More in ‘Lower East Side’

• “I have been advised by my physician that I must undergo a course of chemotherapy on my esophagus,” reveals Tablet Magazine contributor Christopher Hitchens. There’s something poignant about his omission of the word “cancer.” Get well soon, Hitch. [VF Daily]
• As House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Virginia) readies a book tour, a colleague predicts, ...

They had the wrong guy. It was a case of mistaken identity. That’s what I told the dudes on the FBI-NYPD Joint Terrorism Task Force that morning when I was coming home to my strange new abode from a peaceful breakfast and these two big guys in trench coats flashed their badges, threw me up ...

• Richard Goldstone says being an apartheid-era judge was “a difficult moral decision,” and argues, “I do not understand why my actions as a judge in those years precludes me … from judging war crimes whether committed in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, or the Middle East.” [Jewish Chronicle/Vos Iz Neias?]
• Prime Minister Netanyahu referred to ...

There is an upstart Yiddish theater company on the East Side, and it has ruffled the feathers of the much more established Yiddish theater company. What, you should be surprised by this?
The New York Times has the story. You have the Folksbiene group, which has been around for almost a century, and still insists, to ...

• Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas told an Egyptian news agency that Israel killed Yasser Arafat, and he is worried he will meet the same fate. [Arutz Sheva]
• Legendary Lower East Side knishery Yonah Schimmel’s celebrated its 100th anniversary. [City Room]
• Hamas asked Egypt to stop building an underground wall along its border with Gaza. The ...

I’ve always loved dolls. As a child, I couldn’t get enough of them, whether I was plying them with affection or taking out my grievances on them. My preference was for lifelike baby dolls—the ones with soft, squeezable bodies—or dolls that more or less matched my age (which might explain why I was never enthralled ...

Last week brought the news that Guss’ Pickles, the stalwart Lower East side vinegared-cucumber emporium, would soon be relocating to Brooklyn. Which was bad enough. But now it gets even worse: As New York’s Daily News reported Friday, a 2007 legal settlement between Pat Fairhurst, who owns the Orchard Street store, and the father-son duo ...

Manhattan’s Lower East Side has already lost most vestiges of its history as the teeming neighborhood whose tenements housed many of our ancestors. Yet there is still something depressing about Orchard Street landmark Guss’ Pickles decision to move across the East River to Brooklyn’s heavily ultra-Orthodox Boro Park. The pickle emporium, which opened on nearby ...

New York City’s greatest Yiddish writer was born Yitzchak Rayz in 1885 in the village of Narayev, in eastern Galicia, then Austro-Hungary. When he arrived in America in 1898, he became Isaac Reiss, and published poetry, prose, and drama under the pseudonyms Yud-ka Reyzh-zet, De Lancey, Dilensee Mirkarosh, Mir Karosh, J. Strier, Pilatus, Anna Donna, Dr. Hotzikl, R. Naldo, Der Rosenkavalier, Rinnalde Rinaldine, S. Firebird, M. DeNardi, and, finally, Moishe Nadir—the name by which he remains unknown.

If you’re a historian, or even if you just play one on TV, you’re keenly aware that one of the convenient aspects of Jewish history is a 3,000-year-old paper trail—material that has allowed Jewish historians to poke and probe the texts of the rabbinical and intellectual elite that crafted the contours of Jewish law and ...