4: Essay, Mary Heaton Vorse’s “Some Picture Show Audiences,” 1911.

4: Essay, Mary Heaton Vorse’s “Some Picture Show Audiences,” 1911.

From resource kit: Jews and the Invention of the Movies

Vorse, a journalist, describes what it felt like to sit watching movies among the Jewish population of the Lower East Side. The Guardian was a weekly magazine published in New York from 1870 to 1935.

Suggested activity: Read aloud. Ask students to rephrase what Vorse is saying about the appeal of early movies to Jewish immigrants. Does this help explain why there would have been so many movie theaters on the Lower East Side?

Source: Mary Heaton Vorse, “Some Picture Show Audiences,” The Outlook, June 24, 1911, 445. Retrieved from http://www.unz.org/Pub/Outlook-1911jun24-00441, accessed February 22, 2016.