Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of the Lower East Side, a neighborhood in Manhattan that was a center of Jewish immigrant culture in the 20th century.
Lower East Side
The Latest
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Breaking News Lower East Side Developer Paints Over 43-Year-Old Jewish Mural Paying Tribute to Forward
A Lower East Side real estate developer abruptly painted over a 43-year-old Jewish heritage mural Monday — sparking outrage among neighborhood residents and one of the artists who created it nearly a half century ago. Sara Krivisky was a teenager when she helped paint the mural, which features themes including the Holocaust, immigration, sweatshops —…
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News Sheldon Silver’s Handpicked Successor Is Trounced in New York Primary
The electoral thwacking suffered by the handpicked successor to New York State Assembly leader Sheldon Silver looks like the last nail in the coffin of the old Lower East Side political order. Alice Cancel, a longtime Lower East Side activist who won a special election in April to complete Silver’s forfeited final term, came in…
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News How One Funeral and 2 Dead Men Walking Herald Epic Shift on the Jewish Lower East Side
There was more than one corpse in the sanctuary of the Bialystoker Synagogue on the day that Heshy Jacob died. The July 23 funeral for the Lower East Side’s last Jewish power broker drew rabbis, politicians and real estate developers to the imposing stone building just off Grand Street that serves as an anchor for…
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Culture The Forward Building: From Labor Citadel to Luxury Condos
At the corner of East Broadway and Canal, in the heart of Manhattan’s now chic Lower East Side, young men and women lined up on a recent Saturday night, waiting patiently to be seated at Mission Chinese Food, a downtown fixture decorated with a bright red awning and thick curtains. With faces turned to the…
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Culture They Were the Good Kids on the Lower East Side
The three alter kockers looked much younger than their years when they greeted each other at the Seward Park Library on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Mentally sharp, with considerable color in their skin and dyed hair, they seemed giddy that they’d been chosen to be the first formal interview subjects for The New York Public…
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Culture Jewish Psychics of the Lower East Side — and Why We Need Them
I usually fall into the cynic camp when it comes to psychics or any sort of mystical readers. Or at least I used to. In July, I visited a reader named Monte Farber in East Hampton. He was a source for a story I was writing, and I dropped by to introduce myself. He operates…
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Culture The Lewisohn Sisters Put the Ooomph in Do-Gooding
Manhattan’s Lower East Side of yesteryear conjures up images of dense and inhospitable streets filled with immigrants determined to get on with the business of becoming American, as well as with social reformers equally determined to accelerate that process. Though well intentioned and good hearted, these reformers, we’re apt to think, were often tone deaf…
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Breaking News Stanton Street Shul Is Burglarized
A synagogue on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the Stanton Street Shul, was found to be broken into and vandalized on October 14, The Jewish Press reported, citing an email from the historic Orthodox congregation’s president. In the email to congregants, Rebecca Honig-Friedman said that “no one was hurt and the damage could have been much…
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Culture Why saying ‘L’shana Tova’ on Rosh Hashanah may not be the correct phrase
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Culture A Jewish prophet of the 1980s would be horrified to see that we didn’t heed his warnings
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Opinion With killing of Hezbollah’s chief, Israel occupies the inarguable moral high ground
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Opinion This is the most disorienting Rosh Hashanah in memory
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Film & TV How Leonard Cohen — and a Yom Kippur prayer — inspired a coming-of-age epic
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Opinion A year after Oct. 7, Israel has the chance to remake its future — for better or worse
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Opinion Campus protests defined the year since Oct. 7. Could they actually change U.S. policy?
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Special Report At the kibbutz hit hardest on Oct. 7, a wrenching debate over how to rebuild
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