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...A palm reader once lived at 97 Orchard Street. During restoration work, a business card advertising "Professor Dora Meltzer" as a palm reader was discovered beneath the floorboards. By the turn of the last century, "Professor Meltzer" would have been one of many fortune-tellers selling fortunes to women within the Lower East Side's Jewish immigrant community.

Wrongly assumed by outsiders to be criminals, palm readers or fortune-tellers were more likely traditional housewives, though not necessarily reputable businesswomen. Common tricks, including searching through visitors' belongings, were frequently employed to gather information.

Such behavior might seem devious, but fortune-telling helped liberate otherwise housebound immigrant women from the isolation of the tenement, allowing them to participate in the local economy and interact with the outside world. Fortune-tellers could offer immigrant customers advice about adapting to their new home or, even better, a glimpse in to the future that would help prepare them for what life in America held.

In 1911, the New York State Assembly outlawed for-profit fortune-telling. Although it remains illegal to accept money for forecasting the future today, fortune telling is still widely practiced throughout New York's five boroughs.

Reverend Jen Miller has worked at the Tenement Museum's Visitors Center for the past four years. A celebrated artist and author, her latest book is Reverend Jen's Really Cool Neighborhood.

One of the absolute coolest books out there is Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir.

A lot of people think the 60s were the coolest era in New York, but as an expert on coolness, I firmly believe that the late 40s were the coolest era. The war was over and the young hipsters who'd returned from it were ready to Par-Tay! Not to mention abstract expressionism was about to put New York at the center of the art world and artists could live in Greenwich Village for approximately $3,000 a month less than they can in the new millennium.

Author Anatole Broyard recounts his frustrating love affair with a hipster girl, his adventures as a student at The New School and his many acquaintances with famous artists and critics including Anais Nin, Meyer Shapiro, and Dylan Thomas, of whom he writes, "To him, an American party was like being in a bad pub with the wrong people."

Sadly, Anatole Broyard passed away in 1990, but he left readers with an incredibly moving account of the awkwardness, optimism, energy, and fun of youth in any era, even our current lame one.
-- Rev. Jen Miller

Kafka Was the Rage is available for 10% off at shop.tenement.org

The Tenement Museum has been chosen as one of three finalists for the 2005 Sustainable Tourism Award for Preservation. Sponsored by Smithsonian Magazine and Tourism Cares for Tomorrow, the winner of this award will be recognized as a model for preserving historic or culturally significant sites. Voting opens on August 15 at www.sustainabletourismawards.org and closes October 31.

In addition to being featured on the Sustainable Tourism Awards website and winning a $20,000 prize, the finalists are also featured in Smithsonian Magazine. The other finalists are the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum in Baltimore, MD and the Orchard House - home of author Louisa May Alcott - in Concord, MA. The site with the most votes will win, so we hope you log on and vote for the Tenement Museum!

The melting pot is one of America's enduring myths. But does this well-worn symbol capture the complicated process immigrants go through to retain their identity while assimilating into their adopted country?

The Museum's newest Digital Arts project, Folk Songs for the Five Points, will look at how immigrants re-form their identities. Folk Songs will music to get inside this process: the web site will feature a digital mixing board that visitors will use to create new folk songs out of audio from the Lower East Side.

Some of these sounds will be provided by visitors to the site. Indeed, the artists encourage submissions of unlicensed audio that evokes the immigrant experience on the Lower East Side. Visit www.tenement.org/folksongs to submit your audio.

When the Folk Songs project launches on October 21st, it will feature new compositions by Victor Gama. An Angolan-born musician who writes, performs and makes his own utterly unique instruments (see above for a sample), Victor is currently in New York to record his new works in the Museum's tenement building. He is also playing a few gigs around town--check out a show and get a taste of his new folk songs for the Lower East Side.

On July 20th, the Associated Press reported that the head of United States Customs and Border Protection was considering forming citizen volunteer groups "akin to a Border Patrol auxiliary." The next day, the Department of Homeland Security seemingly overruled this idea, noting that their agency had "no plans" to enlist civilian aid at national borders.

The surge in civilian patrols began on April 1st when the Minutemen Project launched a month-long "standoff" against illegal immigrants coming through the Arizona-Mexico border. A self-described "grassroots effort to bring Americans to defense of their homeland," the project has also inspired the formation of like-minded groups in at least 18 other states stretching from California to Maine.

Though Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Arizona Minutemen, claims to have "struck the mother lode of patriotism or nationalism or whatever you want to call it," many would argue otherwise. Critics have branded the Minutemen and their ilk as anti-immigrant vigilantes.

What do you think of these border patrols?

"The decision to leave one’s home for another country is never a simple one. As with any major life choice, it is usually shaped by many different factors. In general, there are three major reasons why people leave their home countries:

To flee violence, war, or political persecution.
To seek economic security or survival.
To join with family members.

Very often, a combination of two or all three of these factors is present." -- American Friends Service Committee

Given these motivations, what rights do you think should be granted to undocumented immigrants?
We'd love to read what you think.