Remember a couple of month ago when I went to the East Side Tenement Museum? I thought it was fantastic and a must see for all. But since some of you make still waffling over whether to go or not, possibly this will convince you. Over on the City Room blog at the New York Times, Steve Long (vice president of collections and education at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum) is answering reader questions this week about the history of immigration and tenement life on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

“The 1910 Census lists the language for residents and since all families were listed as speaking Yiddish, the building’s residents were all Jewish. Fifty-five percent of them came from Russia, 19 percent were U.S.-born, and the remainder came from Austria, Germany, Romania and Poland.”

The notable thing - in my view - isn’t that everyone in the building at that time was Jewish. The immigration came in waves from one part of the world and then another - at another time, they would have been all Italian and at yet another, Irish. No, what I find and have always found interesting about Jewism immigration and emigration is that no matter where they came from or went to at the time, they had this language - over and above in many cases the native language of the land of their birth - that united them.  It makes me a bit sadder about the continued fading of Yiddish.

In any case, the Q&A is going all on this week. Check it out. Fascinating stuff. In the meantime, I am hard at work on the next installment of the Shopping Series - I think it’s time to go uptown and upscale so we’ll do Fifth Avenue now that the tourists have all gone home. Stay tuned