It’s cheese! It’s mustard! It’s…a knish?
By Symi Rom-Rymer
If you happened to be walking down Second Avenue in New York’s East Village last Sunday afternoon, you might have seen an unexpected sight: a small and solemn processional of people dressed in yellow. This was no McDonald's protest or cheese parade. Instead, it was a celebration and memorialization of an oft-forgotten history.
In the 1920s, Second Avenue—then part of the Jewish Lower East Side-- was known for two things: Yiddish theater and food. Artistically, it rivaled Broadway in its offerings, putting on plays by renowned playwrights such as Leo Tolstoy and George Bernard Shaw even before they reached mainstream American audiences. So great was its popularity that when Yiddish theater great Jacob P. Adler, father of famed acting coach Stella Adler, died in 1926, two thousand people flooded the streets to pay...