Remembering the Lower East Side

"To its most recent historians, it seems axiomatic that for the last half century the Lower East Side "has become the most popular locus of American Jewish memory," as Beth Wenger has intimated, and, in some measure, as Jenna Joselit has reminded us, our vision of the Lower East Side has been "a deliberate, willed act of creation," as in greater or lesser degree, are so many of our memories, at least in their details."