Dubbed ‘one of the Prohibition era’s most sinister underworld figures,’ Waxey Gordon spent decades as a thief, gangster, tax cheat, and bootlegger before dying in prison

For Isaac Zuker and other arsonists, defrauding insurance companies was a normal part of doing business in the late 1800s

‘My heart lay with the workers,’ said ‘Dopey Benny’ Fein, expert organizer and ‘shtarker’ of the Lower East Side

Overseeing an army of thieves and pickpockets on the Lower East Side in the late 1800s, she was ‘as adept in her business as the best stock-broker in Wall Street’

The Lower East Side gangster would shake down shopkeepers before saving elderly Jews from harassment

‘Mother’ Rosie Hertz ran a network of brothels in the early 1900s and spent years paying off corrupt cops—until she finally ended up behind bars

The tragic case of Pesach Rubenstein, sentenced to die in 1876 after a sensational murder trial

A new hotel rises on the site of a century-old bank that was once essential for the neighborhood’s Jewish immigrants

Once a central feature of immigrant life in urban America, these mobile markets were eventually shoved aside. But their descendants may be making a comeback.

More than a century ago, police officers beat a crowd of Jewish mourners during a rabbi’s funeral procession—an event the Yiddish newspapers described as resembling a Russian pogrom

An ugly New York City extortion racket at the turn of the last century

A century ago, the Educational Alliance was educating a generation of Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side. Today, it’s serving a largely Hispanic and Chinese community—but holding on to its core Jewish values.

Second in a series on the anarchists and the Jews, civil war in the garment center

First in a series on the anarchists and the Jews: two uniquely Jewish contributions to American life and the global struggle for worker’s rights

Looking back 30 years later at the Lower East Side romance