Dear Colleagues and Friends of The Posen Library,
For many of us, streets emptied of people have come to characterize our cities during this pandemic. It makes photographs of intimate urban encounters on the Lower East Side all the more poignant even as we recognize their power to evoke another era.
Two Lower East Side photographs in The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization speak meaningfully to neighborhood continuities as well as significant changes. They open a window into Jewish culture, showing us lived experience in the 20th century.
The earlier photograph, “Hester Street,” taken by Sol Libsohn in the late 1930s, pictures people arrayed on a typical mixed residential and commercial block. It is included in Crisis and Creativity between World Wars, 1918–1939, Volume 8 of The Posen Library, co-edited by Todd M. Endelman and Zvi Gitelman.
Hester Street (ca. 1938) Copyright The Estate of Sol Libsohn, courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, NY.
Read more about Sol Libsohn and view the photo on the PDL once you register.
Libsohn’s photograph is a record. It captures particularities of an evolving urban social performance. Not only does he picture young, old, and middle-aged working-class Jews in the most iconic of New York Jewish neighborhoods, but he also shows an interactive stage.
In Libsohn’s photo, his characters are looking this way and that way. The only figure wholly in focus, an older woman with arms folded protectively across her flower print ousedress, anchors the scene. She alone looks upstream to her left at something happening off camera. Of three women, only she has planted herself at the edge of the flow of the street. Decades later, the photograph can be viewed as picturing Jews in the streets when the Lower East Side was still a Jewish neighborhood, despite greatly reduced numbers. Or it can be viewed as picturing working-class New Yorkers.
The later photograph, “Fish Bargain, NYC,” taken by Bill Aron in 1978, is included in Late Twentieth Century, Volume 10 of The Posen Library, which I co-edited with Nurith Gertz. Aron portrays two men bargaining in an appetizing store in the same neighborhood. It reveals both continuities with Libsohn’s photo as well as significant changes.
Fish Bargain, NYC (1978) Courtesy of the Artist
Read more about Bill Aron and view the photo on the PDL once you register.
Aron has entered the shop rather than standing outside. He makes explicit the implicit commerce in Libsohn’s photo. But Aron also deliberately pictures Jews. One man we know is Jewish from his dress: his black hat and suit, his full beard. The other man we assume is Jewish based on the fish he is selling (no shellfish in this shop) and his body language. Aron is not alone in observing this interaction. A man behind the counter and another man off to the edge of the frame are also watching.
Had Aron walked outside, he would not have been able to assume, as a viewer does with Libsohn’s photo, that the streets were filled with unmarked Jews. In Libsohn’s photograph only the optometrist’s sign in the upper right corner with its Hebrew letters advertising to Jewish customers subtly announces that this is a Jewish neighborhood. In Aron’s photograph, the physical space of the store and the customer broadcast the Jewishness of this commercial encounter.
In the Posen Digital Library (PDL), you have the freedom to move across time and space and make your own connections. The many images and text selections it contains are all available for free upon registering.
This fall, no matter where you’ll be, you can join our volume editors in a wide variety of online conversations. Please check out our line-up of events. I hope you’ll note at least one event on your schedule to save the date.
Enjoy!
Deborah Dash Moore
Editor in Chief
The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization
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