“Nafkes on the Stoop”: Prostitutes’ Impact on the Lower East Side of New York in the Early Twentieth Century
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Max Weinreich Fellowship Lecture in American Jewish Studies
Rose and Isidore Drench Memorial Fellowship and the Dora and Mayer Tendler Endowed Fellowship Admission: Free Registration is required. |
This lecture will explore the intertwined lives of prostitutes with the larger Jewish immigrant community on the Lower East Side in the early-twentieth century. It will discuss the ways that prostitutes’ neighbors negotiated the realities of living among prostitutes – including increasing their own income by performing domestic labor or other services for sex workers, handling the noise and foot traffic in their buildings from the men coming and going, and the tensions of the use of space in the streets of New York. It will also explore themes of family and family business and look at the ways prostitutes constructed their families around the sale of sex as well as other illicit activities. Prostitutes claimed space on the streets and in the tenements of the Lower East Side and in doing so, shaped the urban environment and the Jewish immigrant experience.
About the Speaker
Deena Ecker is a PhD Candidate at the Graduate Center, CUNY and teaches American history at the City College of New York. Her dissertation, “Painted Vicious Huzzies: Prostitutes Impact on Business, Leisure, and Sex in Early-Twentieth Century New York,” looks at the integral role that sex workers played in shaping the urban social, cultural, and economic environment of New York in that time period. She received the Rose and Isidore Drench Memorial Fellowship and the Dora and Mayer Tendler Endowed Fellowship in American Jewish Studies, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research for the 2024-2025 year.