The Jewish Lower East Side
While the Lower East Side has seen a series of immigrant communities pass through, American Jews relate to the neighborhood in a particularly strong manner, much as Chinatown in San Francisco holds a special place in the imagination of Chinese Americans, and Astoria in the hearts of Greek Americans. In the late twentieth century, the strong pull of the Lower East Side on the imagination of American Jews led to the preservation of a number of buildings associated with the Jewish immigrant community.
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Famous quotes containing the words jewish, east and/or side:
“For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies” dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.”
—Stephanie Coontz (20th century)
“An inexperienced heraldist resembles a medieval traveler who brings back from the East the faunal fantasies influenced by the domestic bestiary he possessed all along rather than by the results of direct zoological exploration.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“I dare take the side of humanity against this sublime misanthrope.”
—Voltaire [François Marie Arouet] (1694–1778)