Hester Street Quotes & Sayings

My earliest recollections are of the teeming East Side where I was born. This Hester Street and its surrounding streets were the most densely populated of any city on Earth; and looking back at it, I realize what I owe to its unique and crowded humanity. — Jacob Epstein

He received in essence the same answer from every other shop he tried. No one recognized his description of Hester, and none of them had sold digitalis to any member of the Farraline household, or indeed to anyone not known to them personally. He pursued the other sources of information, the public house, the street peddlers and crossing sweepers, the errand and delivery boys and the news vendors, but all he learned was very general gossip that seemed to serve no purpose. — Anne Perry

The conventional explanation for Jewish success, of course, is that Jews come from a literate, intellectual culture. They are famously "the people of the book." There is surely something to that. But it wasn't just the children of rabbis who went to law school. It was the children of garment workers. And their critical advantage in climbing the professional ladder wasn't the intellectual rigor you get from studying the Talmud. It was the practical intelligence and savvy you get from watching your father sell aprons on Hester Street. — Malcolm Gladwell