Tenement Museum

Then came the ghettos.” Elie Wiesel wrote. The separation of jews started and the racism starts but nobody realizes it.

During her trip, she thinks of her grandparents, and of their experience arriving in America as teenagers. She agonizes over their mistreatment. Relating to those who passed through, Gordon wants to tell the “ghosts” of the American immigrants that she prefers them to the Americans who “stole their names and chalked their weaknesses in public on their clothing” (Gordon 632).

The Czech film The Shop on Main Street and Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night both focus on two men’s survival of the holocaust and the ways they handle it. However the two pieces of work also have many other similar themes that play key roles in Holocaust Literature, such as Religion, Community, and The Human Response to Stressful and traumatic situations. Another theme seen throughout both pieces of literature is the importance of Family bonds. They also demonstrate how difficult situations either make these bonds stronger or destroy them.

Jacob Riis in “How the Other Half Lives” is about the squalor that characterizes New York City’s working class immigrant neighborhoods. He describes deplorable conditions of these immigrants by providing specific examples, relaying them through quotation and images alike. Riis comments on the injustices that the residents of the tenements faced on a regular basis. So, with his attention to detail, Riis provided the contemporary reader with unsettling images of the poor and marginalized along with a few examples of the benefits of reform and reorganization in the poorer communities, to the benefit of residents. Another observer, Richard T. Ely, in “Pullman: A Social Study” writes about the community of Pullman, Illinois located in the suburbs of Chicago. Pullman is seen as a success in that it is a solid example of the benefits of progressive city planning and sanitation in an industrialized urban America where shoddy tenement housing and lack of

“Homeland is something one becomes aware of only through its loss, Gunter Grass.” In Peter Gay’s memoir, My German Question, he articulates what it was like living in Germany with the presence of the Nazis or in his own experience the lack there of. Peter lived in a family that didn’t directly practice Judaism and most German families didn’t perceive them as Jews until the Nazis defined what a Jew was to the public. The persecution of other Jewish families in Germany where far worse than what Peter experienced growing up. There was a major contrast between how Gay’s family was treated and how other Jews who actively practiced the religion in Germany were treated which played a contributing factor for why the family stayed so long before they left.

The guest speaker at the Illinois Holocaust Museum posed an unanswerable question to the dozen Chabad eighth-grade boys sitting in front of him. Mitchell Winthrop, 88 years of age, a survivor of the Auschwitz and Mauthausen Nazi concentration camps, had been raised in a secular Jewish home in Lodz, Poland. Why had he, he asked the boys—someone who hadn’t even had a bar mitzvah—been chosen to survive the Holocaust and not his pious, white-bearded grandfather?

To this day, the topic of FDR’s decision on whether bombing the concentration camps baffles the mind of many historians, and political researchers/investigators. Criticizing all the Questions and opinions, bias authors are coming from left and right when no one knows the whole story. Frequent questions such as; why didn’t he bomb them? What did Franklin D. Roosevelt do or not do in response to the Holocaust? Such questions as these are commonly known as the “Jewish question”. The two sources being used in this paper is FDR and the Jews by Breitman, Richard, and Allan J. Lichtman (2013) and Saving the Jews: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Holocaust by Robert N. Rosen (2006). The Origin of the first source is a book written By Richard Breitman

The article, “Teens Against Hitler”, by Lauren Tarshis, describes Ben Kamm, a Jewish boy, and his fight against war and the prejudice Nazis had for the Jewish people. The article describes, “One of the darkest and most evil chapters in history- the Holocaust.” Ben Kamm and his family lived in Warsaw, Poland in the 1920’s. “Germany had been struggling since 1918 when it was defeated in WW1.” Adolf Hitler was planning on annihilating all the Jews in Europe. The Jewish people had many challenges to deal with. All through the article, Ben showed courage and bravery. He even made a plan and joined a Partisan group to fight for the Jewish people.

I believe the difficult journey for immigrants and all they had to do to start over in a new country was worth the hardships they faced. This is because after all their hard work, things slowly but surely, started to get better.

In Night, Eliezer Wiesel comments about an experience in which a woman was throwing coins to children, and she comments “I like to give charity…”. Wiesel is saying that the woman wasn’t giving coins for charity, but rather for entertainment. There are many ways to give charity that doesn't involve anyone getting hurt. This statement is absolutely true. Charity doesn’t involve gaining. Charity involves giving without seeking credit.

The U Street Corridor located in Washington D.C., is a unique place full of vibrancy and resilience. Once known for its ability to nurture prominent African Americans, it now houses shops of all kinds, along with trendy restaurants. No longer largely a black community, people from varying races and age groups call it home which can be seen simply by walking the streets. Delores Hayden’s work, The Power of Place helps individuals to understand places like U Street on a deeper level and gain a better understanding of the power a place has to cultivate memories for both the residents and new people moving into the area. Overall, U Street contributes to the understanding of a neighborhood and a city through cultural belonging, place memory, and ?. In addition, an individual’s view of Washington can be starkly changed by Hayden’s perspective and give a community new meaning.

Located in one of the oldest sections of Manhattan, at the intersection of Duane and Elk Streets, New York’s African Burial Ground has emerged from obscurity to become one of the city’s most prominent historic sites. Although today only a small portion of the site is visible, the African Burial Ground has established itself as a public landscape of vast proportions, dramatically changing our understanding of life in colonial New York and providing a point of origin for members of New York’s diasporic African-American community. Set beyond New York City’s early boundaries, the African Burial Ground began as part of New York’s Commons or publicly held land. The Commons were established in 1653, the same year that the Dutch government granted

The era commonly known the “Gilded Age” received this descriptive name for several reasons. One reason the term “gilded” was used was to describe how society appeared shiny and unblemished from the outside, however, the inside did not reflect the same condition. Jacob Riis’ novel, How the Other Half Lives, written amid the Gilded Age in 1890, explored the hardships of the unappreciated populations that embody the unpolished appearance responsible for the name, “the Gilded Age.” Riis used photojournalism to uncover the realities of living in the cramped tenements of New York City along with the causes of exploitation of these inhabitants. As a Danish-American, Riis was set on trying to improve the lives of the immigrants who populated the overcrowded

    Below the worn pavement and below thousands of footsteps, an unsuspecting terminal of tracks exists. The stagnant air of pungent aromas is filtered when the bullets carrying passengers glide by. The train station resembled a beehive; determined individuals zipping through rows of chairs to catch their ride while others frantically search for an exit. Past the makeshift shops that attempt to welcome the tourists, an outlet of steep stairs ascend. A strange phenomena seems to wash over as toes lift off the top step and heels collide with the rough sidewalk, introducing a feeling as if you’ve just teleported into a foreign world. The city doesn’t greet in a formal manner such as slowly integrating you with a taste here and there. Instead, boundless roads with infinite traffic and entire blocks of structures that break conventional height standards serve you a seven course meal that you must immediately swallow. As the mob of bodies sweeps past and urges you into a steady pace, the illusion of day takes place. Millions of pixels screaming for you to visit the latest Broadway show display brilliant colors that seem to reflect on every surface, emitting light through a never ending beam. The crisp night with a stream

types of people who worked there and who they meant to everyone. “...Citizens in the building