By Martin Saps, Center for Jewish History-Fordham University Short-Term Research Fellow (2026) Williamsburg: A New Piece of the Old Country When it first opened in 1903, the Williamsburg Bridge was nicknamed the “Jews’ highway” for the sheer amount of Jewish New Yorkers leaving the crowded tenements of the Lower East Side for a better life across the water. By the 1960s, however, the children and…
By Cassia Kisshauer, Senior Reference Services Librarian Seize Der Tog!: The Yiddish Press in America 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…
By Margaret Tilley, Genealogy Specialist and Curatorial Projects Assistant A Shul on Every Corner: Remembering Synagogues of the Lower East Side 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…
The Center for Jewish History is pleased to be the recipient of a 2013 digitization grant from the Metropolitan New York Library Council. The Center’s project, “American Soviet Jewry Movement in New York: Posters and Photographs,” will involve the digitization of dozens of political posters and rare photographs from the archives of American Jewish Historical Society, one of its partner organizations. The materials to…
