The Hidden World of Jewish, Irish, and French Psychics on the Lower East Side

Between 1850 and the early 1900s, the Lower East Side was home to more than a thousand fortune tellers. Who were these psychics and what were their customers seeking? Join Marie Carter (Mortimer and the Witches: A History for Nineteenth Century Fortune Tellers), Eddy Portnoy (Bad Rabbi: And Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press), and moderator Dan Friedman for an illuminating conversation exploring the lives of Jewish, Irish, and French immigrant psychics and the intersection of religion, gender, and culture on the Lower East Side at the time. We'll discuss colorful psychic personalities, including "Professor" Abraham Hochman, who along with telling fortunes, was Tammany Hall thug Florrie Sullivan's official mind reader. Actor Mikhl Yashinsky will join us for a live reenactment of Hochman's rituals and Marie Carter will demonstrate Madame Le Normand’s fortune-telling card system.

Whether you’re fascinated by history or fortune telling, this evening promises to be a captivating journey into a forgotten world.

Marie Carter is the author of Mortimer and the Witches: A History of Nineteenth-Century Fortune Tellers, Holly’s Hurricane, and The Trapeze Diaries. She grew up in Scotland but has lived in New York City for over twenty-five years. She is a tour guide for Boroughs of the Dead, a walking tour company that specializes in NYC's macabre and haunted histories, and Cats About Town, which looks at the history of cats in New York.

Dan Friedman is the former executive editor and whisky correspondent of the Forward, where he won a number of national awards for both his editing and writing. Recently, he has consulted for HIAS, Dayenu: A Jewish Call to Climate Action, and the Center for Countering Digital Hate. He also writes regularly at his Voice of Reason newsletter and about Jewish culture at the Forward.

Eddy Portnoy is the Senior Academic Advisor and Director of Exhibitions at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. The exhibitions he has created for YIVO have won plaudits from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, VICE, The Forward, and others. He is the author of Bad Rabbi and Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press.

Mikhl Yashinsky is a Yiddishist, performer, and writer. He is the translator of Adventures of Max Spitzkopf: The Yiddish Sherlock Holmes and The Mother of Yiddish Theatre: Memoirs of Ester-Rokhl Kaminska (both out in 2025). In his role in the operetta The Sorceress, he brought a “keen, if malevolent, psychology” to the title role (New York Times). The Yiddish musical Mikhl penned, Feast of the Seven Sinners, which recently had its first reading at the Y, was praised as “a saucy spectacle which sprouts excitingly unorthodox fruit” (Forward).