The Jewish Lower East Side

Tuition: $480 | YIVO members: $375**
Students: $240 (Must register with valid university email address)

This is a live, online course held weekly on Zoom. Enrollment will be capped at about 15 students. All course details (Zoom link, syllabus, handouts, assignments, etc.) will be posted to Canvas. Students will be granted access to the class on Canvas after registering for the class here on the YIVO website. This class will be conducted in English.

Instructor: Elissa Sampson

Course Description:
American Jews have often been touted as a “model minority.” This course will take a more critical look at the historical interactions seen in Jewish urban immigration, United States industrialization, and processes of social and geographical mobility—all through the prism of New York’s Lower East Side, first home for over 750,000 Jewish immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe, the Ottoman Empire and elsewhere from the mid-19th century to the 1920s. By the turn of the 20th century, the Lower East Side was the most densely settled place on the planet as well as the world’s largest Jewish city.

We will compare the Jewish experience to that of other immigrants and migrants by considering race and ethnicity, social institutions, as well as material and other cultural practices. We will examine how interactions with the built environment —most especially street life, the tenement, and the factory— are documented in Lower East Side culture through photography and literature. Special attention will be paid to immigrant labor movement politics including strikes, tendencies, and gender, particularly in the garment trade, and the pushback that closed the gates of immigration. The course will also examine how contemporary commemoration, heritage tourism, and the selling of history intersect with gentrifying real estate in a shrinking “iconic” New York City neighborhood in a downtown area that encompasses Loisaida and Chinatown.

Course Materials:
The instructor will provide all course materials digitally throughout the class on Canvas.

Dr. Elissa Sampson is an urban geographer who studies how we actively use the past to create new spaces of migration, memory, activism, and heritage. A lecturer in Cornell's Jewish Studies program, she teaches courses on Jewish cities including New York’s Lower East Side where she lived for over forty years; her dissertation documented how the acquisition of a Lower East Side building shaped the Tenement Museum's stories of immigrant history. Dr. Sampson has been involved in preserving Lower East Side historic immigrant buildings, organizing Triangle Fire commemorations, documenting community gardens, and much else. Her life-long interest in Jewish migration, re-diasporization and culture, encompasses synagogue architecture, Yiddish theater, American Jewish culture, gentrification, historical preservation, memory studies, and the practice of genealogy.

Dr. Sampson has worked to digitize a section of the confiscated archives of the Yiddish speaking immigrant Left housed at Cornell’s Kheel Center, Catherwood Library. Based largely on this archive’s holdings related to the Jewish People’s Fraternal Order (JPFO) of the International Workers Order (IWO), she organized a public, online academic conference, Di Linke, a week-long series of webcasts in December 2020. Most recently, Dr. Sampson is the author of "Yiddish Leftists as Early Inter-Ethniks," in American Jews and Comparative Ethnicity, edited by Jonathan Karp, in the "The Jewish Role in American Life" series published by Purdue University Press, Casden Center at USC.

She has been featured in films such as Streit’s: Matzo and the American Dream as well as TV programs pertaining to Jewish immigrants, their institutions, politics, and businesses. Due to her work on the Triangle Fire, she was interviewed by CNN on the vulnerability of New York City’s contemporary and historic immigrants to fire related tragedies; her work on the Jewish immigrant Left has been featured in Tablet magazine. She has given academic and public tours on the Lower East Side’s built environment and communities for many years.

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