Williamsburg, Brooklyn has a rich immigrant history. Before the South Side became the Hasidic enclave that it is today, it was a much more eclectic immigrant neighborhood. Among its former residents is the writer Phillip Lopate, who grew up in what's now the heart of the Hasidic "shtetle".

Phillip lived in Williamsburg from age 4 in 1947, until he reached about high school, but after his family moved out of Williamsburg, he returned daily to attend high school at Eastern District High.

Phillip generously joined me in Williamsburg for a visit to his old haunts. We first stopped by his old place at 352 Broadway, right by the noisy train tracks, and then the apartment at 151 Ross Street, which is right off Lee Avenue. We also visited the famed former Eastern District High School, which I've written about extensively, and the public library that sits right across from it, and discussed the Brooklyn Queens Expressway's impact on the time Phillip lived in Williamsburg. We stopped over for knishes and rugelach, ambled along Lee Avenue to see Flaum's Deli, and said our goodbyes at Gottlieb's. It was a lovely afternoon!

Phillip's brother Leonard Lopate is also well known as a famous radio personality. I've written about Leonard Lopate in Williamsburg before and hope to one day visit with Leonard.

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I had the great pleasure of doing a live zoom conversation with fellow former-Hasid [OTD] and professional thinker Izzy Posen. Izzy is a prolific personality on Twitter, where he is eager to encourage nuanced, honest dialog among us ex-Haredim as well as with the communities we were raised in. This live zoom was an opportunity to ask what we need to leave behind when we leave, what obligations we have to our former worlds, and what we can understand about each others' journeys.

If you were on the call, thanks for joining! If you missed it, here's the video recording, have a watch!

You can follow Izzy on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/PosenIzzy

And make sure to check out Izzy's Youtube Channel here: https://www.youtube.com/chan...

Thanks for watching! I am hopeful there will be more opportunities for live video events in the future.

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I'm delighted to be posting another video conversation with a Jewish Williamsburg "old-timer", this one with Harry/Chaim Weiss.

Harry Weiss was born September 24, 1949, in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, and he lived there until 1960. Harry's parents, who were from Hungary, survived Auschwitz and the Holocaust. His father opened up a furniture-making factory on Marcy ave and Keap St. in 1955 and then moved the factory to Flushing Ave. Harry joined the furniture business in 1968 and stayed in the Flushing location until 1991. Many of his clients were of the Hasidic community. Harry has many colorful memories of those transformative 50s and in the neighborhood.

See my blog post for a transcription of highlights of our conversation.
https://friedavizel.com/2022/02/02/interview-...

In this video post, I explore a very interesting part of Hasidic clothing: the silver decorative strip found on the men's prayer shawls. I talk to Elena Solomon, who, together with Lilly Homer is writing an encyclopedia entry on the special craft involved in making these decorative garments. It's an art style unique to Ashkenazi Jews, and it's called 'shpanyer arbet'.

For the video version of this episode see here.

I had the pleasure to talk to Nathaniel Deutsch about his new book on Hasidic Williamsburg.

Nathaniel Deutsch is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he holds the Baumgarten Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies. He is the author of a number of books related to Hasidic history and culture, including The Maiden of Ludmir: A Jewish Holy Woman and Her World, The Jewish Dark Continent: Life and Death in the Russian Pale of Settlement, and most recently (with Michael Casper), A Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate, and the Making of Hasidic Williamsburg. He is currently developing The Minhag Project: A Crowdsourced Archive of Hasidic Customs.

This video is part of a research project to document the way Hasidim came to America after the war and turned Williamsburg into an insular religious enclave.

Nelly Grussgott was born in 1930 in Berlin. In 1940, she and her mother fled nazi Germany for NYC, but her father could not make it out. Although Nelly and her mother were relatively modern, in 1946 her mother remarried a very pious Hasidic man, Moshe Nigreshel. The couple, along with Nelly, moved to the Williamsburg part of Brooklyn. There, Nelly's mother was expected to adopt rigid Hasidic customs like shaving her golden locks. This Nelly's mother did for life, but Nelly herself could never do it, and she struggled to understand her mother's path. Nelly moved out of Williamsburg when she got married, but her mother remained in the neighborhood until her death in 1990.

Many thanks to Nelly for the lovely conversation and for sharing her memories.

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