A New Look at George Luks’s Hester Street and Jewish Immigration

Over the course of two decades, Ashcan School artist George Luks created a series of street scenes situated in New York City’s Lower East Side, of which Hester Street (1905) is the most representative example. This painting is routinely understood by scholars as a picturesque and benign scene of immigrant life that depicts portraits of individuals interacting and contributing to the vitality of a changing New York. Yet art historians have neglected to consider Luks’s engagement with racial typing, stereotyping, and discourses of Jewish difference that proliferated during the long nineteenth century. This paper reassesses Hester Street through the lenses of race, place, and mobility. It argues that Luks’s painting was conditioned by his own movements through the Lower East Side, as well as the wider circulation of racist ideologies and imagery, to which he himself contributed. Close examination of the artist’s visual strategies and “hunting” of his subjects reveals new insights into the painting’s racial dynamics. Namely, Luks worked to identify—and make legible—a group of Jewish types in the immediate foreground, further racializing these figures by calling attention to perceived physical difference and engaging with stereotypes related to Jewish greed. Luks’s participation in the era’s prevailing anti-Semitism compels us to rethink decades of assumptions about this “humanist” artist. Indeed, a revisionist reading of Hester Street demonstrates that Luks catered to an already existing demand for such imagery and sought to paint Jewish immigrants in the spaces in which they were most explicitly racialized.