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NEH Summer Workshop:
Immigration, Religion and Culture on
New York’s Lower East Side
On this page:
The Museum at Eldridge Street invites you to join us at the Eldridge Street Synagogue for Immigration, Religion and Culture on New York’s Lower East Side, a week-long summer Landmarks of American History and Culture Workshop, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
This five-day teacher workshop treats the Lower East Side, a neighborhood known for its immigrant history, as a primary source. Through walking tours, lectures, and photography, we will bring you and a diverse group of scholars together to learn about how various ethnic, religious and immigrant groups adapted their religion and culture to America. The workshop aims to provide you with the tools and inspiration to bring the Lower East Side back to your classrooms.
The first session will be held Monday, July 14-Friday, July 18th.
The second session will be Monday, August 4th to Friday, August 8th.
WORKSHOP DOCUMENTS
Please log in to access the documents you will need for our summer workshops. If you have troubles logging in, please contact Phyllis Freed at
PFreed(at)eldridgestreet.org
HOUSING
Housing is available at the Loeb Residence Hall of the New School. The Loeb Residence is located at 135 East 12th Street
between 3rd & 4th Aves.
Housing is contracted on a weekly basis only. Rooms will be available for Week 1 from Sunday afternoon July 13th through Saturday noon July 19th and for Week 2 on Sunday afternoon August 3rd through Saturday noon August 9th. Participants will reside in air-conditioned dormitory rooms, double occupancy, with community bathrooms and kitchens. Applicants from the same districts may submit special requests for roommates.
Participants will need to bring bed linens, towels, a light blanket and an alarm clock. Those with laptop computers and installed Ethernet cards will have internet access in the rooms.
The New School housing rates are $330 for a double room and $420 for a single.
The National Endowment for the Humanities neither encourages nor discourages participants from bringing family members with them, as long as it is understood that family members may not participate in formal Workshop activities. Those who bring family members with them will be responsible for their own living arrangements during the Landmarks Workshop.
View map of Lower Manhattan (opens in Acrobat)
CONTENT, SCOPE AND APPROACH
Sites and Themes
The Eldridge Street Synagogue, a National Historic Landmark, is the oldest East
European Synagogue in New York, and among the oldest in the country. It is situated on
the Lower East Side, where today’s Chinatown has replaced yesterday’s Little Italy,
Kleindeutchland (“Little Germany”), and the even older Five Points section, home to free
blacks and Irish immigrants. Immigration, Religion and Culture on New York’s Lower
East Side examines the streets and buildings in this iconic neighborhood that tell the
stories of how these groups made the Lower East Side their home.
Our summer 2008 Workshops invite you and prominent scholars to pursue two
interrelated questions: 1) In what ways did group(s) adapt their religion and culture to
New York City? 2) What was the nature of their interactions with other groups on the
Lower East Side? We will explore these questions through study of secondary and
primary texts, as well as a series of historian- and architect-led walking tours, and visits
to related museums and archives such as the Museum of the Chinese in the Americas and
the Schomberg Institute. Each day, educator-led workshops will stimulate the production
of cogent lesson plans directly applicable to your schools.
The Eldridge Street Synagogue is an ideal space to begin this exploration. The restoration
of this elegant synagogue was completed in December of 2007, and visitors experience
the grandeur of its opening day in 1887, but also are able to trace its history beyond its
heyday, as various elements of the building have been preserved rather than restored.
Personal and historical details, such as grooves in the wooden floorboards attesting to
daily use by immigrant worshippers and the generations that followed them serve as a
wonderful point of departure for the exploration of the choices immigrants made as they
adapted their religion and culture to New York. Our research into the history of the
Eldridge Street Synagogue’s congregation has demonstrated how the adaptation of
culture and religion to the urban context was neither seamless nor clear-cut, but rather a
tension-filled process involving both synthesis and rupture.
We then take this theme and these tensions and explore the surrounding neighborhood,
paying particular attention to the various groups who have made the Lower East Side
their home: African Americans, Chinese, Germans, Irish, Italians, and East European
Jews. The Eldridge Street Synagogue is situated in the heart of the Lower East Side, a
mere-five minutes away from other notable landmarks such as the Forward Building, St.
Teresa’s Church, St. Mary’s Church, and the Seward Public Library, and a 15-minute
walk to the City Hall area. Our program uses the neighborhood as a “primary source,”
focusing on the tools to investigate an urban neighborhood.
We will learn to use the city as a source in several ways. Equipped with digital cameras,
you will be able to take photographs as you tour the Lower East Side. This serves two
purposes: 1) we will collect materials for classroom presentation, bringing the immediacy
of the Lower East Side to students as far away as Hawaii or Florida; 2) we will learn the
techniques to craft tours of your own cities, in turn, learning how to engage students with
photo documentation and analysis. To aid in this process, architects will lead walking
tours and demonstrations that help you, and by extension, your students, learn how to
look for architectural “clues” that tell how a structure has changed over time.
Scholars
We’ve invited four scholars who have made a mark not only in their respective academic
fields, but as public historians: New York University Professor, Dr. Jack Tchen, founder
of the Museum of the Chinese in the Americas; New York University Professor Hasia
Diner, author of works on Irish, Italian and East European and German Jewish
immigrants; University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor Tony Michels, author of Fire in
their Hearts: Yiddish Socialist Politics in New York, who revolutionized his field by
uncovering the vital interaction between German immigrants and East European Jewish
immigrants with regard to socialism; and Christopher P. Moore, Research Director of the
Schomburg Institute of the New York Public Library, whose most recent work deals with
the discovery and documentation of the African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan.
These scholars have been selected not only for their scholarship, but also for the diverse
and exciting array of methodologies they have pioneered and the creative sources they
have mined.
ELIGIBILITY
The Immigration, Religion and Culture on the Lower East Side Workshop will be held
on:
Week One Monday, July 14 to Friday, July 18
Week Two Monday, August 4 to Friday, August 8
When you make your application, please specify your first and second preference.
The Immigration, Religion and Culture on the Lower East Side Workshop is open to
public, private, parochial, and charter schools, as well as home-school parents. Other K-
12 school personnel, including administrators, substitute teachers, classroom
paraprofessionals, and librarians are eligible to participate, subject to available space.
Workshop Structure
Today in New York, the immigrant-born compose close to 40% of the population. As
immigration is a vital issue in New York and throughout the country, capturing the
universal and personal elements of adaptation is extremely relevant. The diversity of
these immigrant groups today further reinforces the value of learning how immigrant
groups interact with one another and with native-born Americans. Focusing on the
tension of adapting one’s culture and religion to New York reveals the human story of
immigration; further, the scholars we have engaged use creative primary sources that
touch on daily life, from foodways to newspaper-reading.
Working with master teachers, scholars, curriculum specialists, and Museum at Eldridge
Street staff, you will learn to craft unique curriculum. It is our intention that you will
return to your classroom equipped with curricula, lesson plans, resource materials, and an
understanding of the immigrant experience. In turn, you will be able to teach your
students about the unique role that immigrants play in U.S. history and contemporary
urban life.
At the end of each day, we will work in small groups to brainstorm about how to apply
the days’ activities and findings into lessons suitable for implementation in your own
classroom. Teachers will be divided into “affinity groups” or shared grade-levels, and
will be guided by Master Teachers and Museum at Eldridge Street staff. At each session,
the day’s scholar will be circulating and available for consultation. Following the session,
the lesson plans will be featured on the Museum at Eldridge Street’s website, whose
image portal will be an artist-designed map of the Lower East Side, featuring sites from
the historian-led walking tour, background information, as well as your curriculum ideas
and lesson plans.
Day I: Eldridge Street Synagogue and Religious Adaptation
Using the Eldridge Street Synagogue’s sanctuary as an historic artifact to be studied, Dr.
Annie Polland’s lecture focuses on the interplay between the preservation of tradition and
the adaptation to America. Houses of worship are the product of very hard work,
planning and negotiations. This focused study uses the architectural elements of the
synagogue how American business, cultural and political ideas shaped the congregation’s
administration of the building. You will also have primary sources – the translated
obituaries of the synagogues first five presidents – to analyze together.
We then move outward to explore Lower East Side sacred sites of all backgrounds,
examining the larger impact on immigrants of traversing streets with beautiful buildings.
How might the architecture of nearby St.Teresa’s church, built in 1850, have influenced
the design of Eldridge Street Synagogue? More broadly, as many immigrants of all
backgrounds – from the Jewish immigrants of the 1880s to the Chinese immigrants of the
1980s – prayed in storefront spaces, this tour will examine how these much smaller
sacred sites distinguish themselves from the vernacular buildings.
Day II: Chinatown and the Development of a Port Culture on the
Bowery/Chatham Square
Dr. Tchen will offer an in-depth lecture and tour on the development of New York’s
Chinatown, with special attention paid to the cultural and religious mutual aid societies
formed by the Chinese immigrants. As his new work has focused on the development of a
unique port culture on the Bowery and Chatham Square area, he will then proceed to
discuss the fascinating ways in which immigrant groups have intermingled to form
cultures specific to New York City areas. Dr. Tchen’s theme works from the geography
of New York and its status as a port culture.
Day III: The African Burial Ground and African American Communities
We will follow the development of slave and free black communities in Lower
Manhattan from the 17th to mid-19th century, paying particular attention to the
development of cultural and religious societies. We focus on the amazing discovery of
the 17th and 18th century African Burial Ground, located just north of present-day City
Hall. Research done on sight has shed tremendous light on the daily and cultural lives of
African slaves in Lower Manhattan. A combination of walking tour at the site and
viewing of some of the artifacts brings the importance of this finding to you in a very
immediate way.
Day IV: Irish and Italian Immigration and Foodways
Dr. Hasia Diner will present an overview of Irish and Italian immigration to the United
States, and in particular to the Lower East Side. The focus of her presentation will be on
the ways in which foodways reflect both the preservation and adaptation of culture and
religion for immigrant groups as a whole. In the wake of migration, women and men
encounter new foods, but also come to view familiar foods in a new way. How does
culinary negotiation reflect the specifics of time, place, and the desire of immigrants to be
both Irish and Italian or Jewish and American at the same time? How does the
intermingling with other cultures – whether American or other immigrant groups – shape
a particular group’s foodways? How does the maintenance of traditional foodways work
to perpetuate traditions and create new ones, aiding in the transmission of a group’s
culture to the new generation?
Day V: The Interaction Between East European Jews and the German
Christians on the Lower East Side
Tony Michels will take us on a walking tour of the Lower East Side, featuring sites that
were at once part of Kleindeutschland, and by the 1880s and 1890s, became a home for
East European Jews. Saloons, public halls and cafes were places where German socialists
taught East European Jewish intellectuals about socialism and the labor movement.
Michels’ tour focuses not just on the political content of socialism and the labor
movement, but also on the way that people on the street experienced politics—through
opening a newspaper, running into a soapbox speaker or engaging in a heated discussion
at a tea house.
Concluding Session at the Eldridge Street Synagogue.
READING LIST:
- Ambinder, Tylor Selections from Five Points
- Diner, Hasia Selections from Hungering for America
- Eldridge Street Project Stoop, Synagogue, Soapbox primary source packet
- Michels, Tony Selections from A Fire In Their Hearst: Yiddish
Socialists in New York
- Moore, Christopher Selections from The Black New Yorkers: 400 Years
of African American History
- Moore, Christopher Standing In The Need of Prayer: A Celebration of Black Prayer
(Free Press)
- Polland, Annie Selections from Landmark of the Spirit, The Story
of the Eldridge Street Synagogue
- Tchen, Jack Selections from New York Before Chinatown
- Scorcese, Martin Gangs of New York (recommended film)
STIPEND AND TRAVEL
Each participant will receive a stipend of $500.00 to help cover the costs of housing,
food and other expenses related to the workshop. Participants will receive the balance of
their stipends, less food and room costs described above, at the end of the week. There
are additional funds available to assist with travel costs, depending on distance traveled.
Please be assured that each applicant requiring travel assistance will be reviewed on a
case-by-case basis; funds will be allocated after the Workshop session is over.
CREDIT
Although we cannot arrange for individual professional development credit certifications,
we will supply a letter of equivalency for each participant, indicating the hours spent in
the workshop. Participants will be responsible for submitting the letter to any certifying
agency or organization.
THE LOWER EAST SIDE
The Lower East Side of Manhattan is home to a variety of old and new buildings and
other attractions. 150-year old tenements and houses of worship sit side by side new art
galleries and other chic boutiques. Historical sites include:
- The Essex Street Market
- The Lower East Side Tenement Museum
- The Eldridge Street Synagogue
- Jarmulowsky’s Bank Building
- St. Teresa’s Church
- Sunshine Theater
- The Forward Building
- African-American Burial Ground
- Museum of Chinese in America
- Henry Street Settlement
- St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church
- St. Mary’s Church
- Big Cat Gallery
- Artists Alliance
APPLICATION PROCEDURE AND DEADLINE
When making your application please remember that perhaps the most important part of
completed application is an essay of up to one double-spaced page. This essay should
include information about your professional life background and interest in the subject of
the Workshop; your special perspectives, skills, or experiences that would contribute to
the Workshop; and how the experience would enhance your teaching or school service
You must remember to submit a letter of recommendation from the principal or
department head of their teaching institution or the head of a home schooling association
in support of their application.
Application information is included with this letter. Your completed application should
be postmarked no later than March 17, 2008, and should be addressed as follows:
Annie Polland
The Eldridge Street Project
95 Canal St. Suite 201
New York, New York 10002
Sincerely,
Annie Polland
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