Book Review

In the last three decades, ethnic and multicultural studies have challenged traditional concepts of collective identity. "Essentialist" notions of identity and their linear history have been replaced by new concepts of social construction, invention, and fluidity. In that context, the study of myths, traditions, heritage sites, and their attendant commemorative practices have become useful tools for understanding the persistence and malleability of collective memory.	1
Studies of how national and ethnic groups use historically specific sites—their rituals of tourism, monuments, and museums—reveal the needs and aspirations of social groups to forge a "usable" past. The Lower East Side has become such a memory site. Although it has been a neighborhood of diverse immigrant groups since the mid-nineteenth century and, for the most part, has long been abandoned by its Jewish population, it still evokes powerful historic images for American Jews. Having moved to more respectable domiciles and later to the suburbs, Jews in contemporary America are actively searching their past for a reaffirmation of their ethnic beginnings and of their role in the narrative of the American multicultural saga.	2
Remembering the Lower East Side explores in innovative ways how the past has been filtered, represented, and remade in the practices and rituals that focus on the Lower East Side. Its thirteen chapters, a product of a conference organized by the editors, provide a vibrant and stimulating reading of the iconic uses of the neighborhood—past and present.	. . .