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Block by Block: Mapping the Evolution of Chinatown and Yiddish New York
Organized by Museum at Eldridge Street
In anticipation of the Museum at Eldridge Street’s 25th Annual Egg Rolls, Egg Creams, & Empanadas Street Festival on June 21, join multimedia journalist Aaron Reiss and Dr. Agnieszka (Agi) Legutko, Director of the Yiddish Language Program at Columbia University, on Thursday, May 14th at 6pm Eastern Time on Zoom to discuss the role of digital mapping in tracing the evolution of Chinese and Yiddish-speaking communities in New York City.
In his journalism work, Aaron Reiss uses maps as visual arguments and storytelling tools. In 2022, he co-reported an interactive map and story for The New York Times chronicling the origins and disappearance of Chinatown’s Chinese street signs, investigating the history of the neighborhood on a hyperlocal scale. Since 2014, Dr. Agi Legutko has worked with Columbia University’s students on Mapping Yiddish New York, an online archive documenting the historic sites of Yiddish New York, from Yiddish record labels to iconic theaters and restaurants. The ongoing project invites users to discover the spaces, people, and events that shaped Yiddish culture in the city.
Please see the Zoom link in your order confirmation email. This program is entirely virtual.
Registration for this Zoom program is pay-what-you-wish. The following are suggested amounts for each ticket type:
Adults $12
Seniors $10
Students $8
Aaron Reiss was raised in a coastal California town called Encinitas. He went to Yale University and majored in Urban Planning and Environmental Studies where he fell in love with mapping as beautiful means for talking about we live our lives. For the last decade plus, he has been making maps, taking photographs, shooting video, writing articles, and recording audio to explore how people imagine and shape the places they inhabit – from rural villages in China, to the outer boroughs of New York City. His work focuses on interactive journalism – combining different kinds of media (visual and otherwise) to tell rich and complex stories. Aaron spent 6 years, on and off, researching the Chinese names of streets in New York City.
Dr. Agi Legutko specializes in modern Yiddish literature, language, and culture, women and gender studies, spirit possession in Judaism, as well as in American and European modern Jewish literatures, theater, and film. Her research interests also include trauma, memory, performance, and the body represented in modern Jewish cultures. She is interested in new approaches to content-based foreign language teaching and developing new Yiddish pedagogy in the post-method era, as well as in employing digital humanities in teaching language and literature.
About the Museum at Eldridge Street:
The Museum at Eldridge Street is housed in the Eldridge Street Synagogue, a magnificent National Historic Landmark that has been meticulously restored. Opened in 1887, the synagogue is the first great house of worship built in America by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Today, it is the only remaining marker of the great wave of Jewish migration to the Lower East Side that is open to a broad public who wishes to visit Jewish New York. Exhibits, tours, public programs, and education initiatives tell the story of Jewish immigrant life, explore architecture and historic preservation, inspire reflection on cultural continuity, and foster collaboration and exchange between people of all faiths, heritages, and interests.
Image Credit (left to right): Carl T. Gossett/The New York Times; Courtesy of Jewish Studies at Columbia University