The Yiddish press in America got its start in the late 19th century. By the 1910s, publications were flourishing and represented a wide variety of Jewish religious and political perspectives. Newspapers served as critical sites of information, entertainment, and learning. They provided access to local and national news in…
Two days before Yom Kippur in 1928, a four-year-old girl named Barbara Griffiths wandered into the woods near her home in Massena, New York, a small town in St. Lawrence County along the Canadian border. After a day of fruitless searching by crews and volunteers, the New York State…
All publications referenced in this post can be found in the Sid Lapidus Collection of Early Modern Judaica at the Center for Jewish History.
In August of 1751, a Polish Jewish peddler named Henry Simons traveled to England carrying 554 ducats that had been entrusted…
The 1936 Summer Olympics were, famously, held in Berlin while Germany was under Nazi rule. The Games had not been awarded to the Nazis, though. The International Olympic Committee had awarded the games to Germany in 1931, two years before Hitler’s rise to chancellor and the eventual Nazi takeover of the country….
Above, a boy stands before the oldest surviving synagogue building in New York City, located at 172 Norfolk Street. What was then a neighborhood fixture brimming with debates about Jewish identity and rite has, like many other Lower East Side synagogues, since faced…
