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A location which many Chinese immigrants seemed to favor was Brooklyn’s third Chinatown, in Bensonhurst. With great expectations of social mobility, Chinese immigrants hoped to create a permanent…
The Chinese often lived in apartments or houses with several families because of economic or personal reasons. The immigrants were often not economically settled enough to afford the…
Chinese families who arrived in Bensonhurst were mainly more affluent. Instead of concentrating in the crowded Manhattan Chinatown, they sought to buy homes in outer-borough middle-class neighborhoods with…
Since the Italians dominated Bensonhurst since the 1950s, they were unaccepting of the new immigrants at first since the Chinese did not know how to speak English and…
As any immigrant group would, when more and more Chinese immigrants started to come to Bensonhurst, they wanted to build a community. They wanted to be able to…
When the Jews immigrated to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, they lived in small, crowded apartments in tenements. Beginning in the 1920s, following the creation of the…
Paul S. Green, in his Memoir, “Growing up in Interwar Bensonhurst,” describes how Yiddish, a common language among Jews of European descent, continued to be learned and spoken….
The Jewish community lived alongside the larger Italian community in Bensonhurst. Both groups got along very well. Norma Shamosh, a 73-year-old mother to five children, and a Bensonhurst native,…
Chinese-Americans are often painted as the “model minority.” Due to severe language barriers and distrust of the government, the Chinese tended not to ask for a lot of…
The members of the Sephardic Jewish community in Bensonhurst originally immigrated from the Middle East, and moved to Bensonhurst from the Lower East side of Manhattan. They kept…
