Mingling Past and Present on the Lower East Side: Three Recent Views

Lower East Side Memories. A Jewish Place in America. By Hasia R. Diner. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000. xiii + 219 pp.

Remembering the Lower East Side. American Jewish Reflections. Edited by Hasia R. Diner, Jeffrey Shandler, and Beth S. Wenger. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000. vii + 291 pp.

Selling the Lower East Side. Culture, Real Estate, and Resistance in New York City. By Christopher Mele. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. xvi + 361 pp.

Mingling Past and Present on the Lower East Side: Three Recent Views

Eli Lederhendler

American Jewish (and some well-known non-Jewish) writers, memoirists, scholars, photographers, religious leaders, and artists of every type have lavished more attention on the lives (real or fictional) of the Jews on the Lower East Side of Manhattan than on any other part of the American Jewish experience. This surfeit of East Side lore came, in time, to represent the ethnocultural signature of American Jewry, as Hasia Diner argues in her book, Lower East Side Memories: "No other ethnic group in America, with the exception of the African-American construction of Harlem, has so thoroughly understood, imagined, and represented itself through a particular chunk of space." ¹

Yet, as Diner also points out, a comprehensive history of the Lower East Side in the era of mass East European Jewish immigration to America has yet to be written. ² This is all the more surprising--and disappointing--considering the long-established and still-accumulating body of historical and ethnographical literature on such topics as Jewish immigrant politics, religion, demography, gender relations, public health, journalistic and literary output, ethnic cultural and social institutions, and criminality.

Regrettably, that major lacuna may not be filled any time soon. If the crop of writing under review here is at all indicative of a trend, the latest generation of Lower East Side scholars is interested primarily in what those mean streets represent in today's cultural, civic, political, and ethnic discourse, rather than in documenting the past per se. Both Diner's aforementioned work and the book that she has co-edited with Jeffrey Shandler and Beth Wenger, Remembering the Lower East Side, expand on a point already made several years ago by Beth Wenger, in her perceptive and fluent essay, "Memory as Identity: The Invention of the Lower East Side." ³ In that article, Wenger discussed the ways in which Jews have fostered a retrospective notion of the Lower East Side as a shrine to a lost Jewish cultural authenticity in America. Diner's monograph, in particular, builds very directly upon Wenger's argument.

The concern with representation, not history, may explain why, in the space of two entire volumes devoted to the Jewish East Side, there is precisely one footnote with a direct reference to a Yiddish-language source. ⁴ Such aloofness from primary historical data is methodologically plausible only in a discussion that rarely conveys any unmediated information about the history of the Jewish East Side, but seeks rather to indicate the distance that American Jews have traversed since then, and considers how that distance is reflected in the latter-day symbolic construction of the old immigrant turf.

Capturing the inner workings of sociocultural processes in our own day is, of course, a significant and fascinating task in its own right, and the authors represented in the three recent books under review here do this, for the most part, very admirably. Some of these authors, however, seem less than completely at ease with the notion that history may be regarded solely as "representation," more readily understood as the study of a posteriori social constructions than as an examination of an actual past.

One example is Moses Rischin, whose brief but eloquent contribution to Remembering the Lower East Side concludes by issuing a historiographical challenge that he hopes may yet animate a new generation of scholars: "Equipped with freshly honed linguistic, cultural, and intellectual skills, refined and developed in a singularly propitious climate for the...