More in ‘Lower East Side’

• Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas told an Egyptian news agency that Israel killed Yasser Arafat, and he is worried he will meet the same fate. [Arutz Sheva]
• Legendary Lower East Side knishery Yonah Schimmel’s celebrated its 100th anniversary. [City Room]
• Hamas asked Egypt to stop building an underground wall along its border with Gaza. The ...

I’ve always loved dolls. As a child, I couldn’t get enough of them, whether I was plying them with affection or taking out my grievances on them. My preference was for lifelike baby dolls—the ones with soft, squeezable bodies—or dolls that more or less matched my age (which might explain why I was never enthralled ...

Last week brought the news that Guss’ Pickles, the stalwart Lower East side vinegared-cucumber emporium, would soon be relocating to Brooklyn. Which was bad enough. But now it gets even worse: As New York’s Daily News reported Friday, a 2007 legal settlement between Pat Fairhurst, who owns the Orchard Street store, and the father-son duo ...

Manhattan’s Lower East Side has already lost most vestiges of its history as the teeming neighborhood whose tenements housed many of our ancestors. Yet there is still something depressing about Orchard Street landmark Guss’ Pickles decision to move across the East River to Brooklyn’s heavily ultra-Orthodox Boro Park. The pickle emporium, which opened on nearby ...

New York City’s greatest Yiddish writer was born Yitzchak Rayz in 1885 in the village of Narayev, in eastern Galicia, then Austro-Hungary. When he arrived in America in 1898, he became Isaac Reiss, and published poetry, prose, and drama under the pseudonyms Yud-ka Reyzh-zet, De Lancey, Dilensee Mirkarosh, Mir Karosh, J. Strier, Pilatus, Anna Donna, Dr. Hotzikl, R. Naldo, Der Rosenkavalier, Rinnalde Rinaldine, S. Firebird, M. DeNardi, and, finally, Moishe Nadir—the name by which he remains unknown.

If you’re a historian, or even if you just play one on TV, you’re keenly aware that one of the convenient aspects of Jewish history is a 3,000-year-old paper trail—material that has allowed Jewish historians to poke and probe the texts of the rabbinical and intellectual elite that crafted the contours of Jewish law and ...

New York’s Eldrige Street Synagogue will stage its annual Egg Rolls & Egg Creams Festival on Sunday. It’s a community celebration that nods to the fact the shul’s 1887 Lower East Side building now sits in the middle of Chinatown. Below, what we have to imagine are alternative names for the event, which synagogue leaders ...

Ordinarily, objects in the rear-view mirror get smaller as you leave them farther behind. But with every generation that passes, the Lower East Side seems to loom larger in the American Jewish imagination. It’s not just that prosperous hipsters are moving back into the streets that once overflowed with their great-grandparents. Even for Jews who ...

The news broke back in December: After eighty years on the Lower East Side, Streit’s matzo factory had decided to relocate, most likely to New Jersey. The building is currently on the market at an asking price of twenty-five million dollars.
The popular matzo will still appear in supermarkets each spring, alongside the macaroons and ...

On a summer morning in 1958, up on 126th Street in Harlem, Art Kane took a photograph of a group of musicians that included some of the greatest jazz players of all time, such as Dizzy Gilespie, Thelonius Monk, Charles Mingus, Charlie Parker. The photograph, titled “A Great Day in Harlem,” is now legendary and ...