Your Guide to New York City

This will be a handsomely designed large format book with  two thirds  text, and one third photographs and other graphic materials  related to  the Jewish immigrant experience on the Lower East Side. Almost every Jew in America is from a family that came from Eastern Europe to Ellis Island to the Lower East Side. Consequently this New York City ghetto was for over fifty years the center of Jewish dwelling (in crowded tenements), work (in sweat shops, with carts in the street, in retail stores), and culture, including several daily newspapers in Yiddish, dozens of all Yiddish speaking Jewish theaters, books, films, incredible composers like George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and entertainers like Jack Benny, Fanny Brice, Eddie Cantor, George Burns, and also the dark side, including a period of criminal activities by such gangsters as Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, and others. There’s never been anything quite like the Lower East Side, before or since, and many Jews today revere this original melting pot process as a period of tremendous assimilation into US secular culture, as well as a renaissance of Jewish creativity, struggle, and ultimate success in the brave new world.

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