| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Hasia R. Diner. Lower East Side Memories: A Jewish Place in America. Princeton: Princeton Unviersity Press. 2000. Pp. xiii. 219. $29.95.

In this book, Hasia R. Diner explores the dynamic and complex social processes that since World War II have transformed the Lower East Side from just another large Jewish immigrant neighborhood into an almost sacral icon and perhaps the quintessential cultural metaphor of the American Jewish experience. 1

Analyzing diverse post-World War II sources such as personal memoirs, fiction, films, televisions shows, museum exhibits, Jewish summer camp archives, and even restaurant decor, Diner deconstructs the romanticized American Jewish metanarrative that has evolved since. Its essence is that Jews, like both their biblical Jewish and American Pilgrim forebears, fled persecution and traversed the "wilderness" in search of a new life, which they found in the Lower East Side, where, the myth recounts, they withstood the challenges, hardships, and inevitable losses of resettlement and emerged ever triumphant. And, Diner asserts, while collective Jewish memory recalls a community characterized by pushcarts and poverty, tenements and sweatshops, a raucous, smelly street life and cultural insularity, and religious authority struggling against secularism and materialism, it also fondly remembers a neighborhood that was "the reincarnation of Jewishness, the intensity of Jewish life, and the essence of authenticity" (p. 70). It is these last nostalgic reminiscences that overwhelmingly inspire—and typify—the lingering memories of postwar American Jewry. . . .

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