A Revolution in Type: Gender and the Making of the American Yiddish Press 9781479817665, 9781479817689, 9781479817672

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A Revolution in Type

A Revolution in Type Gender and the Making of the American Yiddish Press

Ayelet Brinn

NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS New York

N EW YOR K U N I V ER SI T Y PR E S S New York www.nyupress.org © 2023 by New York University All rights reserved Please contact the Library of Congress for Cataloging-in-Publication data. ISBN: 9781479817665 (hardback) ISBN: 9781479817689 (library ebook) ISBN: 9781479817672 (consumer ebook) This book is printed on acid-­free paper, and its binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books. Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Also available as an ebook

To my parents

Contents

Note on Orthography, Transliteration, and Translation ix Introduction

1

1. Home Papers and Human Interest: Creating a Yiddish Newspaper Market

23

2. Advice Columns and the Cultivation of a Yiddish Newspaper Audience

62

3. “From a Woman to Women”: Conversations in and around Women’s Columns

101

4. The Advent of Women’s Pages in the American Yiddish Press

140

5. “Women and Men Who Are Like Women”: Pseudonyms and the Interwar American Yiddish Press

181

Epilogue: Gender and the Historical Memory of the Yiddish Press

225

Acknowledgments 245 Notes 249 Bibliography 285 Index 303 About the Author 315

Note on Orthography, Transliteration, and Translation

All words in Yiddish have been rendered according to the transliteration scheme of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, except that no attempt has been made to standardize nonstandard orthography for any words other than the titles of Yiddish daily newspapers. For the spelling of author’s names, I have where possible tried to choose the name as it appears in the US Library of Congress Catalog, unless that spelling diverges from the one generally used by scholars of Hebrew and Yiddish literature. All translations are mine, unless otherwise noted.

ix

Introduction

In 1927, the New York–­based communist Yiddish daily Frayhayt (Freedom) published a book called Di goldene medine (The golden land), featuring some of the most attention-­grabbing work by its in-­house political cartoonist, William Gropper. Gropper was a radical activist as well as a gifted artist, and his cartoons reinforced the messages conveyed in the Frayhayt’s editorials and news coverage, furthering its ideological project and attracting new readers. As was true of Gropper’s broader oeuvre, the cartoons in Di goldene medine lampooned a range of subjects, including bloated capitalist bosses, corrupt religious leaders, and scabs who dared to cross picket lines. But many cartoons took aim at one target: Abraham Cahan. As the longtime editor of the socialist Yiddish daily Forverts (Forward), Cahan had transformed that newspaper into by far the best-­selling Yiddish publication in the world. Cahan had won a vast audience of devoted readers by fusing radical ideology with mass appeal, but his rivals and detractors criticized his tactics for dampening the political resonance of the Forverts. These critiques found frequent voice on the pages of the Frayhayt, whose own circulation was dwarfed by that of the Forverts. And in Gropper’s cartoons, these invectives took visual form.1 In one cartoon, “Un zi redt” (And she talks), Gropper depicted Cahan perched on top of the Forverts’s towering office building in Lower Manhattan (figure I.1). Dressed in women’s clothing, though he is still identifiable by his trademark mustache, Cahan is wagging his finger with one hand while brandishing a pan in the other. In the corner, the caption comprises a jumble of groups that were frequent subjects of derision for Cahan or the newspaper he helmed, including “communists,” “thieves,” “gangsters,” and “maidens.” And this feminized version of Cahan is presumably holding forth on these subjects from his perch.2 This was not the only cartoon in which Gropper depicted Cahan in women’s clothing. In fact, this was “a favorite device in Gropper’s 1

Figure I.1. William Gropper, “Un zi redt” (And she talks), in Di goldene medine (1927). (Care of the William Gropper Estate. From the Library of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research)

Introduction | 3

cartoons of Cahan.”3 This particular image had originally appeared in the Frayhayt a year prior under a different title and with a caption that criticized Cahan’s stance on a contentious cloak makers’ strike—­ suggesting the flexibility of this gendered device, which could serve to lampoon Cahan’s stance on a particular issue or as a more general critique.4 Indeed, Gropper was not alone in using gendered images or rhetoric to lampoon Cahan or his newspaper. In depicting Cahan in this way, Gropper drew on several common tropes that circulated in the American Yiddish publishing sphere in the first decades of the twentieth century. For instance, by drawing Cahan not just as a woman but specifically a nagging, middle-­aged housewife, Gropper aimed to fuse Cahan with Yente Telebende, a character made popular by a long-­running series of sketches in the Forverts by B. Kovner.5 These sketches, along with the Forverts’s influential advice column the “Bintel brief,” were often singled out by critics as prime examples of the “popular articles about feminine things” that Cahan included to infuse the Forverts with mass appeal. In fact, critics often argued that these sketches were so representative of Cahan’s journalistic priorities that the newspaper could just as easily be referred to as the “Telebende-­paper” or the “Bintel-­paper,” rather than the Forverts.6 At the same time, this image also evoked common assumptions about the intended audience of this popular content. Throughout Cahan’s career, his detractors frequently conflated his attempts to infuse the Forverts with entertainment-­driven or sensational material with his desire to increase the female readership of the newspaper. For some radical journalists, Cahan’s attempts to court a female audience reflected a desire to infuse his socialist newspaper with commercial appeal. As the newspaper relied on advertisements as a major source of funding, they argued, incorporating material that addressed women became a method to demonstrate to corporations that a major consumer demographic read the publication. For others, invoking “women” was instead a rhetorical stand-­in for a mass audience. In these instances, invoking the reading interests of women became a shorthand to describe Cahan’s attempts to broaden the paper’s readership beyond people with strong commitments to socialism or to pander to the lowest common denominator.7

4 | Introduction

In making these arguments, critics also echoed rhetoric employed by Cahan himself, who frequently conflated a female readership with his popular, mass-­consumption-­focused approach to journalism. Cahan even imparted these messages to the Forverts staff: “The story goes,” the journalist Melech Epstein later recounted, “that Cahan, displeased with the literary language of a young writer, . . . took him to the window of the ninth floor and, pointing to a middle-­aged woman in a shawl passing by, said, ‘This is your reader, she has to understand you.’ ”8 By depicting Cahan as a middle-­aged woman, Gropper’s image turned Cahan’s advice on its head. Instead of looking down from his office onto his female readers below, the Cahan in this image has so internalized these instructions that he has been transformed into his ideal Forverts reader. Gropper, Cahan’s other critics within socialist Yiddish journalism, and Cahan himself used their conflations of the editor with the newspaper’s supposedly female readership or supposedly “feminine” content to divergent ends. For some critics, it became a method to tie Cahan and his newspaper to older, outdated forms of information circulation. By equating the sensational headlines or entertaining features that Cahan brought to the Forverts with feminine “gossip” or “old-­wives’ tales” that circulated in eastern Europe, they portrayed the socialist daily and its editor as backward and out of touch with recent developments in radical spheres. For others, it became a way to evoke Cahan’s engagement with the latest trends in the American popular press—­for good or for ill. Cahan, for instance, asserted that his desire to attract female readers was gleaned from his experiences as a reader of and contributor to the most well-­regarded mainstream American newspapers. His detractors instead attributed Cahan’s desire to reach a female audience to his penchant for mimicking lowbrow, sensational newspapers, deeming Cahan’s approach socialist-­tinged “yellow journalism.”9 The meanings infused into these debates about the Forverts’s female readership or feminine content were thus in no way consistent. Nor did they necessarily reflect the reading needs or interests of women who read the Yiddish press—­some of whom were as drawn in by the Forverts’s editorials or job listings as by the contents of its women’s page or advice columns. Instead, within the American Yiddish publishing sphere, discussions of the Forverts’s female readers, and the content they supposedly read, became avenues

Introduction | 5

for different factions to debate what an American Yiddish newspaper should encompass with regard to content, tone, and intended audience. *** This book explores the vital, complex, and often unexpected ways that questions of women and gender shaped the content and drove the decision-­making, marketing, and institutional power of newspapers across the ideological spectrum of the American Yiddish press. Between the 1870s and the 1920s, Yiddish newspapers rose from precarious origins to become successful and integral institutions in American Jewish life. By the 1920s, if you were a Yiddish-­speaking farmer, housewife, theatergoer, humor lover, Zionist or anti-­Zionist, Marxist or anti-­Marxist, you could find a weekly or monthly periodical that catered specifically to your interests.10 You could also choose to read one or multiple daily newspapers that targeted a broader, more varied reading public. Each Yiddish daily espoused a particular ideological agenda, from religious Orthodoxy and alignment with the Republican Party to socialism or communism—­reflecting the diversity of outlooks and affiliations that made up the Yiddish-­speaking population in the United States at this time. And while some of these publications only survived for a handful of issues, others succeeded beyond their founders’ wildest dreams—­attracting large audiences of devoted readers and publishing continuously for decades. During this period, Yiddish newspapers forged intimate, multivalent relationships with their audiences. Readers began to look to Yiddish newspapers not just as sources for entertainment and news or as the foremost venue for Yiddish literature but also as influential forces in shaping the contours of American Jewish life. Through reading or contributing to Yiddish newspapers’ myriad advice columns and write-­in contests, readers began to feel deeply connected to their favorite newspaper and its writers and fellow readers. When the most successful Yiddish dailies moved to office buildings on Yiddish Newspaper Row—­on East Broadway at the heart of New York’s Lower East Side—­readers flocked there to attend events and demonstrations, to personally ask for advice or aid, and to express their opinions on the paper’s editorial direction. Readers living farther afield replicated these interactions by

6 | Introduction

sending letters that offered their opinions about newspaper content or asked editors to provide them with confidential information or advice on a wide array of subjects. Over the course of half a century, Yiddish newspapers positioned themselves at the very center of American Jewish life, spatially and ideologically as well as culturally. This transformation of American Yiddish newspapers into immensely successful publications and essential, authoritative political and cultural institutions was in no way inevitable. When the American Yiddish publishing field began to take shape, no precedent for Yiddish newspapers on this scale existed in eastern Europe. In that context, both Jewish radical intellectuals and religious elites often stigmatized Yiddish as a language that was fit only for simplistic content aimed at a mass, relatively uneducated audience. Many writers thus preferred to publish in Hebrew, German, or Russian. Moreover, censorship laws made it extremely difficult to publish Yiddish newspapers within the Russian Empire until after the turn of the twentieth century, severely curtailing the early growth of European Yiddish publishing. Weeklies and monthlies that were granted permission to publish in the nineteenth century tended to attract relatively small reading audiences. And the first European Yiddish daily newspaper did not appear until 1903, twenty years after the founding of the first Yiddish dailies in the United States. The mass-­consumption, daily Yiddish press thus developed in the United States before it took hold on a similar scale in Europe. It would take several decades before a similar market for Yiddish newspapers would blossom in Europe as well. For all of these reasons, many Jewish immigrants, especially those who immigrated before the turn of the twentieth century, would never have read a newspaper before coming to the United States.11 Yet quickly upon their arrival, hundreds of thousands of Yiddish reading immigrants began to see daily newspapers as indispensable parts of their lives. They pored over newspapers on their way to work, at home with their families, or out loud with neighbors and friends. For many Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe, acclimating to life in the United States became inextricably intertwined with becoming a devoted reader of the Yiddish periodical press, as newspapers became a mix of friends, religious and/or political authorities, tour guides, matchmakers, and social welfare agencies. By the 1920s, not only was there a broad array of options for readers to choose from, but the Yiddish press had

Introduction | 7

become the most successful foreign-­language newspaper market in the United States. The circulation of the most popular daily, the Forverts, surpassed two hundred thousand issues at its peak, at times even exceeding that of the New York Times.12 How did the Yiddish newspaper market transform from a small handful of struggling publications into a successful, commercially viable publishing field with mass appeal and ideological potency? What made radical intellectuals and religious elites begin to view Yiddish’s association with a mass audience—­once a source of stigma—­as one of its greatest assets? And how did hundreds of thousands of immigrants come to view Yiddish newspapers as both personal interlocutors and vital communal institutions? I argue that questions about women and gender were central to the emergence of the Yiddish press as a powerful, influential force in American Jewish culture. It was through rhetorical debates about women readers and writers that the producers of the Yiddish press explored how to transform their newspapers to reach a large, diverse audience; how to build a broad base of institutional power; how to negotiate their relationship to American and international Jewish cultural trends; and how to balance the often-­competing commercial, ideological, and cultural aims undergirding Yiddish newspaper publishing. Moreover, the seemingly peripheral status of women’s columns and other newspaper features supposedly aimed at a female audience (but actually read with great interest by many Yiddish newspaper readers regardless of gender) meant that editors and publishers often used these articles as testing grounds for what types of content or formatting their newspapers should encompass. Instead of framing issues of gender as marginal, we must view them as central to understanding how the American Yiddish press developed into the influential, complex, and diverse publication field it eventually became. In the late nineteenth century, as writers, editors, and publishers began to build an American Yiddish newspaper market from scratch, they invoked the needs and interests of female readers when discussing their desire to create mass-­consumption, commercially successful daily publications. As was previously noted, Abraham Cahan, the longtime editor of the socialist Forverts, described the innovations he brought to the publication as attempts to create a newspaper that “the masses of

8 | Introduction

the Jewish people, and even women, could read.”13 Similarly, Yekhezkl Sarasohn of the Orthodox Tageblat (Jewish Daily News), a bitter rival of Cahan, described his newspaper as a commodity that he hoped housewives would buy at the market along with other household goods.14 Decades later, these arguments continued to resonate, as B. Z. Goldberg of the nonpartisan, intellectual Tog (The Day) attested that anytime a newspaper published something addressing women readers, its staff was really trying to attract the “the masses, the folk, the rabble.”15 These assertions drew on long-­standing traditions within Yiddish culture that conflated the reading needs of a mass audience and a female or feminized audience. In early modern east European Jewish communities, Yiddish was the vernacular language of everyday life, as opposed to the more scholarly or religiously oriented Hebrew, taught primarily to men. Authors often referred to those who read in Yiddish as “women and men who are like women,” meaning men who were not educated enough to read Hebrew. In reality, this phrase was a useful fiction. Texts in Yiddish were read by men and women of a variety of educational levels. Nevertheless, evoking a female or feminized audience became a method for the founders of modern Yiddish and Hebrew literature to create internal hierarchies of genre, authorship, and audience in Jewish cultural spheres.16 At the same time, discussions about gender within the early American Yiddish press were equally influenced by trends in mainstream American journalism. In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, politically funded publications addressing small, elite, and primarily male audiences gave way to mass-­consumption-­oriented publications funded by circulation and advertisements. This shift prompted editors to experiment with a variety of new content meant to draw in a broader audience, including works of fiction, advice columns, and human-­ interest stories. In the process, newspapers transformed into venues of both entertainment and news, as well as guides to help readers navigate transformations taking shape in American society, including rises in urbanization, industrialization, and immigration. Many of the most successful newspapers—­best exemplified by Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal—­were derided by older, more established rivals for catering to the baser instincts of their readers. Nevertheless, these rivals also began expanding and

Introduction | 9

diversifying their papers’ content in order to compete for readers’ attention and advertisers’ support.17 These transformations in American journalism were deeply intertwined with attempts to increase the female readership of newspapers. Editors and publishers shared the view held by many advertisers that women drove household consumption and were the major purchasers of products. To convince advertisers to buy ad space, newspapers needed to demonstrate that they were attracting a female audience. To this end, newspapers began to include content explicitly aimed at women for the first time, including women’s pages, advice columns, and features-­heavy Sunday editions. These innovations have led scholars to refer to this era not just as tantamount to the commercialization of American newspaper publishing, or the era of “yellow journalism,” but as characterized equally by the “feminization” of the newspaper market in the United States.18 The advent of the American Yiddish press thus coincided with profound changes in society and journalism in the United States. In determining how to cultivate a mass audience for their own publications, the producers of American Yiddish newspapers looked to these new trends in mainstream American journalism as models. Yiddish newspapers continually readjusted their formatting, features, or news coverage to keep up with the latest trends in surrounding newspaper culture. Moreover, following the blueprint of the American popular press, Yiddish newspaper editors and publishers appealed to a female audience by including advice columns, popular fiction, and women’s pages. They also began describing their papers as “home papers,” “family papers,” or papers filled with “human interest”—­words meant to signal to readers and advertisers alike that they were interested in engaging a female readership.19 Within the Yiddish press, therefore, invoking female readers’ needs and interests became a way for newspaper producers to make various claims about their publications’ connections to long-­standing Jewish cultural traditions or to recent trends in American popular culture (or to reframe the boundaries between these categories). As was true with Abraham Cahan, the meanings that other writers infused into debates about female readers were not necessarily consistent or accurate. Instead, discussions of women readers in the early, formative decades of

10 | Introduction

Yiddish newspaper publishing provide invaluable insight into how the founders of these publications negotiated the balance between American and global Jewish culture for themselves, their newspapers, and, by extension, their readers. While the producers of the Yiddish press viewed attracting female readers as integral to the process of making their newspapers commercially viable publications with mass appeal, these features were in no way disconnected from the political and ideological aims of these publications. Instead, for editors and writers associated with each Yiddish daily, writing women’s columns became an avenue to explore how to translate political or ideological messages, religious texts, or American academic and popular discourse in ways that they hoped their broad, diverse audience could understand. Yiddish dailies all included countless articles exploring pressing issues of the day related to women’s roles in society, including the phenomenon of the New Woman, suffrage, and the roles that Jewish women played in the Jewish home and Jewish public spheres. Tracing newspapers’ changing rhetoric surrounding these issues provides crucial insights into how they navigated the shifting landscape of modernity for themselves and for their readers. Moreover, influential editors of Yiddish newspapers espousing various ideological frameworks wrote women’s columns. Getsel Zelikovits of the Orthodox Tageblat and Mikhail Zametkin of the socialist Forverts experimented early in their careers with fusing household tips, advice on child rearing, and arguments about women’s issues in the Jewish community or the broader American public sphere with their particular political perspectives. Through writing women’s columns, each of these editors hoped to guide the reading habits and daily lives of their audiences. But in the process, they also explored how to write newspaper content that was simultaneously entertaining, useful, and ideologically potent. In the following decades, the Yiddish newspaper reading audience diversified with regard to age, education level, political ideology, and religious doctrine. Advice columns, human-­interest stories, women’s columns, and other features became spaces where publishers and editors emphasized the various ways Yiddish newspapers could play active role in the lives of their readers. Editors and publishers were well aware that women were never the exclusive readers of so-­called women’s content.

Introduction | 11

By shifting back and forth between describing these features’ supposed connections to a female audience and the authority of the mainly male writers of these columns, Yiddish newspapers were able to effectively market this material both as light features meant to entertain and as crucial components of the institutional power and communal authority employed by Yiddish newspapers and their staffs. By the 1910s, editors and publishers of Yiddish newspapers increasingly included work by female writers in their publications as a method to broaden their appeal. Depending on the outlook of the publication in question, including material by women served to make a newspaper appear more radical, popular, American, modern, or traditional than its rivals. As was true with earlier discussions of female readers, these marketing campaigns did not necessarily reflect the experiences of women who forged careers working for the Yiddish press. This book therefore takes readers behind the scenes of Yiddish newspapers to illuminate the connections and divergences between the actual and symbolic roles that women readers and writers played in the development of the Yiddish press. This brief overview demonstrates how the methods and the arguments of this book are intertwined: only through a gendered history can we understand the full power and complexity of the American Yiddish press. Gender became the prism through which the Yiddish newspaper market continually reshaped the boundaries between traditional and modern, political and commercial, and American and Jewish culture. It was through considerations of women and gender that the producers of the Yiddish press, together with their readers, forged a new discursive forum and new relationships between east European Jewish immigrants and American culture. This made women’s columns, women’s pages, and other related content within the Yiddish press particularly dynamic. But it also made them rife with contradictions, as the various political, cultural, and commercial priorities of Yiddish newspapers did not always neatly align. *** The Yiddish press has long been a crucial resource for historians seeking to understand the American Jewish past. Yet the history of the Yiddish press itself—­how the publishing field developed over time and how

12 | Introduction

Yiddish newspapers came to take on such important and multivalent roles in readers’ lives—­has yet to be fully explored. Taking their cue from the early histories of the Yiddish press, most of which were written by active participants in the publishing field, scholars have primarily explored the relationship of Yiddish newspapers to the changing landscape of American Jewish politics—­particularly the relationship of the socialist Forverts to shifts in radical political culture.20 This approach tends to segment the Yiddish publishing sphere by ideology, assuming that radical and religious Yiddish newspapers can and should be studied in isolation from each other. Moreover, it places primary emphasis on editorials, highbrow literature, and front-­page news. When questions related to women and gender are explored at all, they are viewed as subservient to these other aims, and analysis centers around how women’s content within individual Yiddish publications succeeded or failed to conform with the political, ideological, or literary project of these newspapers as a whole.21 In contrast, this book traces the evolution of the entire Yiddish daily newspaper market in New York from the 1880s, when the first Yiddish dailies were founded, through the mid-­1920s, when the Yiddish press began to decline in circulation and cultural influence. The newspapers explored in this volume encompass the full ideological range of Yiddish journalism, from radical publications like the socialist Forverts and the communist Frayhayt to religiously oriented, politically conservative newspapers like the Tageblat and Morgn-­zhurnal (Jewish Morning Journal).22 Examining the Yiddish daily press as an entire publishing sphere unearths commonalities among publications that spanned ideological boundaries. Each Yiddish daily attempted to balance ideological potency, commercial viability, and cultural importance, as well as the often-­conflicting priorities of advertisers, publishers, editors, writers, and readers. Reading these publications in tandem also allows us to track the movement of content and writers between radical, religious, and nonpartisan publications over time—­revealing, for example, that writers such as Rose Pastor Stokes, David Hermalin, Adella Kean Zametkin, and Rae Raskin wrote women’s columns and other content for radical, religious, and nonpartisan publications over the course of their careers. Sometimes these authors shifted their arguments to conform

Introduction | 13

with the political project of the publication in which they were writing. But often these writers found ways to infuse their own ideological perspective into their columns, even when it diverged from the editorial priorities of their publication venue. To some extent, the distinction between daily newspapers and the other publications that constituted the American Yiddish publishing sphere is artificial. Writers and editors often wrote simultaneously for multiple dailies, weeklies, and monthlies, and many readers supplemented daily newspapers with a variety of other publications. Many of these publications were also deeply conversant with one another. Articles in the monthly Tsukunft (Future) or weekly humor publication Der groyser kundes (The big stick), for example, frequently commented on recent articles featured in dailies like the Forverts and Varhayt (Truth). However, unlike weekly or monthly publications, which tended to segment the Yiddish reading public, Yiddish dailies presented themselves as resources that a wide range of readers could incorporate into every facet of their lives. Moreover, the most successful Yiddish dailies were each funded, at least in part, by advertisements and circulation. Because of this, Yiddish dailies attempted to speak to as many readers as possible, including those outside their ideological purview. If their paper could reach a broader audience, editors and publishers reasoned, they could win out over their rivals in the battles for circulation figures and advertisers’ financial support, as well as for ideological sway over Yiddish readers in the United States and beyond.23 The balance between these priorities was different in each Yiddish daily. Some, like the nonpartisan Tog or the communist Frayhayt, asserted that they offered a more intellectually driven reading experience than other Yiddish dailies, while others, like the Forverts or Tageblat, touted their ability to attract even the least educated readers. Nevertheless, each publication found ways to demonstrate to various segments of the Yiddish reading public that they had their specific needs and interests in mind. This created an atmosphere in which Yiddish dailies competed with one another for readers, advertisers, writers, and ideological and institutional primacy. While this book incorporates materials from nondaily Yiddish publications when relevant, especially from prominent weeklies like the socialist Arbeter tsaytung (Worker newspaper) and the anarchist Fraye arbeter shtime (Free voice of labor), the primary focus is on the history of the

14 | Introduction

Yiddish daily press in New York—­the major center of Yiddish news­ paper publishing in the United States. This book also focuses on sections of the newspaper that are often viewed as peripheral to the development of the Yiddish press. At the turn of the twentieth century, “women’s content” was an expansive and shifting journalistic category that encompassed the types of articles that publishers and editors thought would be most effective at attracting female readers and the most fitting genres to assign to female writers, including women’s columns, advice columns, human-­interest pieces, poetry, serialized fiction, advertising, and short stories.24 Some of these features have lost their gendered connotations over time; and even at the turn of the century, newspaper producers vacillated in their descriptions of these genres, sometimes describing them as ways to draw in a broader mass audience or as crucial bases for the political or religious authority of the Yiddish press. But throughout the history of the Yiddish press, newspaper producers often linked their inclusion of these genres with their desires to increase the female readership of their newspapers. Over the course of the period between the Yiddish dailies’ respective founding and the mid-­1920s, each changed drastically in content, formatting, circulation, and business model. These features came and went throughout these papers’ runs, as publishers, editors, and writers experimented with how best to speak to and shape their ever-­diversifying audience of readers. Exploring these features over time thus affords us a window into how the American Yiddish press developed and how changes within the American Yiddish publishing sphere evolved in relation to changes in American and global Jewish print culture. While newspaper editors and publishers described the inclusion of “women’s content” as crucial to ensuring that their publications attracted a broad reading audience and remained commercially viable, they also tended to denigrate these features and those who wrote and read them—­arguing that they were less culturally rich than highbrow literature or literary criticism and less ideologically potent than editorials. These assessments have also shaped the ways that scholars have assessed the Yiddish press. With the exception of the Forverts’s influential advice column the “Bintel brief,” scholars have focused significantly more attention on editorials or literary criticism than on the popular fiction, advice columns, write-­in contests, advertisements, women’s pages, and

Introduction | 15

women’s columns that were also crucial components of every Yiddish daily newspaper published in the United States between the 1880s and 1920s, a publishing field characterized by a broad mix of highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow material. However, historical actors’ claims about the political or literary importance of different sections of a newspaper should not dictate our own understanding of these publications as source materials to unearth the history of American Jewish culture. In reality, questions of competition, commercial viability, and popular appeal were just as important in shaping each newspaper’s political commentary or literary criticism as more narrowly defined ideological goals—­just as questions of ideology infused the entertaining or gendered features included in each Yiddish newspaper. By looking at Yiddish newspapers holistically, we gain a fuller understanding of the convergence and divergence between the various motivations that went into Yiddish newspaper publishing and how these motivations impacted the messages that newspapers conveyed to readers. Moreover, “women’s features” were immensely popular, with an avid audience among male and female readers alike. In some ways, choosing which Yiddish daily to read meant choosing a sense of ideological affiliation or political identity. But in other cases, readers read multiple dailies or chose which newspaper to purchase on the basis of whether they preferred a newspaper’s features or because it had more up-­to-­date job listings—­for reasons not necessarily directly related to a newspaper’s party line. Different readers approached the same features as entertaining reading material, as invaluable guidance they could apply to their own lives, or as content containing a mixture of these impulses.25 It is therefore crucial to incorporate these features into the history of the American Yiddish press in order to fully contend with their complexity as a source base through which to understand the American Jewish past. For the past half century, scholars who focus on Jews and gender have encouraged us to think critically about the relationship between debates about women’s roles in Jewish society and the reality of women’s lives in the historical moments in which these debates were produced. In many cases, they have shown, discussions of women by Jewish communal leaders diverged significantly from women’s lived experiences. As Jews living in various areas around the world became swept up in processes

16 | Introduction

of acculturation or secularization, discussing, praising, or criticizing women became a method for leaders to express their anxieties about what would happen to Jewish communal life. As major communal forums in the modern area, newspapers in many languages, including the Yiddish press, became prime venues for debates about the present and future of Jewish life and culture. Understandably, then, newspapers have served as a primary source base for scholars looking to explore historical representations of women and gender.26 But when read against the grain, these same sources offer invaluable insight into the formation and growth of the American Yiddish newspaper market. Throughout the history of the Yiddish press, publishers, editors, readers, and writers waged fierce arguments about the roles that newspapers should play in the political, civic, and cultural lives of their readers and what types of content and style the ideal American Yiddish newspaper should employ. What balance should papers maintain between informing, entertaining, and educating readers? Should newspapers aim to speak to readers who fit within their ideological framework? Or should they instead speak to a broader audience encompassing various education levels, political aims, or reading interests? Because the inclusion of so-­called women’s content was deeply intertwined with Yiddish dailies’ various commercial, ideological, and cultural priorities, debates about female readers and the content they supposedly read often became the prism through which editors and publishers explored these charged questions. And by turning our focus to what these sources can tell us about the development of the Yiddish press as a publishing sphere and seat of institutional authority, these sources illuminate not only what it meant to be an American Jewish man or woman but also what it meant to be an American Yiddish newspaper. As a publication field that saw its peak circulation figures over a century ago, the American Yiddish press encompassed very different approaches to gender than we have today. Though radical and religious publications diverged significantly in their understanding of the ideal future trajectory of American Jewish life and the roles that women and men should play within it, they shared a binary, essentialized understanding of gender. Nevertheless, a focus on how questions of gender featured in polemics about the development of American Yiddish print culture allows us to separate the representations of women and men

Introduction | 17

within the Yiddish press from the lived realities that they supposedly represented. In some cases, the producers of Yiddish newspapers were sincere in their desire to speak to and shape the lives of female readers. In others, “women” became a trope through which newspaper producers explored their relationship to diverse audiences and to mass culture more broadly. A focus on gender allows us a window into the complex rhetorical strategies employed within Yiddish newspaper culture. This, in turn, allows us new insights into how to analyze Yiddish newspapers as historical source material. This same methodology, for instance, also allows us to reframe the relationship of the Yiddish press to the United States, as discussing female readers often became a way for Yiddish newspaper readers to describe their relationship with various streams of American culture. In addition to focusing on the political content of Yiddish newspapers, scholars have also highlighted the role of the Yiddish press in “Americanizing” its audience by introducing readers to American culture, the American political system, and a broad range of “American” values.27 These studies, taking their cue from Yiddish newspapers themselves, tend to rely on static, unchanging definitions of what “America” was and how Yiddish cultural producers and consumers related to it. But in reality, multiple competing, inconsistent definitions of “American culture” coincided simultaneously in the Yiddish press. Individual newspapers, and the publishing field as a whole, reshaped how they framed their relationship to culture in the United States in order to meet the needs of particular historical moments. At times, “America” became a stand-­in for mass culture or popular culture, while in others, discussing the relationship of the Yiddish press to “America” became a method to assert the patriotism of new immigrants when faced with deep suspicions of foreign-­language culture. Only by delving deeply into the complex ways in which Yiddish newspapers related to and reshaped the concept of “America” over time can we truly understand the multivalent roles played by Yiddish newspapers in the acclimation of new immigrants to the United States.28 Moreover, this approach also allows us to fully embed the history of the Yiddish press within the history of journalism in the United States more broadly. The heyday of the American Yiddish press coincided with profound changes that destabilized what the United States, American culture, and American journalism looked like—­all of which were shaped

18 | Introduction

by the mass migration of immigrants, including Yiddish-­speaking immigrants.29 While the development of the American Yiddish press was deeply informed by changing trends in American mainstream journalism, this influence was never unidirectional. As the following pages demonstrate, mainstream newspapers frequently covered the latest trends in American Yiddish journalism and wrote lengthy obituaries for noted Yiddish journalists. Many even published translations or adaptations of material that had initially run on the pages of Yiddish newspapers. Some Yiddish newspaper writers eventually made their way into the mainstream Anglophone press. But others, including Abraham Cahan, Rose Pastor Stokes, and B. Z. Goldberg, spanned the divides between these journalistic spaces, bringing concepts and content back and forth between them. Fully integrating the Yiddish press into our understanding of American journalism allow us to create a fuller understanding of American culture at the turn of the twentieth century in all of its complexity. Importantly, in addition to exploring the changing rhetorical strategies of the Yiddish press, this book also explores the experiences of the men and women who contributed to the American Yiddish press. Throughout its period of peak influence, the production end of Yiddish newspapers was in many ways a male-­dominated sphere. The vast majority of content within these publications was written by men, including women’s columns, advice columns, popular fiction, and other genres described by newspapers as particularly appealing content for female readers. Yet throughout the history of the Yiddish press, there were always women contributing to these publications in various ways. At first, many of these contributions were behind the scenes, with women serving as translators, secretaries, or bookkeepers—­providing many of the day-­to-­day operations that kept Yiddish newspapers afloat in their first, tumultuous years of existence. By the 1910s, female bylines were becoming more frequent in the American Yiddish press. However, even as more women writers entered the Yiddish publishing sphere in the 1910s and 1920s, many expressed their frustrations at the limits of what they, as women, were able to contribute to Yiddish newspapers. It was very rare for women to hold editorial positions, though there were a handful of female editors at various times at various newspapers, who were mainly appointed to edit women’s

Introduction | 19

pages. Most women who contributed to the Yiddish press worked as freelancers as opposed to having full-­time staff positions, which would have afforded them more job stability and higher wages. Moreover, women contended with editors and publishers who had specific expectations of what women should publish within their publications—­often limiting women’s bylines to supposedly feminine topics such as romance or housekeeping or writing that emphasized women’s sentimentality or naïveté. In truth, women continued to contribute to these newspapers in other unacknowledged ways, both on and off the page. But editors’ decisions about what types of work carried bylines have obscured our understanding of the myriad roles women played in the development of the Yiddish press. In other cases, the lack of prestige afforded to women’s content within the Yiddish press meant that writers working within these spaces faced less oversight or editorial pushback than when writing content that ran in other sections of the Yiddish press. Women writers found ways to infuse their columns with trenchant critiques of the roles that women were allowed to play in the Yiddish publishing sphere and beyond, transforming women’s columns into a largely untapped resource for uncovering women’s voices. Rosa Lebensboym, for instance, used her women’s columns in the Tog to explore the limitations imposed by newspaper editors on women journalists’ creativity and talent.30 And Rokhl Holtman used her women’s columns in the communist Frayhayt to question editors’ decision to limit their women’s section to half a page—­arguing that this did not afford her the space to provide readers with sufficient material to advise and politicize them.31 Yet even women’s columns with female bylines need to be treated carefully as sources for uncovering women’s roles in the development of the American Yiddish press—­as they did not always offer readers a reliable window into the actual processes through which newspapers were composed. In 1909, for instance, the Tageblat’s most frequent women’s columnist, the “Lithuanian Wisewoman,” complained to readers about the frustrations inherent in being “the only woman on the [primarily] male staff ” of a Yiddish newspaper. This position led the Lithuanian Wisewoman to feel isolated when agitating for causes like women’s rights, as male colleagues simply could not appreciate the import of these questions. Together with equally isolated female compatriots

20 | Introduction

working for other venues in the Yiddish-­and English-­language press, the Lithuanian Wisewoman contended with “dozens of male editors . . . crack[ing] jokes at [women’s] expense.” The fact that most papers employed so few women meant that “only one or two female writers write against [them].”32 In reality, the Lithuanian Wisewoman was not the only woman on the Tageblat’s staff or, in fact, a woman at all. Instead, it was a persona created by one of the paper’s male editors, Getsel Zelikovits. Throughout the history of the Yiddish press, it was quite common for male writers and editors to write newspaper content under female pseudonyms. Writing as a woman and discussing women writers’ careers, Zelikovits joined other male writers and editors who spoke on women’s behalf about the experience of female writers for the American Yiddish press. In fact, many of the sources at our disposal that recount the histories of women who worked for the Yiddish press were written by male colleagues or family members. Some of these men, like Zelikovits, used these discussions to decry or mock the gender imbalances they felt characterized Yiddish publishing. Others, in contrast, chose to portray the Yiddish press as an especially hospitable place for women writers.33 These sources contribute to a skewed understanding of women’s contributions to the development of the Yiddish press specifically and to American Jewish culture more broadly. Earlier scholars have often taken male-­authored sources at their word when they asserted that women who wrote in Yiddish primarily wrote in “feminine” genres such as poetry and women’s columns and that women’s writing was driven more by emotion or personal turmoil than by a desire to engage with pressing social, political, or literary questions of the day.34 In recent years, scholars have begun to correct these narratives by uncovering a rich and diverse corpus of prose and poetry written by women in Yiddish, spanning a range of genres from modernist highbrow literature to popular, serialized novels about abortion and free love.35 By exploring the writing and experiences of women who forged careers working for the American Yiddish press, this book builds on this wave of scholarship, adding journalistic genres like women’s columns and advice columns to our understanding of the content written in Yiddish by women.

Introduction | 21

By exploring the experiences of women writers, translators, and administrative workers, it also becomes easier to understand the variety of labor that went into the day-­to-­day operations of Yiddish newspapers, not all of which has been acknowledged in histories of the Yiddish press. In addition to discounting the import of women’s features, sources by prominent writers and editors tend to gloss over the less prestigious, unattributed work performed by secretaries, translators, or writers of anonymous content. Integrating the lives and careers of female writers and staff members into the history of the Yiddish press is critical for gaining a fuller picture of how and why the Yiddish press became such a powerful force in American Jewish life and the actual processes that went into producing these valuable publications and cultural institutions. Because much of the behind-­the-­scenes work that women performed was not given attribution on the pages of the newspapers themselves, we need to supplement these publications with sources from archives or memoirs in order to gain a broader understanding of what women contributed to the development of the Yiddish press. These external sources are spotty and intermittent—­so we may never be able to capture the full history of women’s behind-­the-­scenes contributions to the Yiddish press. Nevertheless, these women’s experiences offer a corrective to male-­centric narratives by asking us to consider what kinds of work were considered most valuable in the production of Yiddish culture and whose work has been accounted for thus far. This book consists of an introduction, five chapters, and an epilogue. Each chapter focuses primarily on one period in the history of the Yiddish press, using particular journalistic genres or concepts to illuminate the major questions and tensions animating the Yiddish press in that period. Some chapters focus on case studies of individual publications, columns, or writers in order to explore the depth and complexity of the women’s content included in the Yiddish press. Others take a broader approach, focusing on the publication field as a whole to demonstrate the ways in which the development of newspapers across the ideological spectrum was deeply intertwined, as well as the movement of ideas and personnel back and forth. Together, these chapters offer a rereading of the history of the Yiddish press at the height of its power. Placing gender at the center of the story, this book explores how preexisting ideas about

22 | Introduction

gender, consumption, politics, writing, and reading within east European Jewish culture were both reworked and completely transformed when placed into dialogue with American popular culture. These varied considerations of women and gender were crucial to the development of Yiddish newspapers’ roles as political entities, entertainment venues, and agents of acculturation. They were therefore integral to the influence that these publications had on their readers and, by extension, on the development of American Jewish culture.

1

Home Papers and Human Interest Creating a Yiddish Newspaper Market

In the summer of 1894, Yoyne Paley picked up the latest issue of the Filadelfyer shtot tsaytung (Philadelphia city newspaper). As the editor of another Philadelphia-­based weekly, the Yidishe prese (Yiddish press), Paley constantly battled with the Filadelfyer shtot tsaytung’s editor, Hayim Malits, for readers’ attention and money. Paley was not above fabricating headlines when current events were not sufficiently eye-­ catching. But most weeks, both he and Malits instead pored over the pages of English-­language newspapers, looking for articles to adapt for their respective publications. They were particularly inspired by the sensational “yellow” journalism that characterized many mass-­circulation newspapers in the United States at this time, viewing it as a potential model for attracting readers to the still-­nascent Yiddish press. On this particular week, however, Paley was shocked to find that he had somehow been scooped by Malits. The Filadelfyer shtot tsaytung featured a bold headline announcing, “The Empress of China Has Come to America Looking for a Husband.” Full of romance and intrigue, this article represented precisely the content Paley usually co-­ opted from English-­language venues. So how could he have missed such an intriguing article? Frustrated at his carelessness, Paley decided to retrace his steps. When he did, he realized that the error lay not in his ability to scan local papers for engrossing content but in the spotty English comprehension of his rival. What Malits had translated was not, in fact, a headline about a foreign royal’s search for love. Instead, it was an advertisement for a ship called the Empress of China embarking on its maiden voyage. Misunderstanding the ad’s meaning, and probably not bothering to read its text in full, Malits had transformed this content into his vision of an ideal front-­page headline for a Yiddish newspaper.1 23

24 | Home Papers and Human Interest

Malits and Paley’s competition to glean inspiration from local newspaper culture may have been particularly fierce, and particularly haphazard, but it was in no way unique. Instead, it was a part of a larger trend taking shape in the American Yiddish publishing sphere in the 1890s. Many other Yiddish newspaper publishers, editors, and writers viewed Anglophone publications from the sensational New York Journal to the more tonally moderate Commercial Advertiser as potential sources for content and, more broadly, as inspiration for how to create commercially successful newspapers that spoke to a devoted audience of readers. This was especially true in the growing field of daily news­ paper publishing in New York—­which was quickly becoming the center of a burgeoning Yiddish newspaper market and to which both Paley and Malits soon relocated. As Paley’s and Malits’s endeavors reveal, this process of adaptation was not always seamless. Nevertheless, the example set by the American popular press proved crucial to shaping the type of publications that the most successful Yiddish dailies would become. By the 1890s, the United States had seen two decades of Yiddish newspaper publishing that had proceeded in fits and starts. As there was no strong precedent in Europe or the United States for a thriving Yiddish newspaper market, the first American publications in Yiddish failed to secure reliable streams of funding. Moreover, producers of these early publications, generally members of the religious elite or radical intelligentsia, struggled to attract an avid readership among the mainly working-­class Yiddish speakers migrating to the United States in ever-­ increasing numbers. It was only beginning in the 1890s that the Yiddish press really found its footing, transforming over the course of the next decade and a half into a flourishing, competitive market of options.2 Within the Yiddish press, this process of transformation was inherently gendered. The producers of Yiddish dailies espousing everything from radicalism to religious traditionalism described attracting female readers as integral to creating commercially successful, mass-­ consumption-­oriented publications. These assumptions drew on long-­ standing traditions within Yiddish culture, which conflated the reading needs of a mass audience in general and a female audience in specific. But they also reflected innovations in American mainstream journalism, a field that had recently introduced an array of new content explicitly or implicitly addressing female readers—­including women’s columns,

Home Papers and Human Interest | 25

human-­interest stories, and various gendered marketing strategies—­in order to convince advertisers that female consumers made up a valued component of their reading audience. In some cases, Yiddish news­ paper producers utilized these dual sources of inspiration to reframe innovations taken from mainstream newspapers in the United States as deriving from long-­standing elements of Jewish tradition. In others, discussing their attempts to speak to and shape the lives of female readers became a method for Yiddish newspaper producers to market their publications as thoroughly American cultural endeavors. While efforts to attract female readers were crucial to the early development of the Yiddish newspaper market in the United States, they also reflected the central dilemmas that would shape the market going forward, as each publication, and the field as a whole, attempted to balance ideological potency, commercial success, and engagement with a variety of broader American and Jewish cultural trends. Fierce debates pervaded the Yiddish publishing sphere over what Yiddish newspapers should encompass with regard to content, style, and layout. Because attempts to speak to women readers reflected a complex fusion of newspapers’ various ideological, commercial, and cultural agendas, invoking the perceived needs or interests of female readers became a powerful rhetorical strategy through which to debate the present and future of the Yiddish press. By exploring how these questions of gender, mass culture, and adaptation played out in two prominent Yiddish dailies at the turn of the twentieth century—­Dos yidishes tageblat, also called the Jewish Daily News, and the Forverts, also called the Forward—­we can see the diverse and complex ways that content aimed at the perceived reading needs of female readers, and debates surrounding this content, were built into the very fabric of creating a sustainable market for Yiddish daily newspapers in the United States. As the first Yiddish daily to survive more than a few months, the Orthodox, politically moderate-­to-­conservative Tageblat paved the way for later attempts to balance ideological potency with commercial viability.3 Founded twelve years later, the Forverts espoused radical politics while also attempting to court a broad range of readers and advertisers. Over the course of the period covered in this chapter, these publications vied with each other, and with other publications, for control over the Yiddish public sphere. By 1905, the Forverts had

26 | Home Papers and Human Interest

replaced the Tageblat as the highest circulating Yiddish daily—­a designation it largely maintained for decades to come.4 In many ways, these newspapers offered readers starkly divergent visions of American Yiddish culture. However, in this period, their editors, publishers, and writers adopted remarkably similar cultural strategies in order to vie for primacy in the Yiddish newspaper market. Both began describing their readership as comprising a mass audience composed of different classes, regional identities, and ages, as well as both men and women. For the Tageblat, incorporating features and gendered marketing strategies gleaned from the Anglophone press in the United States lay at the heart of the newspaper’s attempts to cultivate a definition of Jewish tradition that was informed by editors’ and publishers’ conceptions of American values. And for the Forverts, the concept of human-­interest journalism, adapted from the American popular press, helped transform the paper from a small, sectarian publication into a commercially successful juggernaut. Focusing on two publications that were so ideologically opposed reveals that transformations happening in Yiddish print culture transcended political divides while also being deeply intertwined with questions of ideology.

Dos yidishes tageblat: A Newspaper for the Jewish Home In the summer of 1897, Sarasohn & Son, the publishers of the Tageblat, announced various changes to their twelve-­year-­old newspaper. In particular, they highlighted a new English Department, which they hoped would transform their paper in several ways. First and foremost, they wanted to attract younger readers who were more comfortable with English than Yiddish. This would no doubt increase the paper’s circulation and help the publishers guide readers’ continuing acculturation processes. But the Sarasohns also marketed this section as a “literary department,” full of “features” meant to supplement their news-­heavy Yiddish pages. In so doing, the Sarasohns vacillated between describing this section as catering to different readers than their Yiddish pages did and as a means to diversify the content of the paper as a whole.5 While the Sarasohns used their English page to infuse their paper with new content and readers, they also utilized it to reach out to potential advertisers. The page’s masthead proclaimed that “Yiddish is more

Home Papers and Human Interest | 27

widely read in New York than any foreign tongue, except German,” suggesting that advertising in the Tageblat would introduce a robust audience to advertisers’ products.6 At other times, the Tageblat incorporated messages to advertisers into articles. One feature, for instance, ended with a poem declaring, “Call it not vain, they do not err, / Who say that he alone is wise, / Who in his business will prefer / In ‘Tagebla[t]’ to advertise.”7 By combining advertisements and articles, the publishers of the Tageblat conflated the various interest groups they hoped to attract to their paper. In many ways, this English page served as the culmination of a series of changes that affected every aspect of the paper. Over the course of the 1890s, the Tageblat transformed from a short and struggling news bulletin into a publication deeply informed by recent innovations in the American popular press. Since the Tageblat’s founding in 1885, the Sarasohns had enjoyed a position of primacy in the budding Yiddish newspaper market. But recently, new publications had begun to gain traction, including several that espoused radical politics, including the Arbeter tsaytung, the Abend blat (Evening paper), and eventually the Forverts. Faced with these challenges, the Sarasohns experimented with methods to attract a broader pool of readers and advertisers, including sensational front-­page headlines, women’s columns, serialized fiction, and the English Department. In publicizing these transformations to potential readers and advertisers, the Sarasohns began referring to the Tageblat as a “home paper” and a “journal for the Jewish home.” With this language, the Sarasohns offered their newspaper as a source of support and guidance for religiously observant households. By creating a publication that could be read together by all members of the family, they promised to bridge the gap between the paper’s mainly immigrant readers and their children who were either born or raised in the United States.8 But the term “home paper” did not originate with the Tageblat. Instead, the Sarasohns absorbed the term from the American popular press, where publishers used it to signal to advertisers that women constituted a core part of a newspaper’s audience.9 The example of the Tageblat reveals that even a religiously oriented publication, committed to bolstering Jewish tradition, responded to trends in American culture, gleaning inspiration for how to maintain primacy in the Yiddish

28 | Home Papers and Human Interest

newspaper field. This dynamic highlights an interesting paradox at the heart of the Tageblat: while the paper’s management was in part guided by a constant fear of the impact acculturation would have on Jewish life, they also modeled a certain brand of acculturation for readers in their business practices. The introduction of women’s content into the Tageblat reflected these dynamics but was also integral to shaping them, as women’s columns and other related content became crucial nexuses between the religious daily and mainstream American journalistic trends.

The Tageblat’s Transformation into an “American” Newspaper If readers were to pick up an issue of the Tageblat in 1906, they would encounter a publication that looked remarkably similar to contemporary American newspapers that were not in Yiddish (figures 1.1 and 1.2). Its front page would have been brimming with sensational headlines, often accompanied by images. The rest of its pages would have been filled with a variety of classifieds, advertisements, editorials, women’s columns, popular fiction, and an English Department, with each genre running on the same page each day. This consistent layout was a far cry from how the newspaper looked when it began publication in 1885. The Tageblat was founded by the rabbi and printer Kasriel Tsvi Sarasohn, who had spent the preceding decade struggling to keep various publishing ventures afloat. While his weekly paper, the Yudishe gazetn (Jewish Gazette), had achieved moderate success, his first two dailies, both called the Teglekhe gazetn (Daily Gazette), only lasted a few months each in 1881 and 1883. Like Sarasohn’s previous ventures, the Tageblat was on shaky footing during its first years. While it was ostensibly a daily publication, it appeared only sporadically. Moreover, its news coverage comprised short paragraphs, segmented into New York, international, and Jewish news. There were rarely headlines on its front page and no set order as to where news, editorials, or works of fiction would run.10 Looking back on his early career, Sarasohn described the challenges he faced in getting his publications off the ground. As was true of all early American Yiddish newspapers, Sarasohn’s first publications lacked an avid audience. In the 1870s, there were still relatively few Yiddish speakers in the United States. Moreover, as the growth of the European

Home Papers and Human Interest | 29

Figures 1.1 and 1.2. Front page of the Tageblat, February 7, 1888 (left) and November 20, 1906 (right). (Figure 1.2 is from the Collection of the National Library of Israel and the New York Public Library; Historical Jewish Press website—­www.Jpress.org.il—­founded by the National Library and Tel Aviv University)

Yiddish newspaper market was greatly curtailed by censorship laws in the Russian Empire, most Yiddish speakers who came to the United States before the turn of the twentieth century had been unaccustomed to reading newspapers in Europe and saw no need to pick up the practice once in the United States. Many did not have sufficient literacy skills, and those who did gravitated more toward chapbooks or dime novels than newspapers.11 Sarasohn also faced significant pushback from religious leaders and maskilim (adherents of the Jewish enlightenment) for attempting to publish newspapers in the Jewish vernacular. Religious authorities worried that readers might substitute newspapers for religious texts. Maskilim, in contrast, feared that Yiddish newspapers might dissuade readers from learning German, Hebrew, or English—­which they viewed as more enlightened languages. Sarasohn—­who considered himself both

30 | Home Papers and Human Interest

a religious leader and a maskil—­had to convince readers to begin buying newspapers while also convincing Jewish intellectual and religious elites that a Yiddish newspaper did not threaten the religious or intellectual integrity of Jewish life.12 Moreover, like all early Yiddish newspaper publishers, Sarasohn faced difficulties financing his early publications. At first, he rented equipment from publishers focused on Hebrew-­language religious materials. These venues were in short supply and charged exorbitant fees for Yiddish newspaper publishers to use their equipment. This made publishing an extremely costly venture, forcing Sarasohn and other pioneers in the field to charge higher prices than most readers were willing to pay.13 Because of these financial pressures, and because most other members of the Jewish elite were not interested in working for a Yiddish newspaper, Sarasohn’s early publications became family endeavors. His young children set type in order to make sure the paper came out on time. Sarasohn’s wife, Bashe, supplemented the family’s income by teaching English lessons. She also offered editorial feedback on newspaper content. According to obituaries published after her death in 1913, Bashe Sarasohn continued this advisory role even after the Tageblat became a commercial success.14 The fortunes of Sarasohn and his publications began to change in 1890, when he began dramatically transforming the layout, content, and business model of the Tageblat and his other publishing ventures. Though Sarasohn was at the forefront of the market at the time, these alterations reflected broader trends in the Yiddish publishing sphere and beyond. Like all newspaper publishers in the United States at this time, Sarasohn benefited from new, cheaper printing technologies and sharp decreases in paper prices, making publishing a much less costly venture. In addition, rising urbanization and immigration expanded audiences for newspapers in every language. Thus, the proliferation of Yiddish newspapers in the 1890s was part of a larger newspaper boom taking shape across the country, especially in major cities.15 Because of the massive numbers of Ashkenazi Jews arriving in the United States at this time, the relationship of migration to newspaper publishing was particularly salient for the Yiddish press. Between 1870 and 1914, the number of Jews in New York almost doubled, from eight hundred thousand to almost 1.4 million, with the first large influx beginning in the 1880s.16

Home Papers and Human Interest | 31

Jewish population growth invigorated the field of Yiddish newspaper publishing, expanding the number and diversifying the tenor of publications. Among those who arrived from eastern Europe was a small but significant cohort of radical intellectuals, who hoped to use newspapers to radicalize the Yiddish-­speaking immigrants who were joining the ranks of the city’s working class. The advent of radical newspapers fostered the development of a competitive Yiddish newspaper market where, for the first time, readers could choose between publications espousing different ideologies.17 While still having to convince potential readers to begin purchasing newspapers, publishers like Sarasohn now had to convince them to read their specific paper and buy into their particular point of view. In order to compete with these rivals, Sarasohn brought on his son Yekhezkl as his business partner and eventually added his son-­in-­law, Leon Kamaiky, to the management team as well. Together, the two generations of the Sarasohn family began altering the Tageblat’s business model. Like many publishers in this period, the Sarasohns shifted from relying on financial backers like the political machine Tammany Hall to relying mainly on advertisements and circulation. Integral to this process was the Sarasohns’ decision to promote the Tageblat in advertising trade journals like Printers’ Ink and the Fourth Estate and to solicit more classifieds, which Yekhezkl Sarasohn asserted was also crucial to attracting new readers. They also diversified the ways in which they distributed the Tageblat, adopting the more “modern” technique of hiring newsboys to hawk the Tageblat on the streets of the Lower East Side.18 In addition, the Sarasohns also began using their publications to put forward scathing critiques of other newspapers, especially those espousing radical politics. The Tageblat’s publishers asserted the paper’s ability to better serve the broad, varied needs of Yiddish speakers by touting the paper’s strength as a “kol yisroel paper,” a periodical for all Jewish readers, which did not pit “class versus class.”19 In return, editors of radical newspapers mocked the Tageblat’s piety, publicized connections between the paper and Tammany Hall, and accused Kasriel Sarasohn of stealing money from local charities. These accusations ultimately culminated in a court case in which Sarasohn successfully sued editors of the Abend blat for libel.20

32 | Home Papers and Human Interest

But the Sarasohns’ attacks on rival publications were not confined to narrowly defined political grounds. Instead, they also began asserting that the Tageblat offered a better, more “American” reading experience. In 1898, the same year Sarasohn sued the Abend blat, the Tageblat published an advertisement announcing that it had no true rivals in the Yiddish publishing sphere: “The reason is simple: we are up to date, progressive and American in our methods. The others are slow and dull, without the slightest conception of American methods and American requirements.”21 In this way, adapting to American newspaper models became a crucial component of the marketing strategy for this traditional, religious publication. While the Sarasohn family lambasted rival publications on the pages of their newspaper, behind the scenes, they also began buying up many of these rivals, including New York–­based publications as well as papers in Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago, cities that hosted smaller local Yiddish newspaper markets. In the process, they transformed the Tageblat from the first successful Yiddish daily newspaper to the centerpiece of the first Yiddish newspaper empire.22 This also allowed the Sarasohns to bring together a larger staff comprising writers and editors who had previously worked for these publications. In 1894, the Sarasohns brought in Yoyne Paley to serve as the Tageblat’s editor. By this time, Paley had garnered a reputation for infusing his newspapers with the sensationalism of “yellow” journalism.23 He furthered this trend at the helm of the Tageblat, suggesting that writers contributing to the paper fabricate stories or foment controversy that they could transform into compelling headlines. In the journalist Joseph Chaikin’s history of the Yiddish press, he described an incident in which Paley tricked a Jewish peddler into eating oysters, a non-­kosher food, to give his staff an example of sensational content. When reporting this story, the Tageblat reworked it as an act of prejudice by an antisemite as opposed to a cruel trick by the paper’s own editor.24 Paley continued his association with the Tageblat on and off until his death in 1907. In addition, the Sarasohns also incorporated Getsel Zelikovits onto the Tageblat’s staff, after buying out his previous employer, the Folksadvokat (People’s advocate). While Zelikovits would spend the rest of his career deeply enmeshed in Yiddish and Hebrew publishing, he had one

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of the more varied backgrounds in Jewish journalism. After a traditional religious education in Riteve, a town in modern-­day Lithuania, Zelikovits had moved to Paris to pursue a degree in Egyptology. He then served as a translator for British archaeological expeditions to Egypt in the early 1880s before migrating the United States, where he briefly served as a professor of Egyptology at the University of Pennsylvania. His academic career soon stalled, and Zelikovits decided to devote his full attention to journalism, an arena that had previously supplemented his other ventures. Once he joined the staff of the Tageblat, Zelikovits strove to make the paper more accessible by incorporating a mix of highbrow and lowbrow material and simplifying the paper’s language, arguing that the Yiddish used in the paper was akin to German printed in Hebrew characters rather than the actual vernacular spoken by readers.25 Under the leadership of the Sarasohns, Paley, and Zelikovits, the formatting and style of the Tageblat transformed dramatically. They replaced headings segmenting international, local, and Jewish news with bold, splashy headlines. They also exchanged short blurbs for longer, more sensational reportage. A typical Tageblat issue now kept readers apprised of fires, political scandals, and murder trials, as well as the Tageblat’s attempts to intervene in city affairs.26 Moreover, the paper’s management also began experimenting with new content meant to attract a more diverse pool of readers, including material meant to meet the needs of many readers at once and material that was meant to cater to specific segments of the paper’s audience.

The Lithuanian Wisewoman: The Tageblat and Its Female Readers While the Tageblat’s staff experimented with an array of content in the 1890s, they placed a particular emphasis on increasing the material addressing a female audience. As was true of many American publications in this period, the Tageblat’s desire to reach new audiences, especially women, was partially an attempt to remain commercially viable. In the Tageblat’s first years, when it was primarily sold in grocery stores, the Sarasohns described their desires to market the paper to housewives, who might be enticed to buy it while shopping for

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groceries.27 But their interest in appealing to female readers increased when the Sarasohns began relying on advertisements as a major source of funding for their publication. In the process, they strove to demonstrate to advertisers that women constituted a valuable segment of their audience. To this end, they published advertising circulars describing their publication as “essentially a home paper,” which incorporated “stories[,] serial and short, [that] can be read by your wife and children.”28 But for the Tageblat, the desire to address a female readership was also integral to the paper’s attempt serve as a pillar of strength for religiously observant households. Many Jewish religious leaders in the United States, including both rabbis and newspaper publishers, viewed women, especially mothers, as playing critical roles in negotiating the acculturation processes of their families. By educating their children in certain ways or buying certain goods for their households, mothers had the power to decide the extent to which their homes and families adapted to surrounding cultural norms. In many cases, this meant that leaders turned women into scapegoats for their fears that immigrants were not striking the right balance between acculturation and tradition.29 But for newspapers like the Tageblat, which were also attempting to project commitments to both tradition and adaptation, it also turned women’s content into ideal spaces to explore the convergence and dissonance between these motivations. Incorporating women’s columns was thus a method for the Tageblat both to promote religious observance in its readers and also to modernize the newspaper (and, by extension, its readers as well). All of the women’s content that the Tageblat incorporated exemplified this interplay between commercial and ideological motivations. Initially, the Sarasohns turned to one writer to pen much of the women’s material that appeared in their publications: Getsel Zelikovits. He introduced the first women’s columns to run in Sarasohns’ publications and indeed the first to appear in any Yiddish newspaper. There had always been an avid female audience for Yiddish writing in various genres, including devotional texts and popular literature. Moreover, the first, short-­lived Yiddish newspapers in the Russian Empire contained letters to the editor from women that suggested that they read these publications as well.30 Nevertheless, formally designated women’s columns were not a regular feature of Yiddish newspapers on either side of the Atlantic

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until Zelikovits’s columns debuted in 1891—­first in the Sarasohn’s weekly paper, the Gazetn, and soon after in the Tageblat as well. Looking back on the invention of this column a decade later, Zelikovits asserted that the Sarasohns had appointed him to write women’s columns not because he was an expert on women’s issues but because the publishers could not find a female writer whom they considered qualified to do so: “Unfortunately, at that time in America we lacked a Jewish woman who could impart her thoughts to her sisters plainly in black and white.” Over the following decade, he asserted, enough women had proven themselves to be capable writers that “today we don’t need men to dress up as women” to fill the Tageblat with women’s material—­ pointing to his successor as the Tageblat’s women’s columnist, Emma T”B, as proof.31 To be sure, Zelikovits was not a reliable source on the availability of women writers in the contemporary Yiddish-­language sphere in the United States. While the Tageblat did not regularly incorporate female writers on its Yiddish-­language pages, radical newspapers occasionally included short stories, articles, or editorials by women, often the wives of male contributors.32 While Zelikovits was still unmarried when his column debuted, the Sarasohns could have chosen a similar course of action, perhaps by appointing Bashe Sarasohn as their women’s columnist. Moreover, in flaunting the Tageblat’s increasing incorporation of women’s voices over time, Zelikovits failed to mention that Emma T”B was not, in fact, a woman. Instead, this was a pseudonym employed by Avner Tanenboym, a writer also known for his popular science articles and translations of world literature.33 The fact that the first Yiddish-­ language women’s columns were written by men was likely less a result of a lack of capable female authors and more a consequence of the desire of male writers and editors to exert control over Yiddish newspaper publishing. Like Tanenboym, Zelikovits employed a female pseudonym when writing women’s columns: “Di litvishe khokhmanis.” The phrase literally translates to “the Lithuanian Wisewoman,” but as scholars like Gil Ribak and Ze’ev Goldberg have argued, this pseudonym carried condescending connotations and can also be translated idiomatically as the Lithuanian “foolish woman” or “busybody.”34 Beginning with “her” debut, Zelikovits’s persona contrasted her authority with that of male writers employed

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by the Sarasohns. Unlike male columnists, whose insights came from years of learning or professional pursuits, she asserted that she was “no great writer or one with a great knowledge of worldly things.” Instead, she promised to speak from firsthand experience as a wife and mother.35 In determining the style of the women’s columns, Zelikovits looked to the women’s columns in the American popular press as a source of inspiration. The Lithuanian Wisewoman focused on issues that Zelikovits felt would speak to the reality of women readers’ lives, including love, housekeeping, and child care. Like Zelikovits’s English-­language models, the Lithuanian Wisewoman often asserted that she drew inspiration from letters she received from readers.36 At the same time, Zelikovits also found ways to reframe this genre to serve what he viewed as the specific needs of his readership and of the religiously oriented newspaper in which his articles appeared. Some columns, for example, expressed sympathy for immigrant mothers who constantly had to adapt to changing American trends in parenting or housekeeping.37 Others drew on the lives of historical Jewish women, making analogies between their experiences and the concerns facing Zelikovits’s audience. One early column recounted the life story of Rachel, the wife of Rabbi Akiva, who encouraged her husband to become a scholar. The Lithuanian Wiseman exhorted readers to view Rachel as a model of righteous behavior. But she also described Rachel as an example of the often-­forgotten but critical roles that women played throughout Jewish history: “[men] do not realize, that Jewish history has been adorned from beginning to end with our heroic women.”38 Gil Ribak has argued in his analysis of Zelikovits’s columns that these columns sometimes subverted the ideological project of the Tageblat in championing women’s equality within Jewish practice, including columns arguing for women to become rabbis.39 But Zelikovits usually found ways to reframe the radicalism of his claims, insisting that they reflected long-­standing trends within tradition and historical experiences of Jewish women. In deciding on a title for the women’s columns, Zelikovits reflected the dialectic between tradition and adaptation that was so crucial to their content. In the 1890s, the most common title for these columns was some combination of the terms “Ezras noshim” and “Leydi’s korner,”

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which are the phrase “ladies’ corner” translated and transliterated into Yiddish, respectively. This dual title was a play on words, in that “Ladies’ Corner” was a common title of women’s columns in the Anglophone press, but “Ezras noshim” was also the phrase used to refer to the women’s section of an Orthodox synagogue.40 This title reflected the fact that it was a Yiddish-­language, religiously tinged adaptation of the genre. Read in different ways, it signaled the traditional outlook of the paper as well as its adoption of mainstream cultural trends. Six months after Zelikovits published his first women’s column as Lithuanian Wisewoman, he also employed this pseudonym when he added a new genre of writing into his repertoire: serialized fiction. In order to capitalize on the flourishing market for Yiddish chapbooks, publishers like the Sarasohns incorporated popular, serialized fiction into their newspapers, hoping the episodic nature of these narratives would keep readers coming back for more.41 While the Sarasohns and their rivals viewed serialized fiction as a highly lucrative genre, many people in the Yiddish literary sphere considered it less prestigious than other genres, such as highbrow literature, literary criticism, and editorials. To emphasize this point, critics often referred to it as shund, literally meaning “trash.” These critiques partially rested on the content of these stories, which tended to be formulaic, borrowing heavily from sources in European languages. But they also centered on implied readership of this literature, which elites asserted mainly comprised less educated readers, especially female readers. While these texts were, in reality, popular with men and women alike, the assumption that serialized fiction catered to a mass and/or feminized audience remained a common trope in Yiddish literary criticism.42 Some authors of popular fiction countered these critiques, arguing that their work allowed readers respite from the hardships in their lives. Others asserted that incorporating popular fiction into newspapers would encourage readers to transition to more “serious” newspaper content over time. However, many writers continued to publish popular fiction under pseudonyms in an attempt to preserve their literary reputations. Zelikovits, like his contemporaries, vacillated in his relationship to this genre—­at times discussing its merits and at others describing his shame at being associated with it.43

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It is no coincidence that early women’s columnists in the Yiddish press, such as Zelikovits and Tanenboym, also wrote popular, serialized fiction. For publishers, introducing both women’s columns and popular fiction was a means through which to appeal to new audiences, especially women. Throughout the 1890s, the Sarasohns expanded these elements of their empire by hiring prominent novelists such as Nokhem Meyer Shaykevitsh, better known as Shomer, in the process turning the Tageblat into a premier venue for popular literature.44 In many ways, Zelikovits’s first serialized novel, After the Wedding (Nokh der khupe), followed similar contours to other fiction published in the Tageblat and its rivals in the late nineteenth century. The novel’s protagonist, Miriam, begins as a young orphan in Kovno, Lithuania. As the narrative progresses, readers follow Miriam’s journey as she marries, has children, and migrates with her family to the United States. In the early chapters of the novel, Zelikovits found ways to signal Miriam’s bourgeois identity, discussing her extensive education, her family’s ties to prominent maskilim, and her experiences attending lavish balls.45 This sense of privilege set Miriam apart from the Tageblat’s readership, many of whom migrated to the United States with few economic resources and minimal educations. But in other ways, like much of the fiction within the Yiddish press, this narrative echoed readers’ experiences, especially the struggles faced by Miriam’s family once they arrived in the United States.46 Within this story, Zelikovits blurred the lines between fiction and reality more than most serialized narratives in the press, in framing the novel as the purported origin story of the Lithuanian Wisewoman herself. Toward the end of the novel, when Miriam’s family arrives in the United States, they are welcomed by childhood friends of Miriam’s husband: the “prominent Yiddish publisher” Kasriel Sarasohn and a member of his staff, the “Lithuanian Philosopher” (another pseudonym used by Zelikovits). After learning of Miriam’s penchant for offering sound advice to friends and neighbors, these men encourage her to broaden her influence by advising the Tageblat’s readers as well. With that offer, this story suggested, the “Lithuanian Wisewoman” was born.47 As this story indicates, Zelikovits and the Tageblat went back and forth between presenting the Lithuanian Wisewoman as an actual,

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living person and as a transparently fictitious persona. In After the Wedding and in other moments over the course of three decades, Zelikovits mapped out a detailed biography for the Lithuanian Wisewoman—­ describing her home life, frustrations with misogynist coworkers, and deep passion for Jewish education and women’s rights.48 In these moments, Zelikovits used the Lithuanian Wisewoman to model his vision of proper Jewish womanhood. For example, immediately before Passover one year, the column appeared several days earlier than usual, because “like all women,” the Lithuanian Wisewoman would be too busy preparing for the upcoming holiday to write her column on the day it normally appeared.49 But in other moments, Zelikovits was open about the fact that he was the creative force behind the Lithuanian Wisewoman.50 Moreover, the experience of readers who only read these women’s columns was markedly different from that of readers who read them in conjunction with Zelikovits’s other writings, where he discussed his pseudonym use. For readers in the know, discussions of the Lithuanian Wisewoman’s life probably injected humor into these columns. For other readers, they might have served as proof of the authenticity of their favorite writer.

“The Jewess as She Was and Is”: The Tageblat’s English Department In the 1890s, women’s content on the Yiddish pages of the Tageblat was primarily written by men like Getsel Zelikovits and Avner Tanenboym, who also contributed a variety of other material to the paper. But by the end of the decade, the Tageblat was also experimenting with women’s content on its English page. This section comprised a mix of fiction, announcements from local organizations, religious sermons, poems, and editorials. Almost every issue included something explicitly or implicitly addressing a female audience—­including advice columns directed toward young, female readers; biographies of famous Jewish women; and serialized fiction. This mix reflected publishers’ and editors’ desires to diversify the paper’s audience and content. But it also reflected trends taking shape in Anglophone publishing spheres, as the Tageblat’s management often culled articles for or about Jewish women

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from other publications and mimicked their concerted efforts to appeal to female readers.51 For the English page’s first two years of existence, from 1897 to 1899, it was edited by Peter Wiernik, who would later become one of the Sarasohns’ major rivals as editor of the Morgn-­zhurnal after its founding in 1901. At the helm of the Tageblat’s English page, Wiernik experimented with various new features, including “The East Side Observer,” a column modeled on urban sketches in the Anglophone press. But during his tenure, the page primarily consisted of articles reprinted from other publications. The fact that the Tageblat gleaned much of this from other publications resulted, in part, from the limited English skills of its staff at this time, including Wiernik. However, this tactic also comported with general trends in the Yiddish press and beyond, as most contemporary newspapers reprinted articles from other publications.52 Within the Yiddish publishing sphere in specific, borrowing comprised a complex mixture of ideological and practical considerations. Reprinting or adapting articles from various sources and languages allowed publishers and editors to introduce readers to a wide array of discourses. On the other hand, it also reflected the fact that most early Yiddish newspapers were run by one or a handful of individuals. Because they were so short-­staffed, newspaper producers often felt compelled to translate material from German, Hebrew, or English in order to fill out their publications. When Sarasohn was composing his earliest newspapers, for example, he imported Haisraeli, a German paper printed in Hebrew characters, to serve as their backbone. He replaced its masthead and added translations of English and German-­language material published in the United States in an effort to include some amount of local news.53 Reprinting material from other publications helped the Tageblat stay afloat in its early, precarious years. However, it also introduced a variety of contradictions into the paper, as some of these pieces originally had been intended for very different audiences than the Tageblat.54 Many issues of the Tageblat’s English Department, for instance, featured articles that had originally appeared in English-­language Jewish publications, including the American Hebrew, American Jewess, and American Israelite. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States already hosted a thriving market for English-­language Jewish periodicals. The

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first major Anglophone Jewish publications appeared in the 1840s, in response to the proliferation of Jewish communities throughout the country. By publishing newspapers that could be disseminated widely, Jewish leaders hoped to create a sense of community to supplement whatever infrastructure was present in new areas of settlement.55 Unlike the Tageblat, whose readers mainly comprised religiously observant immigrants or their children, the Anglophone Jewish press targeted a more acculturated audience. Several of these publications were also aligned with Reform Judaism, which the Tageblat generally derided. In fact, when the Tageblat’s publishers promoted their English Department, they contrasted their page with preexisting Anglophone Jewish publications, arguing that “Orthodox Jewish young people looked [on them] with mistrust.”56 Such statements elided the fact that their own English page drew heavily from these sources in its first years of existence. Some of the content that the Tageblat borrowed from English-­ language Jewish publications openly disparaged the Yiddish press. In 1902, the Tageblat reprinted an article that had originally appeared in the American Hebrew called “Lullabies of Our Russian Mothers.” The piece referred to an unnamed author as “one of those struggling hack writers who are sustained by the Yiddish press down town.” When editors reprinted this article in the Tageblat, they chose to keep this description without offering comment or rebuttal.57 In addition, the Tageblat’s English Department also borrowed heavily from mainstream American newspapers and magazines. Much of the content that the Tageblat incorporated from non-­Jewish publications spoke explicitly to the role of women in Jewish life, suggesting the ways in which life among the United States’ immigrant populations had become a topic of keen interest in the American public sphere. Though the publications that this material was taken from were vastly different from the Tageblat, the messages about women, religion, and class within these publishing venues were often remarkably consistent. In December 1897, the Tageblat published an article titled “The Jewess as She Was and Is,” which had originally run in the Ladies’ Home Journal. It was written by Dr. Gustav Gottheil, a leading figure in Reform Judaism. Gottheil was best known for organizing the first synagogue sisterhood, an institution that fused American social gospel and Jewish

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tradition. Gottheil hailed from western Europe, where Jewish leaders had been experimenting with fusing Western norms with Jewish tradition for decades. As the rabbi of New York Temple Emanu-­El, he continued to bring Judaism more in line with Western conceptions of religion, gender, and class.58 In “The Jewess as She Was and Is,” Gottheil asserted an eternal connection between Jewish women and the domestic sphere, stating that “[the Jewish woman’s] sphere is the home, and has been so from the beginning.” Gottheil also asserted that the Jewish wife and home have been so “completely identified” with each other that “home and wife are convertible terms in law as well as in morals.”59 Moreover, Gottheil asserted that Christian society was less acquainted with Jewish women than with Jewish men, because a commitment to the home kept Jewish women removed from the public sphere. In reality, it was not the case that “home and wife [had always been] synonymous” in Jewish tradition. In fact, for most Tageblat readers, the strong, sole association of women with the domestic sphere was an ideology they would not have encountered before coming to the United States. While east European Jewish women performed the majority of domestic tasks, they were often just as engaged in the economic sphere as men were. The ideal gender norms for religiously observant eastern European Jewish households consisted of women as primary breadwinners and men devoting their time, whenever possible, to religious study—­even if that ideal was realized for only a tiny minority. Gottheil’s conception of Jewish womanhood, by contrast, was more consistent with Western and American middle-­class ideologies that many religiously observant immigrants strove for only after arriving in the United States.60 The fact that this article was now part of a publication aimed at eastern European Jewish immigrants and their children, as opposed to a middle-­class women’s magazine, led it to take on new shades of meaning. Gottheil began his article by explaining that he wrote the piece to promote a greater understanding of Jewish women within Christian society. When read as part of the Ladies’ Home Journal, this article reframed Jewish values so as to make them synonymous with those of the Journal’s other readers. When read in the Tageblat, it suggested that surrounding gender norms could or should be incorporated into readers’ “traditional” lives.

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While certain borrowed articles addressed a different intended audience than the Tageblat, advertisements suggest that publishers or advertisers wanted to project some amount of affinity between the audiences of Anglophone publications and the Yiddish paper. In 1899, for example, the Tageblat published advertisements for the English-­language American Jewess.61 A year prior, it had included advertisements for the Ladies’ Home Journal as well.62 Neither of these publications marketed itself as catering to religiously observant immigrants or their children.63 But these advertisements suggest that borrowing material from these sources was not always done haphazardly. Instead, the English Department aimed to bridge the divide between these publishing spheres and their audiences. Content borrowed from other publications remained an integral part of the Tageblat’s English page until it was discontinued in 1906. However, by 1900, appropriated content began to appear alongside increasing amounts of original features. In 1899, the Sarasohns hired a new English-­page editor, A. H. Fromenson, who was born in the United States and had extensive experience with Anglophone journalism.64 He, in turn, hired a young English-­speaking staff to fill the paper with content. As we will see in subsequent chapters, this staff included some of the paper’s first female writers, who primarily contributed content addressing young, female readers. Throughout the 1890s, therefore, the content of the Tageblat’s Yiddish and English pages reflected the management’s desires to transform the daily into a successful commercial publication inspired by innovations taking shape in the Anglophone press in the United States. At the same time, it also revealed the complexities inherent in attempting to do so while also marketing the paper as a publication meant to bolster traditional Jewish life. The founding of the Tageblat coincided with debates within observant Jewish circles about the extent to which traditional Jews should integrate within American society—­with some leaders promoting and others rejecting Jewish engagement with American culture.65 Throughout the paper’s existence, the Tageblat cultivated an image of Jewish observance that was consistent with, and influenced by, American culture, often reworking the boundaries of Jewish tradition in order to do so. The fact that the Tageblat often published reprinted articles with attributions to their original sources provides insights into

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the materials the paper’s publishers used to refashion and reframe observant Jewish life and the crucial role that questions of gender played in this process. But the Tageblat was not alone in incorporating these types of innovations. In fact, Yiddish newspaper producers with very different ideological frameworks also infused their publications with inspiration and content gleaned from the American popular press. These transformations also pervaded certain sectors of the Yiddish socialist press. And just as was true in the Tageblat, the radical press’s engagement with American popular culture was deeply tied to questions of gender.

Human Interest: Abraham Cahan between the Yiddish-­and English-­Language Press In 1902, the poet Naftali Herz Imber stormed into the offices of the socialist Forverts. Imber is now best known as the author of “Hatikvah,” which would form the basis of the Israeli national anthem. But during his lifetime, he garnered a reputation for bad behavior, drinking to excess and making unwanted advances toward female staffers of newspapers like the Tageblat.66 So the staff of the Forverts probably did not know what to expect when he appeared in their offices. It soon became clear that Imber had come to voice his frustrations with changes that the Forverts’s editor, Abraham Cahan, had introduced since retaking the helm of the paper in March of that year. Cahan served as the paper’s first editor upon its founding in 1897 but had quickly resigned after not receiving full creative control. He spent the next five years writing primarily in English-­language venues like the New York Sun and the New York Commercial Advertiser. When he returned to the Yiddish publishing sphere, Cahan focused on infusing the Forverts with lessons he had learned during his time away. These innovations transformed the Forverts from a financially struggling, partisan publication into by far the most successful and influential Yiddish daily anywhere in the world. For Imber, however, these innovations exemplified everything that was wrong with Cahan’s approach to journalism. In his view, Cahan had diluted the paper’s commitments to enlightening and radicalizing the

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Jewish working class by prioritizing popular and commercial appeal. Imber was particularly frustrated with Cahan’s desire to broaden the paper’s audience, including his efforts to appeal to female readers: “Just think, what we have lived to see! That fanatic old people and unenlightened women should read the ‘Forverts’! This means that the ‘Forverts’ is going backwards.”67 Imber was hardly alone in voicing these sorts of critiques. In fact, throughout Cahan’s time at the helm of the Forverts, many of his harshest critics invoked Cahan’s desire to fulfill the reading interests of an uneducated, female audience as a symbol for Cahan’s emphasis on popularization over radicalism. Given that Imber came to the Forverts to disparage Cahan, it might be surprising that we know about this exchange not from Imber’s retrospective accounts nor from reports by other critics of Cahan. Instead, Cahan himself documented this confrontation with Imber in an article published in the twenty-­fifth-­anniversary edition of the Forverts. In this piece and in other retrospective accounts, Cahan laid bare accusations that he had diminished the Forverts as a voice for socialist doctrine in order to turn them on their head. Refuting such claims, he insisted that the newspaper served as a more effective radical organ by reaching a broader audience, especially one that included women. Moreover, rehashing these critiques became a method for Cahan to highlight his American journalistic bona fides, as he equated his desire to reach a female audience with his desire to transform the Forverts into a successful daily in the style of the American popular press. How did Cahan, his supporters, and his detractors come to conflate Cahan’s approach to radical Yiddish journalism, his time working for the American popular press, and his desire to market the Forverts toward female readers? In many ways, these debates reflected the gendered realities of Cahan’s work for the Anglophone press between 1897 and 1902. Though he wrote a variety of articles for different Anglophone publications during this period, he mainly wrote human-­interest pieces about life on the Lower East Side for the New York Commercial Advertiser. At this time, “human interest” was a term applied to a variety of articles that expanded the coverage of what newspapers considered newsworthy, including interviews, advice columns, and, in some instances, urban sketches. While human-­interest stories were popular

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with both men and women, editors viewed them as one of newspapers’ most potent tools for attracting female readers.68 Cahan’s decision to depict the Lower East Side through the lens of human interest had a profound effect on the readers of the Commercial Advertiser, who were encouraged to empathize with the immigrant. But it also would eventually profoundly impact the readers of the Forverts, as the concept of human interest became central to Cahan’s vision for the Forverts upon his return in 1902. By invoking “human interest” as the bridge through which he connected American journalism in English and Yiddish, Cahan set the stage for supporters and detractors alike to use female readers as ciphers through which to debate questions about the political and cultural direction of the Forverts.

Cahan and the Early Radical Yiddish Press Before the founding of the Forverts in 1897, there had been several previous attempts to publish radical Yiddish newspapers in the United States. Many Russian-­Jewish intellectual leaders lived on New York’s Lower East Side in their first years in the United States, where they found themselves adjacent to Little Germany, a neighborhood where radical politics flourished. Relying on publishers and politicians like Johann Most as models, these intellectuals began organizing the Jewish proletariat. Their desire to educate Jewish workers led radical leaders to begin speaking and writing in Yiddish, the vernacular spoken by most of the Jewish working class. While some radicals had abandoned Yiddish in their youths, and others had never known it well, they recognized its power as an organizing tool. In order to radicalize workers, they created a number of cultural institutions, including lecture series, educational societies, and eventually newspapers.69 Because there was no precedent for radical Yiddish newspapers on this scale, either in the United States or in Europe, early writers and editors looked to a variety of models when crafting their first publications. German papers such as the socialist New Yorker Volkszeitung and anarchist Die Freiheit served as models for how to infuse publications with political vigor. Russian-­Jewish intellectuals’ experiences with Russian literature and journalism also informed their publications. In fact, many radical Yiddish writers also published materials in Russian

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or German, indicating the multilingual character of the Jewish radical intelligentsia. Many of these figures also drew inspiration from Anglophone newspapers, including socialist publications like the Workmen’s Advocate and mainstream papers like the New York Sun.70 These varied models made these early publishing ventures quite eclectic with regard to content and style. They also led to fierce debates over whether radical publications should focus more on educating or entertaining readers, as well as whether to seek a small, partisan audience or as many readers as possible. These debates were reflected in disputes between the first two editors of the Arbeter tsaytung (Worker’s newspaper), the first successful radical weekly: Abraham Cahan and Philip Krantz. Its founders harnessed the momentum of a wave of strikes beginning in 1890 to cultivate an audience for the burgeoning radical press. From the beginning, Cahan and Krantz clashed over what style to implement in the paper. Krantz saw himself as an educator and had little interest in entertaining readers or meeting them at their level. Cahan, on the other hand, championed entertainment and tailoring the language of articles to less-­educated readers. Krantz and Cahan’s debates centered around different visions of the relationship newspapers should forge with readers but also contrasting ideas about the proper models for their papers. Krantz’s youth in eastern Europe and his sojourn in England en route to the United States had imbued him with a sense that newspapers should be restrained and intellectual in tone. In contrast, by 1890, Cahan’s understanding of newspapers were filtered through almost a decade of engagement with the Anglophone American press. Soon after his arrival in the United States, Cahan had begun reading, and occasionally contributing to, publications like the Herald and the Sun. In order to ensure that the Arbeter tsaytung successfully transmitted socialist messages to its audience, Cahan wanted to it include “features,” a concept he borrowed from the Anglophone press. For Krantz, this content diluted the paper’s political resonance. Cahan, in contrast, viewed features as a crucial for infusing it with mass appeal.71 Similar debates resurfaced in 1897, after the founding of the Forverts, a publication what grew out of factional splits within the Yiddish socialist sphere in specific and the socialist sphere in the United States more

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broadly. Just as Cahan had clashed with Krantz at the Arbeter tsaytung, he continued to face backlash from fellow members of the Forverts Association—­the cooperative board in charge of the paper—­over editorial policy. Cahan again insisted that the paper should combine ideology with popular appeal and steer clear of partisan infighting. Though he was appointed editor, Cahan did not receive full creative control of the publication. Four months after the paper’s founding, he resigned, rather than compromise his vision.72

Cahan and the American Anglophone Press After Cahan’s resignation from the Forverts, he shifted his primary focus to English-­language journalism. Through his work for one of these publications, the New York Evening Post, he became friendly with its city editor, Lincoln Steffens, who was an admirer of Cahan’s English-­ language novella Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto. When Steffens left the Post to become the city editor of the Commercial Advertiser, he hired Cahan as a member of his staff. One of the oldest newspapers in the United States, the Advertiser sought an elite audience and resisted the sensational tone of publications like Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. However, even the Advertiser felt compelled to incorporate entertaining features like women’s columns and human-­interest stories, in order to compete with newer, more sensational publications.73 When Steffens became city editor of the Advertiser, he filled his staff primarily with aspiring novelists, hoping that they would infuse the paper with “literary charm as well as daily information.”74 According to the historian Moses Rischin, this emphasis bolstered Steffens’s “overarching vision of the Advertiser as the self-­appointed educator of its genteel readers in the . . . arts of metropolitan living.”75 A crucial component of Steffens’s vision was familiarizing readers with immigrant enclaves in the city and their inhabitants. Unlike contemporary newspapers that depicted immigrant life through the lens of sensationalism or by mimicking literary genres like the detective novel, Steffens wanted to frame articles about immigrant life as human-­interest stories tinged with literary realism. He saw it as his aim not to make immigrant life seem foreign but instead to make it relatable to his readership. To achieve this

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task, Steffens often turned to Cahan, who was Steffens’s own frequent tour guide on the East Side.76 Though Cahan’s articles explored different facets of immigrant life—­ from leisure culture to work conditions—­he returned often to certain settings and themes to reinforce the messages he wanted to convey to readers about the immigrant experience. Many articles, for example, depicted immigrants’ encounters with the legal system in the United States. This reflected the fact that Cahan’s first Advertiser assignment was as a court reporter, which had also been Steffens’s first journalistic assignment.77 In these articles, Cahan highlighted tensions between immigrants and American customs but attempted to do so in ways that humanized his subjects. Some articles, for instance, depicted civil suits erupting within families. Describing one mother’s suit against her son for “calling her names and breaking her furniture,” Cahan explained that “it was one of the typical Essex Market cases, which grow out of the chasm between immigrant parents and their American-­born children.”78 By reframing court cases as domestic dramas, Cahan infused the paper with entertaining material while also highlighting the human emotion underlying these cases—­encouraging his readers to empathize. In other articles, Cahan drew implicit or explicit connections between his readers and the subjects of his articles. One article from 1898 described the responses of Jewish immigrants to the outbreak of the Spanish-­American War: “The ghetto never does things by halves, and its war feeling manifests itself with oriental exuberance.” Such descriptions exoticized the East Side while also framing its residents as patriotic Americans. In this article, Cahan also explained the debt the Yiddish press owed to Anglophone newspapers: “The war news is conveyed to the people of the ghetto in a manner which the Yiddish papers have borrowed from English papers of the ‘yellow’ type”—­reinforcing connections between newspapers in Yiddish and English.79 This was one of many Advertiser articles in which Cahan portrayed immigrants reading newspapers, which often became a shorthand to signify acculturation. Cahan marveled, for instance, at how “old-­ fashioned Jews from the old European ghettos soon learn to shave their beards, to go to the theater, [and] to read newspapers.”80 These descriptions highlighted how alien newspaper reading, even Yiddish newspaper reading, was for most eastern European Jews who arrived in the US

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before the turn of the twentieth century. But they also subtly suggested a commonality between the subjects and readers of Cahan’s articles, who encountered these statements while themselves reading newspapers. Moreover, Advertiser readers could also become proxy readers of the Yiddish press, as Cahan sometimes summarized Yiddish newspaper articles within his Advertiser columns. He also helped to inform the reviews of Yiddish plays in the Advertiser penned by his colleagues, including Hutchins and Norman Hapgood, as well as Hutchins Hapgood’s 1902 book The Spirit of the Ghetto, which explored the lives and cultural pursuits of Jewish immigrants in New York.81 Quite a few of Cahan’s articles for the English-­language press also used stories of love and marriage to explicate immigrant life for readers. In many ways, romance provided a key site of tension for Jewish immigrants between embracing American life and maintaining cultural cohesion. As Moses Rischin noted, “no sphere of immigrant life seemed more threatened by radical modification in the encounter between Europe and America.”82 Cahan wrote articles on marriage brokers, or shadkhns, who struggled to adapt their business models in the United States, and others focusing on tensions within families over how to choose romantic partners.83 In the historian Christine Stansell’s work on bohemian culture in New York at the turn of the twentieth century, she highlights the differences between the ways in which Commercial Advertiser reporters like Cahan described immigrant experiences and the reportage found in other contemporary newspapers. In her reading, these articles shifted the tone “from a moralistic reform perspective to human-­interest writing,” forging a “common ground” between readers and subjects of articles. Stansell’s analysis of the Commercial Advertiser’s sketches emphasizes their connection to human-­interest journalism as well as their gendered dimensions, as she asserts that these articles reflected an attempt at “softening and domesticating rather than playing up social differences.”84 In this vein, Cahan’s articles often appeared on the paper’s features page or in its weekend features supplement—­spaces particularly infused with human interest, where the paper’s women’s columns and fashion features also ran. By writing about the Lower East Side through the lens of human interest, Cahan transformed the immigrant experience into a subject fitting for an Anglophone audience to read in the domestic sphere.

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These articles in the Commercial Advertiser provide crucial context for understanding Cahan’s career after his return to the Yiddish press. Cahan learned from his time at the Advertiser that a newspaper was a powerful medium for introducing new concepts and ideas to readers and that human-­interest stories were a useful tool to achieve this aim. In addition, he learned to view women as constituting a distinct, valued segment of a newspaper’s readership and gleaned insights about how to appeal to this demographic. Cahan’s experiences with human-­interest journalism profoundly shaped the innovations he implemented after he returned to the Forverts, as well as on the narratives he crafted to describe his career in retrospect.

Cahan’s Return to the Forverts: Human Interest and the Imagined Female Reader In 1901, Lincoln Steffens left the Advertiser to join McClure’s Magazine. Soon after Steffens’s departure, Cahan lost interest in working for the Advertiser. At first, Cahan considered devoting himself solely to fiction. However, he soon returned to journalism in order to make a living. By this time, Cahan had resumed cordial relations with the Forverts. Although he cut ties with the paper in 1897, by 1901 he was contributing occasional articles. Eventually, staff members asked whether he would return as editor. Cahan agreed, on the condition that he be granted more editorial control going forward. Cahan left the Forverts for another brief period in 1902 but soon returned and would go on to edit the paper for almost fifty years.85 When Cahan reclaimed the helm of the Forverts, he immediately set about transforming the paper to conform to his vision of the ideal American newspaper, regardless of the language in which it was printed. On March 15, 1902, Cahan published a statement outlining the changes he planned to introduce to the newspaper’s language, audience, and content. From then on, Cahan proclaimed, “all articles will be written in clean, plain Yiddish Yiddish, and we hope that every line will be interesting for the whole Yiddish-­speaking people from great to small.”86 Like Zelikovits at the Tageblat, Cahan wanted to avoid use of Yiddish that was too heavily inflected with German and Hebrew elements. By “Yiddish-­Yiddish,” he meant language that was closer to the vernacular

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that readers actually spoke. By saying he hoped to attract “the whole Yiddish-­speaking people from great to small,” Cahan emphasized his desire to bring mass appeal to the newspaper, drawing an audience including, but not limited to, committed socialists.87 Looking back on these changes in the paper’s language and intended audience later in his career, Cahan described them as a process of “Americanization,” wherein he not only hoped to help readers conform to surrounding cultural trends but wanted his newspaper to do so as well.88 Central to Cahan’s vision of the new, improved Forverts was a desire to incorporate “features” and “human-­interest” stories into the newspaper’s regular repertoire. For Cahan, these additions would make the paper more commercially successful and broaden its potential audience. Only after people began reading the paper, Cahan argued, could they be influenced by its ideology. Even entertaining articles that were not directly related to socialist doctrine could further the paper’s ideological goals. In order to train the Forverts staff in these methods, Cahan brought in several articles from his tenure writing for English-­language newspapers to serve as models. Instead of insisting that his staff translate these articles word for word from English-­language sources, however, he encouraged them to adapt pieces idiomatically. As Irving Howe noted, Cahan was not bothered if this adaptation did not perfectly reflect its sources, as his methods “purchased vividness at the cost of accuracy.”89 To be sure, there were precedents for features-­like content in European newspapers in various languages, as feuilletons about urban life were a regular feature of French, German, and Russian publications throughout the nineteenth century.90 However, Cahan instead anchored his choices to trends in American mainstream journalism, particularly human-­interest journalism.91 In 1903, for example, Cahan stressed that his emphasis on mass readership set the Forverts apart from other socialist publications. Other newspapers, Cahan asserted, were so full of polemics and jargon that “he who is not a socialist, the great, wide masses, feels as if he is not at home” when reading these publications. Moreover, he asserted that these publications failed to hold readers’ attention because “human interest is lacking in them.” In contrast, the Forverts promised to offer readers content infused with “human interest in the broadest sense of the term.”92

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In subsequent decades, Cahan continued to invoke “human interest” as the key to his journalistic approach. “As an American journalist,” he wrote in one representative piece from 1922, “I often had the occasion to use the words ‘human interest.’ . . . This means, things that are related to the general human nature and that interest all people.”93 In some cases, Cahan chose to translate the term into Yiddish (menshlekher interes). At other times, he also provided readers with a rough transliteration (yuman interes), perhaps so that they would be able to recognize the term if they heard it or read it in English-­language venues. Cahan also communicated this ethos to his staff, many of whom took on similar understandings of newspaper writing. Cahan’s protégé and eventual successor as editor of the Forverts, Hillel Rogoff, asserted in 1922, “If the ‘Forverts’ wants to attract the masses to socialism, . . . it must first before anything make the masses into its readers. And in order to do this, it must print articles that interest the greater public, articles that contain a general human interest.” Cahan was so taken with this description that he quoted it in his memoirs.94 In addition to Cahan encouraging his staff to incorporate new types of content into the Forverts, he also encouraged them to begin thinking of their reading audience in new ways. Up to this point, Cahan insisted, the Forverts’s audience had primarily consisted of those who were already steeped in socialist ideology. In contrast, this had never been Cahan’s conception of the ideal newspaper audience. During his time at the Arbeter tsaytung in the 1890s, as the historian Tony Michels has noted, Cahan encouraged the paper’s staff to envision their intended reader not as a socialist loyalist steeped in party polemics but as “Moyshe,” an unlettered everyman who was not yet familiar with socialist ideology and who would respond best to simple, clear language.95 After Cahan’s time at the Advertiser, however, his vision of the ideal reader shifted from a simple, unlettered everyman to a simple, unlettered everywoman. For Cahan, this was one of the major benefits of human-­interest stories and other innovations he brought to the Forverts. In his mind, these features would make the paper a more thoroughly American publication, as well making it more suitable for a female audience. Furthermore, Cahan saw these two goals—­making the paper more American and more female-­reader-­friendly—­as deeply intertwined.

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Looking back on Cahan’s tenure as editor, chroniclers of the history of the Yiddish press recounted how Cahan consistently imparted these arguments about the paper’s intended audience to his staff. Longtime staff member Adolph Held, for instance, recounted how Cahan would chastise him when he wrote in ways that Held’s own mother might not comprehend: When [World War I] began, I was the news editor. We used to write that one side had advanced ten kilometers and another retreated ten kilometers. One day Cahan came in and said to me, “Held, does your mother know what kilometers are?” I answered “I doubt it, my father has to read the paper aloud to her.” “All right,” he said, “so when you write about kilometers and they come to that line, she can’t go any further. . . . From now on I’ll come in every day and write a column of war news without all those hard words, so your mother can understand what is happening in the world.”96

With these instructions, Cahan emphasized pitching the newspaper at a particular audience: not just a woman but an uneducated, middle-­ aged housewife. This reader was not necessarily a socialist but would be sympathetic to radical ideals if they were explained simply and clearly. To be sure, this description of the Forverts’s female readers was steeped in condescension. Though it was often the case that working-­class female immigrants were less likely to have received formal educations than men were, this did not mean that there were not women who were committed radicals with an interest in literature and political news. Furthermore, unstated in these descriptions—­though crucial to their potency—­was that this imagined reader was probably purchasing goods for her household. These articles thus also demonstrated to advertisers that women constituted a valued segment of the Forverts’s reading audience. Cahan’s attempts to envision a certain female readership for the socialist Yiddish press became a frequent topic of debate upon his return to the Yiddish journalistic sphere in 1902 and eventually a shorthand for the style of journalism he championed. Throughout his career, Cahan faced criticism from other members of the radical intelligentsia, who asserted that his tactics purchased mass appeal at the expense of socialist

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dogma. Several writers resigned in protest after Cahan’s return, and rival publications constantly lambasted his style and content.97 In describing Cahan’s innovations, these rivals often evoked gendered language similar to that employed by Cahan himself. These critiques lasted throughout Cahan’s tenure at the Forverts and beyond. In a pamphlet commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Forverts, onetime Forverts writer S. D. Levine decried how “the ‘Forverts’ went off in pursuit of circulation and profits through printing cheap shund-­literature, vulgar sensations . . . and seeking to please advertisers.”98 To illustrate these points, he cited Cahan’s announcement from March 1902, quoted earlier. But instead of quoting Cahan’s announcement verbatim, Levine reworked it to exaggerate Cahan’s position. Levine maintained, for example, that one new feature publicized in the announcement, “Eygene un fremde” (Kin and strangers), included content “mainly about women.” In the actual statement, Cahan had made no reference to female subjects. To Levine, gender constituted such a central element of Cahan’s vision that he saw it even when it was not explicitly there. Moreover, for Levine and other critics of Cahan, gender was a vehicle for derision, as well as for conveying a lack of political or social import. For Cahan’s supporters, in contrast, attempts to attract female readers to the radical Yiddish press became a metonym for the editor’s innovative, American approach to the Yiddish press. Twenty years after Cahan returned to the Forverts, the sociologist Robert Park wrote a book assessing the role of Yiddish and other non-­English-­language newspapers in the acclimation of immigrants into American society. In it, he summarized the innovations that Abraham Cahan had brought to Yiddish journalism, drawing on interviews and articles by Cahan himself. According to Park, Cahan’s approach revolutionized the field of Yiddish journalism, as “it was not until the appearance of the [Forverts], however, and not until Abraham Cahan returned from his five years’ apprenticeship upon an American daily paper, that the Jewish Socialists succeeded in creating a newspaper that the masses of the Jewish people, and even women, could read.”99 At first glance, Park’s description of Cahan bears profound similarities to origin stories told by the pioneers of European Yiddish literature. Sholem Aleichem, the self-­proclaimed founder of modern Yiddish literature, used remarkably similar language in his memoir when describing

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his first encounter with a Yiddish newspaper. In 1883, when he was a young writer living in Kiev, he came across an issue of Dos yudishes folks-­blat (Jewish people’s newspaper), one of the few Yiddish newspapers to be published in eastern Europe in the nineteenth century. Sholem Aleichem described discovering that a newspaper could be published in Yiddish as an epiphany. At this point, he was primarily writing in Hebrew and, as such, reaching a small, elite, and almost exclusively male audience. But the fact that the Folksblat was written in the more vernacular Yiddish made it “accessible to all Jews, even to women!” This represented new possibilities for speaking to a mass audience. But the shame of writing to this audience, and in a language best suited for “tkhines [prayers] for women,” led him to begin publishing under the pseudonym Sholem Aleichem, as opposed to his given name, Shalom Rabinovich.100 Although Sholem Aleichem and Robert Park focused on different publications, geographic locations, and time periods, both used the ability to reach a female audience as a gauge of the mass appeal of the Yiddish newspapers they described. In some ways, the fact that this trope was evoked in both contexts is a testament to the deep, multifaceted connections between Yiddish cultural production in eastern Europe and in the United States. But upon closer inspection, these two authors invoked female readers to quite divergent ends. In Sholem Aleichem’s formulation, the gendered, mass nature of the first Yiddish newspaper he encountered was tied to the language in which it was written, as he viewed a mass and female readership as the implicit audience of anything written in Yiddish. In contrast, in Park’s formulation, transforming the Forverts into a publication that spoke to a female and mass audience was not a function of the Yiddish language. Instead, it was a sign of Cahan’s proficiency at drawing inspiration from mass-­circulation newspapers in the United States to inform his vision of Yiddish newspaper culture. While these two authors offered vastly different interpretations of female readers of Yiddish newspapers, neither provided a completely accurate historical narrative. In eastern Europe, writers of Yiddish religious texts and lowbrow fiction often described their audience as primarily encompassing women and uneducated men. However, as was previously mentioned, these descriptions elided the fact that Yiddish texts were actually read and enjoyed by a broad audience of readers. By the late nineteenth century, as the literary scholar Naomi Seidman has

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noted, “the myth of Yiddish femininity had taken on a powerful independent existence out of all proportion to the circumstances of Yiddish literary history.”101 Conversely, Cahan was by no means the first or only radical Yiddish journalist to draw inspiration from the American popular press. Nor was he the only editor to express an interest in attracting female readers. In the period between 1897 and 1902, while Cahan was focusing his attention on the Anglophone press, the Forverts was a vastly different publication than the commercially successful, mass-­consumption daily that it would eventually become.102 Nevertheless, the staff of the Forverts also adapted American journalistic trends, such as incorporating sensational headlines to entice readers to buy their newspaper.103 Even Cahan admitted this, describing the paper’s front page as its only “American” section before his return.104 In addition, the early Forverts also incorporated attempts to speak about or to women. Writers like M. Yanovsky and S. Elizovitsh published frequent articles on the “Woman Question,” in which they expressed sympathy for women’s rights but argued that true equality could not be achieved under capitalism.105 The paper also included translations of articles by women’s rights agitators like Margaret Haile, as well as original articles by the activists Dr. Ida Badanes and Dr. Katerina Yevzerov.106 The Forverts also explored these issues in women’s columns that ran sporadically between 1898 and 1902 by “Sofia Housewife” (Sofia Hoyzfroy)—­a pseudonym for sometimes-­editor Mikhail Zametkin.107 As Sofia Housewife, Zametkin argued that women’s columns should not be seen as frivolous. Instead, she insisted that her advice could alleviate the burdens that wives faced when performing housework, which was itself a radical act: “Men won’t understand this and will joke about it, [saying] that we will chat about the philosophy of a tsimmes, the science of a kugel, the non-­partisan-­ness of a noodle. . . . [But] is socialism not in the end a philosophy about tsimmes[?]”108 As was true with Zelikovits’s women’s columns in the religiously oriented Tageblat, Zametkin injected these columns with humor, but he also engaged readers with radical ideologies in ways that he felt spoke to the realities of women’s lives. Zametkin’s women’s columns thus reflected broader transformations taking shape in the American Yiddish publishing sphere, as editors experimented with how to harness

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genres borrowed from the mass-­consumption press for ideological purposes. Moreover, this period also saw the advent of women’s pages in the German-­language socialist press, suggesting that Zametkin’s desire to address a female audience in his socialist newspaper also reflected broader patterns in radical publishing at this time. In columns on the best cleaning supplies, cooperative housekeeping, and women’s antiwar efforts, Zametkin reflected the particularly complex gender politics in the socialist movement at this time, in which men and women were seen as playing distinct yet crucial roles in the labor movement and in the home and discussions of female emancipation often remained more on the level of theory than practice.109 Even in this early period, then, the Forverts’s staff fused inspiration taken from European and US newspaper models, both radical and mainstream, and envisioned themselves as speaking to and about a female audience. Cahan greatly enhanced and expanded this mission when he returned to the Forverts. But it would be a mistake to view Cahan’s innovations, and the ways he drew on American newspaper culture, as having no precedent in Yiddish journalism in general or in radical Yiddish journalism in specific. Furthermore, these examples suggest the importance of viewing statements by Cahan, his staff, and his detractors invoking a new, female audience for the Forverts not merely as historical reporting but also as rhetorical strategies. To be sure, there are clear differences between Cahan’s unsophisticated imagined female reader and the imagined female audience of the early Forverts, as in these early years the publication often emphasized the integral, complex roles that women played in the socialist struggle. But invoking a new feminine or femininized audience for the Forverts was also a method for Cahan to underscore his desire to speak to a mass audience and implement a more popular style. For detractors, by contrast, it became a way to trivialize Cahan’s approach and to find sources within American popular culture for these innovations that separated them from Yiddish culture or radical politics.

Conclusion Between the respective foundings of the Orthodox Tageblat and the socialist Forverts and 1906, both evolved from short, sectarian

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publications into commercially successful venues for news, features, and fiction. The example set by American mainstream newspapers and magazines, especially the way these publications spoke to and about female readers, was integral to this process of transformation. Though the Tageblat and Forverts espoused very different ideologies, each drew inspiration from prominent Anglophone publications in determining how to speak to a female audience—­incorporating content and strategies adapted from the mainstream press and gleaning from these publications the reasons why it was important to attract a female audience. Discussions of female readers thus became avenues through which to debate broader questions about the present and future of the American Yiddish press. Nevertheless, there were also important differences between the approaches these two newspapers took to their female readers. In the Tageblat, content for women became central to the paper’s attempts to fashion a version of traditional Judaism in line with Western, middle-­class ideals of domesticity. By contrast, in the Forverts, content for women became an avenue to explore and debate the balance between entertainment-­driven journalism and political rigor. Furthermore, neither provided a consistent definition of what it meant to be an “American” newspaper, as they drew on divergent models including more sensational “yellow” publications as well as more restrained newspapers and magazines. Together, these two case studies reveal the breadth of the inspiration that the American popular press exerted on the Yiddish press in this period and how that inspiration was used to divergent ends in different publications. The Forverts and Tageblat were at the forefront of the Yiddish newspaper market in this period, with the Forverts ultimately emerging as the vanguard Yiddish daily for decades to come. However, the transformations in these periodicals reflected broader patterns in the Yiddish publishing sphere. During these years, several new publications emerged that also looked to American mainstream newspapers, or to Yiddish newspapers modeled on them, as sources of inspiration. Many also hired writers previously associated with older publications to fill their staffs—­which highlights the small, interwoven world of Yiddish newspaper publishing. The Yidishe velt, a daily published from 1902 to 1904 by prominent acculturated Jewish leaders like Louis Marshall, hired the frequent Tageblat contributor Avner Tanenboym to write

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women’s columns, in addition to incorporating Cahan’s onetime rival Philip Krantz onto the paper’s staff. They also introduced an English page and marketed their newspaper as a “family paper,” in ways that echoed the Tageblat.110 As was previously mentioned, when the book publisher Joseph Saperstein began publishing a new Orthodox daily called the Morgn-­zhurnal, he hired the Tageblat’s Peter Wiernik as its editor. He also invited the novelist Shomer, another frequent Tageblat contributor, to contribute serialized fiction to his paper as well.111 Daily publications were most influenced by surrounding newspaper culture, as they tended to be more interested in drawing in a mass audience. But many Yiddish weeklies and monthlies reflected these trends as well.112 The Yiddish press was not the only non-­Anglophone newspaper sphere to be influenced by the US popular press in this period. Newspapers in German, Italian, Greek, and Polish also began incorporating sensational news coverage and human-­interest stories and changing their layouts to more closely conform with surrounding newspaper culture. However, the Yiddish press seems to have been particularly keen in its employment of these trends. American journalistic trends pervaded every corner of the Yiddish daily press, as newspapers, regardless of their ideological outlook, took the American mainstream press for inspiration. In this period, being an American Yiddish newspaper meant being deeply engaged with American newspaper culture, whether a publication was committed to radicalism or religious traditionalism. The same does not seem to have been true, for example, of Italian or German newspaper publishing, where radical periodicals tended to be less influenced by American popular culture.113 There are several reasons why the writers and editors involved in the creation of the Yiddish newspaper market may have been more receptive to the influence of surrounding newspaper culture than other non-­Anglophone journalists were. First, as there was no strong, long-­ standing tradition of Yiddish journalism in eastern Europe, those who were involved in the formation of the American Yiddish newspaper market did not have fixed, preexisting models of what a Yiddish daily should include. They were thus more likely to be influenced by surrounding journalistic innovations than, for example, pioneers of the American Italian or German press, who often imported much of their

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content from Europe.114 Second, those who were involved in both religious and radical Yiddish publishing were well versed in translating between different languages and cultural milieus, and many worked simultaneously for publications in Hebrew, Yiddish, German, English, and Russian. Thus, they may have been more open to a hybrid understanding of American Yiddish culture than those who were involved in other foreign-­language presses.115 It is also likely that the gender dynamics of Jewish immigration allowed the Yiddish press more thoroughly and successfully to imitate American mainstream journalism. Unlike other immigrant groups arriving in the United States in large numbers at this time, which tended to be predominantly male, the eastern European Jewish migration was broken up relatively equally along gender lines. When Yiddish newspapers began attempting to court female readers, they could draw on a large potential audience. In addition, women played a particularly central role in the eastern European Jewish economy as partners in family businesses. This precedent allowed eastern European Jewish immigrants to integrate more seamlessly into the gendered contours of consumer culture in the United States than other immigrant groups could.116 The fact that there were preexisting connections in Yiddish culture between women, consumption, and popular culture no doubt also made it easier for Yiddish newspaper producers to model publications on the American popular press. Once editors and publishers had forged a Yiddish newspaper market that was deeply engaged with newspaper culture in the United States, they began to use these models as blueprints for establishing more personal connections with readers. Chapter 2 focuses on the particular impact of one genre, the advice column, on the development of the Yiddish press. Editors and publishers introduced these columns to entertain readers and increase circulation. At the same time, they also used these columns to encourage readers to view newspapers as personal interlocutors and guides. These varied aims, and the ways in which readers responded, transformed Yiddish dailies into multivalent platforms and powerful forces in Jewish life.

2

Advice Columns and the Cultivation of a Yiddish Newspaper Audience

In 1906, Forverts editor Abraham Cahan was sitting in his office when his secretary, Leon Gottlieb, came in carrying three letters from the newspaper’s readers. Like much of the mail the Forverts received, these letters sought information and counsel from the newspaper’s staff. But their content perplexed Gottlieb, leaving him unsure of how to respond. They did not fit the themes usually explored in the paper’s existing write­in columns, such as socialist ideology or Jewish communal questions. Instead, according to Cahan, “all three letters had a private character, not public, and each of them told of a personal issue.”1 For Gottlieb, this intimacy presented a problem, but for Cahan, the letters were a godsend. After Cahan’s return to the paper in 1902, he hoped to encourage readers to see the Forverts as a wellspring of vital information. But he also wanted them to view themselves “not just as readers of the ‘Forverts,’ but also as writers for the ‘Forverts.’ ”2 While working for the Anglophone press, Cahan had gleaned the value of write-­in and advice columns for infusing newspapers with human interest and building relationships with readers. With these goals in mind, Cahan began asking readers to contribute. “Many people who have never written anything for print in their lives ‘have good stuff in them,’ as the Americans call it,” Cahan explained.3 It was just a matter of getting readers to describe experiences in the right way. Cahan was initially stymied in his efforts to coax the sort of material he wanted out of his audience. Try as he might, Cahan could not seem to explain to readers how to transform their life experiences into compelling content. “The greatest challenge,” Cahan later recounted, “was that the readers could not appreciate what I meant by ‘interesting.’ ”4 He tried prompting them with questions like “What is luck?” or “Who is more honest: men or women?” He also tried to inspire creativity by reframing submissions as “true novels,” as opposed to “true events.” When indirect 62

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curation failed, Cahan wrote editorials explaining why submissions fell short: “get straight to the point, without asides and without introductions,” he exhorted.5 After three years, Cahan discontinued these columns, chalking them up to noble, but failed, experiments. When Gottlieb came to Cahan’s office with letters containing precisely the type of material he had been asking for, Cahan was overjoyed. He was particularly taken with one letter, in which a woman asked to confront a neighbor through the Forverts. She suspected that this neighbor had stolen and pawned her husband’s watch. Instead of anger, the woman felt compassion for the poverty that drove her neighbor to steal. The letter reflected the struggles of workers’ lives, which helped connect it to the paper’s political agenda. But it was also full of emotion, serving Cahan’s desire for engrossing content. The fact that it was written by a working-­class housewife—­a demographic Cahan particularly wanted to attract—­certainly added appeal. Moreover, the letter underscored the fact that this woman viewed the Forverts as an authoritative source of advice as well as a communal mouthpiece. Because of this, Cahan believed the letter could serve as “an excellent example for other readers” of the material they should send to the Forverts. Cahan decided to print all three letters, short responses, and an “explanation of what made them interesting,” under the title “A bintel brief,” or a bundle of letters.6 *** In Cahan’s autobiography, he described the origin story of his most famous feature, the “Bintel brief,” as a fusion of authentic, spontaneous outpourings of emotion by Forverts readers and a long, intensive process of encouraging readers to respond to the Forverts in the ways he wanted. He emphasized that these letters arrived out of the blue, after the Forverts had discontinued its write-­in columns, but also that “it would never have occurred to [them] to send this sort of letter . . . if the ‘Forverts’ had not shown the public all the time that such worldly things, things of human interest, were important for a newspaper.”7 By emphasizing the authenticity of these letters, as well as the meticulous processes that led to their being written, Cahan underscored his success at encouraging readers to rely on newspapers for guidance, information, and engrossing content. But he also projected an image of the Forverts as a space shaped by the needs and interests of readers and writers alike.

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The themes that Cahan highlighted in this narrative are key to understanding the central role that advice columns, write-­in contests, and more indirect forms of guidance played in the development of the American Yiddish press as a whole, not just the Forverts. The “Bintel brief ” is by far the most famous feature ever to run in a Yiddish newspaper.8 However, every major American Yiddish newspaper experimented with some form of advice columns. Some were very much like the reader-­driven, narrative “Bintel brief ”; others were more specific, like columns on health, legal advice, or child care. Moreover, the advisory role of the press extended beyond the confines of advice columns, as newspapers also leveraged their news coverage, editorials, and advertisements to encourage readers to incorporate newspapers into various facets of their lives. Advice columns, write-­in columns, and the broader role of advice in Yiddish newspapers should be understood in three central ways: as human-­interest features meant to entertain readers; as guidance meant to steer readers toward institutions and information; and as spaces through which readers, writers, and editors debated the roles that newspapers and their staffs should play in readers’ lives.9 All of these elements drew on functions performed by similar features in the English-­language press. However, the advisory function of the Yiddish press took on particular potency when aimed at a mainly immigrant audience acclimating to life in the United States. The power of these features, and by extension the newspapers that published them, lay in their ability to be read in a variety of ways and serve a variety of functions. With new waves of immigration and the maturation of younger readers, the audience for Yiddish newspapers became increasingly diverse in the first two decades of the twentieth century. By creating a range of guidance-­driven content, editors could direct different readers to columns that fit their needs. And through creating content that readers could engage with in various manners, editors found ways to build relationships with their ever-­broadening audience. Thus, the genre of advice was crucial to forging a complex, multifaceted relationship between the Yiddish press and its readers. As was true in the American mainstream press, the advent of narrative-­driven advice columns in the American Yiddish press was, in part, a crucial component of newspapers’ attempts to attract female

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readers. But over time, as the reading audience and intended functions of these columns expanded, Yiddish dailies began describing these columns in more varied ways—­sometimes highlighting their connections to human-­interest journalism and sometimes negating these connections in order to emphasize a column’s political import or authority. Within the press, questions of gender were crucial to this process of differentiation. Newspapers switched back and forth between highlighting columns’ female readership and the authority projected by mainly male advice columnists in order to emphasize different aspects of a column’s appeal. By tracing the various meanings that advice columns took on for readers and newspapers alike, we can excavate the processes through which Yiddish newspapers became such central, nimble components of the American Jewish experience.

Advice Columns and Human Interest Abraham Cahan was by no means the only Yiddish newspaper editor interested in infusing his paper with human interest or the only one to see write-­in and advice columns as methods to generate this material. In fact, several of Cahan’s rivals incorporated these materials into their newspapers at the same time as Cahan or even before. Each Yiddish daily experimented with a variety of features, all of which fused elements of write-­in contests, letters to the editor, advice columns, and women’s columns throughout the 1890s and early 1900s. But it was only in 1906, with the advent of the “Bintel brief,” that a particular format took hold, consisting of letters from readers printed in full, accompanied by responses from editors. The connections between advice columns, write-­in campaigns, and human-­interest journalism in the Yiddish press echoed the combined development of these genres in American mainstream newspapers. While newspapers had included letters to the editor since the eighteenth century, the modern advice column was a product of the late nineteenth century and reflected newspapers’ transformation from political into commercial ventures. Instead of inviting readers to contribute opinions on current events, advice columns encouraged them to share private details about their lives. The interactive nature of advice columns was part of newspapers’ attempts to build closer relationships with their

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audiences. But it also reflected editors’ beliefs that these columns both helped readers and contained engrossing reading material.10 Like human-­interest journalism, the first Anglophone advice columns aimed particularly at drawing in female readers. Early columns like “In and out of the Household” in the Philadelphia Ledger and “Advice to the Lovelorn” in the New York Evening Journal appeared in conjunction with the advent of women’s pages. Over time, advice columns spread to other sections of the paper and were adapted to fit the perceived interests of different audiences. But they continued to rely on the fusion of “collective comfort with prescriptive counsel” that initially made them so successful at attracting female readers.11 The development of reader-­response material in the Yiddish press followed a similar trajectory. American Yiddish newspapers had always included sections publishing readers’ opinions on articles or featuring replies to reader queries, usually called “Briefkasten” (Letterboxes). Several also included sections called “Korespondentsya” (Correspondence), where readers contributed local news stories. “Korespondentsya” columns originated in the fledgling eastern European Yiddish and Hebrew presses, which also outsourced to readers the task of finding local Jewish news throughout the Pale of Settlement and around the world.12 Though readers’ letters had always been an integral component of the Yiddish press, there are significant differences between these columns and reader-­response materials that began to appear in the 1890s. In “Briefkasten” columns, readers wrote in with questions about historical events or local institutions, and editors would seek out the desired information. Unlike the “Bintel brief ” and the columns it inspired, “Briefkasten” editors did not reprint original queries, instead publishing responses next to initials or pseudonyms identifying the letter writer. Because of this, “Briefkasten” included replies that would have only made sense to the letter’s writer, such as “one should ask a lawyer these kinds of questions” or “we do not have these kinds of statistics on hand.”13 Unlike later columns, the “Briefkasten” invited a more individual interaction between readers and editors. Readers could glean from these columns that newspapers were places to turn for information but could not necessarily derive secondhand entertainment or instructional benefit from questions posed by other readers.

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In contrast, in the 1890s and early 1900s, Yiddish dailies began incorporating more narrative material contributed by readers. Some, like the socialist Varhayt, were probably inspired by Cahan’s innovations in the Forverts. The Varhayt was founded in 1905 by Louis Miller, who had previously worked at the Forverts. Like Cahan, Miller attributed the impetus for the Varhayt’s advice columns to a letter sent by a reader to the paper. The letter writer explained that he had immigrated to the United States a few years prior, temporarily leaving his wife behind, and was beginning to worry that he and his wife would no longer have anything in common once they reunited. Miller published this letter under the headline “A tsubrokhene harts” (A broken heart), inviting other readers to write in with their advice.14 These responses evolved into a feature called “Tragedies, Comedies, and Simple Sorrows from True Life,” which appeared two weeks before the first “Bintel brief ” in the Forverts.15 This no doubt helped ignite Cahan’s desire to reintroduce write-­in columns into his paper. But Miller’s decision to include this column was likewise clearly inspired by Cahan’s earlier experimentations. Unlike the “Bintel brief,” Miller’s feature did not include advice from the editor, instead privileging responses from other readers. It was only after Cahan introduced the “Bintel brief ” that Miller began a column with advice from editors, called “Der baleytse” (The adviser).16 The introduction of advice columns in the Varhayt highlights the interplay of competition and inspiration in the Yiddish publishing sphere, as well as the movement back and forth of personnel and ideas among different publications. Other newspapers, like the Orthodox Tageblat, began experimenting with this material even before the Forverts. In January 1898, the Tageblat published a letter from a reader wondering whether he should marry his Christian girlfriend, and editors invited readers to respond. In their replies, some suggested that this man should ask his girlfriend to convert, while others asserted that there were no circumstances under which he should marry her. Within the replies, most Tageblat readers used biblical passages to support their opinions. While the Tageblat’s readers were beginning to see the newspaper as a resource that could perform advisory functions akin to rabbis or religious texts, they still looked to these more traditional sources as well and sometimes found ways to fuse older and newer modes of authority.17

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The connections between write-­in campaigns, advice columns, and women’s columns were particularly pronounced in the Tageblat’s English Department. By 1899, the page’s editors began supplementing materials culled from Anglophone publications with write-­in contests: symposia that encouraged readers to contribute their opinion on topics like societal misconceptions about young Jews in New York.18 Editors also highlighted their responsiveness to readers’ demands by reprising discontinued columns at readers’ request. For one of these features, “The East Side Observer,” editors also proposed that readers could participate in the column’s production by suggesting potential topics: “What we ask is that the public aid us, by telling us what they want. . . . We will use our utmost efforts to supply their demands.”19 Through these statements, editors made readers feel involved in the production of the newspaper. Submissions from readers played an even more critical role in the creation of the paper’s first two English-­language women’s columns. The authors of these columns often drew on readers’ letters in deciding which topics to cover. For instance, many of the individual columns in the Tageblat’s first series of English-­language women’s column, “Talks with My Sisters,” signed under the pseudonym “MEG,” summarized and responded to letters from readers.20 The author of the paper’s second English-­language women’s column came to the attention of English-­page editor A.  H. ­Fromenson because of her submission to a Tageblat write-­in contest. In the spring of 1901, the Tageblat invited readers to contribute descriptions of who in their family read the newspaper and suggestions of how editors could improve the English Department. When announcing this invitation, editors highlighted the difficulty in gauging readers’ interest in the English section of a Yiddish paper, as “this paper is a supplement, and is free to its readers, whose parents pay for the Yiddish section, and would pay for that section even if there was no English Department attached to it. . . . We only can tell how popular this paper is by the number of letters we receive from our readers.”21 Throughout the summer and fall of 1901, editors published dozens of letters submitted to this contest. Some gave straightforward information, saying who in their families read the paper or asking editors to include more articles on Zionism or translations of biblical passages. Others were more florid, describing what compelled them to write to the paper and trying their hands at writing creatively themselves.

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On July 22, the editors published a striking letter from a factory worker in Cincinnati, Ohio, named Rose Harriet Pastor. In it, Pastor described how the paper’s call for submissions became an obsession, as if it had taken the place of a paramour: “I awoke with ‘Write a letter’ as the first thought in my mind. Now, generally, when I awake in the morning, my first thought is the name of—­well—­somebody. And it struck me as very strange to have any other thought take the precedence.” Over time, the pull of letter writing consumed her. “So here I am writing a letter while my neighbors-­at-­work, who are watching my skeleton fingers as they are moving rapidly over the paper, are each thinking in their own minds that I have fallen in the depths of love.”22 Rose Harriet Pastor, later known as a prominent radical activist under her married name, Rose Pastor Stokes, described in her memoir how this letter led her to be hired as a columnist for the Tageblat’s English Department: “I received a long missive in the editor’s own hand urging me to tell him more of myself, of the shop, of my life at home. I wrote again and he replied—­inviting me, this time to contribute; preferably talks to the girls. The invitation pleased and excited me. Was I not ‘confidential advisor’ to dozens of my shopmates? Ready for the ‘call,’ I acted without delay, and wrote my first talk that night.”23 In Pastor’s most frequent column, “Just Between Ourselves, Girls,” she shifted from confidential adviser to coworkers to public guide to Tageblat readers. Like MEG’s column, “Just Between Ourselves, Girls” spoke mainly to a young, female audience, reflecting editors’ assumption that their English section drew a younger readership. At the same time, the paper also introduced several short-­lived women’s columns in Yiddish targeting an older demographic. These columns carried titles like “Khanaleh di hoyzfroy” (Khanaleh the housewife), “Fir froyen un kinder” (For women and children), and “Tsvishen unz geredt, vayber” (Speaking between ourselves, women)—­an aged-­up version of the title of Pastor’s column. While Pastor, writing under the penname Zelda, focused on courtship and respect for one’s parents, these Yiddish columns focused more on housekeeping and child care.24 This divergence in audience and subject matter reflected a growing distance between the lives of immigrant Jewish mothers and their daughters. While most young women worked and socialized outside the home, it became increasingly common for Jewish women to withdraw

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from the formal workforce after marrying or to shift to working from home.25 The Tageblat’s staff reflected these realities; at the same time, they probably enhanced them by creating reading material with different messaging for their younger and older female audiences. Other early Yiddish dailies followed similar trajectories in the reader-­ response materials they included—­probably inspired by innovations in the Tageblat. In 1902, Louis Marshall and other established, acculturated Jewish leaders founded the Yidishe velt (The Jewish world). The paper’s founders hoped to counteract the influence of both socialism and Orthodoxy within the Yiddish publishing market by providing new immigrants with what they viewed as more suitable reading material. However, they also drew inspiration from radical and religious papers in composing their own. Like the Tageblat, this paper included an English section, which was filled with symposia containing readers’ letters and an advice column, “Only Girls,” whose single-­monikered writer, Sylvia, seems to have been inspired by the Tageblat’s MEG and Zelda.26

“A bintel brief ” and “Advice to the Lovelorn”: Inspiration and Adaptation A careful study of the early twentieth-­century Yiddish press reveals that Cahan was not the only editor experimenting with advice-­laden materials in his publication. As was true in the Forverts, these experiments took various forms, with some resembling write-­in contests and some more akin to early advice columns in the American popular press that advised readers but did not reprint their original letters. With the introduction of the “Bintel brief ” in 1906, Cahan’s major innovation was in privileging the voices of readers within these columns by publishing reader letters in full and in introducing in-­depth responses from the column’s editor.27 One mainstream advice column, “Advice to the Lovelorn,” seems to have been a particular source of inspiration for the “Bintel brief.”28 Marie Manning, better known by her penname, Beatrice Fairfax, was one of the first professional advice columnists. Her “Advice to the Lovelorn” column debuted in the Evening Journal in 1898, offering readers a public space to vent their personal turmoil. Like the “Bintel brief,” this column tended to print reader letters in full, along with responses from Fairfax.29 Articles describing the “Bintel brief ” in the contemporary

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American popular press often highlighted the similarities between Cahan’s Yiddish column and Fairfax’s English one.30 In part, this was a way to characterize the “Bintel brief ” to Anglophone readers in terms they could understand. But it also reflected the ways in which Cahan drew inspiration from the American popular press when devising the “Bintel brief.” As will be discussed shortly, Cahan sometimes seized on comparisons between his column and “Advice to the Lovelorn” and sometimes rejected them, depending on which better served his needs. The similarities between the two columns emerge in the striking overlap between the origin stories that both authors recounted about their columns. Like Cahan, Manning described her column in her own memoir as an organic outgrowth of three letters that the Journal received from readers. Manning was working at her desk when a colleague—­in her case, her editor—­came to her with missives that were brimming with the “genuine tragedies and comedies” of human life. However, they did not fit with the themes explored in the newspaper’s existing columns. Like Cahan, Manning suggested using these letters as the basis for a new column.31 In recounting the origin stories of their advice columns, both Cahan and Manning fused facts and narrative devices in order to emphasize particular aspects of their columns’ appeal. Moreover, Cahan’s and Manning’s accounts share several features, including the spontaneous arrival of three letters and descriptions of these letters’ literary merit, with both authors evoking tragedies and comedies.32 Though Manning’s column predated Cahan’s by eight years, her memoir was published in 1944, almost two decades after Cahan’s. It is possible, though unlikely, that her story was influenced by his, perhaps by interviews he gave in English-­ language venues. It is also possible that Cahan heard or read Manning’s narrative from earlier sources—­interviews or word of mouth—­and decided to use it as a template in crafting his own narrative. If nothing else, these narratives suggest common understandings of the appeal of advice columns that pervaded the journalistic ether in the United States, privileging columns as authentic outpourings of emotion while also placing them squarely in the realm of human interest. In Cahan’s introduction to the inaugural “Bintel brief ” on January 20, 1906, he emphasized the connection between his decision to publish the column and his desire to infuse the Forverts with features inspired

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by the American popular press: “Among the letters, which the ‘Forverts’ receives . . . one finds many that have a general ‘human interest,’ as the American critics call it. We will collect them and print them here from today on, with comments or without comments, under the name ‘A bintel brief.’ ”33 Again Cahan stressed that letters should describe the issues writers faced in a way that stoked the interest of other readers. Cahan reemphasized this point in subsequent editorials by describing the column’s content in literary terms, noting, “some of the most famous writers from the Jewish Quarter have taken from the ‘Bintel brief ’ themes for their articles, for sketches, for plays.”34 Scholars who have discussed the “Bintel brief ” have also highlighted its literary nature, emphasizing its relationship to romanticism or Russian realism and drawing connections to Cahan’s own works of fiction.35 Over the next few months, the “Bintel brief ” took on the contours it would have for decades to come. The column usually included one to three letters, sometimes with a summary of their contents at the top. The themes covered in the letters varied from romance to tensions between parents and children to quarrels between coworkers, neighbors, or friends. Letters streamed in from people living within close proximity, around the country, sometimes around the world—­attesting to the Forverts’s growing influence not just in New York but also farther afield. The “Bintel brief ” was the purview of two staff members throughout its run: one in charge of choosing which letters to print and one in charge of responding. For the first few years, Leon Gottlieb sorted through submissions and “corrected the language” to make them fit for print, and Cahan wrote the replies. Over time, Cahan became too absorbed with editorial duties, and other writers took over responding to readers’ letters. As the literary scholar Steven Cassedy has noted, editors did not sign the advice they gave in the “Bintel brief,” and letters generally addressed the paper’s “worthy editor.” Readers probably thought they were continuing to interact with Cahan through the “Bintel brief ” even after he delegated control to other writers.36 The way that the “Bintel brief ” functioned behind the scenes reflects important aspects of the column and its historical legacy. First, it highlights the fact that editors did not print every letter they received, instead carefully selecting which letters to publish. Cahan later asserted that “most of the letters that came to the ‘Bintel’ were about family matters:

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about love, jealousy, relationships between husband and wife, mothers and children—­in short: about the most intimate events in human life,” suggesting that these themes were heavily represented because they were common submission topics.37 However, it seems likely that editors also emphasized these themes when selecting what to print. The literary scholar Ellen Kellman, in her work on fiction in the Forverts, points to overlap between the “Bintel brief ” and fiction in the paper—­which often ran side by side—­as evidence of editors’ attempt to create thematic coherence; both sections used love and family life as avenues to offer readers political messages or models of acculturation in subtler ways than editorials or news articles could. Furthermore, many of the same staff members contributed to both sections: Gottlieb helped to curate the “Bintel brief ” between 1906 and 1925, years when he also penned much of the paper’s fiction.38 The second, and perhaps thornier, issue relates to editors’ attempts to “correct” “Bintel brief ” submissions. Throughout Cahan’s tenure, detractors asserted that the improvements editors made went beyond correcting language and extended to substantially rewriting or even fabricating letters. Joseph Chaikin, for example, suggested that when the column did not receive sufficient worthy submissions, the Forverts would hire professional writers to fill in the gaps.39 Neither those who espoused the veracity of “Bintel brief ” letters nor those who espoused their fabrication cited ample evidence to support their claims, other than rumors or discussions with “Bintel brief ” editors, who doubtless had their own agendas when asserting its authenticity.40 In the absence of definitive evidence one way or the other, I am inclined to believe that the truth lies somewhere in between, with some letters fabricated, some real, and most real letters significantly reworked by Forverts staff. This view is supported by George Wolfe’s study of original “Bintel brief ” submissions and published versions from the 1930s. Wolfe concluded that editors based published letters on those they received from readers. However, they transformed them so dramatically that it would be a mistake to see published versions as unmediated expressions of immigrant life. Editors, for example, added in stock phrases that amplified readers’ relationship to the Forverts, such as identifying the writer as a devoted “Bintel brief ” reader. They also reworked or omitted facts to make stories more compelling.41 According to Wolfe,

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Cahan’s staff generally destroyed originals after publication, except for the ones they made available to him. So, it is impossible to say whether these policies were consistent over time. However, Wolfe’s findings emphasize the twinned goals of this column, to advise and entertain, and that these dual agendas necessitated curating submissions to make them into compelling reading material.

Advice Columns and Their Female Readers Because the “Bintel brief ” lay at the heart of Cahan’s attempts to transform the Forverts into a popular, “American” newspaper, the column became a prime target for many of his harshest critics. Detractors were particularly critical of the confessional nature of the column and how it contributed to the breakdown of a separation between public and private spheres in the Yiddish socialist press. For critics, the column’s invitation for readers to air their personal grievances exemplified everything that was wrong with Cahan’s approach to journalism. They worried that features like the “Bintel brief ” pandered to the basest desires of all readers. But they were especially vocal about the paper’s influence on less educated workers and the fact that this feature would, in their eyes, in no way contribute to these readers’ political development.42 As had been true since Cahan’s return to the Forverts in 1902, Cahan’s detractors invoked female readers as the shorthand though which they described his engagement with a mass, uneducated audience. Many critics, for instance, used the column’s particular appeal to female readers as evidence of its lack of political or cultural importance, especially in relation to other sections of the newspaper (figure 2.1). These critiques were not limited to people employed by the Forverts’s competitors. In fact, they were sometimes voiced by members of the newspaper’s staff. In the late 1910s, the “Bintel brief ” was under the purview of the poet Mani Leib. While poetry was Leib’s primary passion, he worked as a boot maker and journalist in order to make ends meet. And like many writers of his generation, Leib generally viewed his nonpoetic writing projects—­his work both as the “Bintel brief ” editor and as a translator of German and Russian texts—­in instrumental terms, not as creative or valuable content in and of itself.43

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Figure 2.1. Cantor, Der groyser kundes, August 19, 1910. In this image, from the Yiddish humor publication Der groyser kundes (The big stick), the cartoonist lampooned “the educational-­work of the ‘Forverts’ on the East Side.” Two of the girls are reading recent works of fiction serialized in the paper, while the third is reading “A bintel brief.” (From the Library of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research)

During Leib’s tenure as the “Bintel brief ” editor, he would frequently complain to his partner, the poet and novelist Rochelle Weprinsky, about his obligations to the column, feeling that it took time away from his poetry. In one letter from 1920, Leib included a poem that he addressed to the female writers and readers who had become so associated with the column, “Tsu di froyen fun bintel briv” (To the women of [the] “Bintel brief ”). Leib shifted between a sense of identification or compassion with these women, saying, “I see in you my wife, my daughter and my mother,” and a sense of embarrassment that he was the one tasked with responding to their emotional missives.44 Unlike poetry, which he felt afforded him freedom of expression, Leib felt constricted by the genre of advice columns and by their intended audience. Cahan, like his rivals and certain members of his staff, frequently asserted that many of those who read and contributed to the “Bintel brief ”

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were women. However, Cahan transformed these critiques into a point of pride, framing the column as an avenue for female readers and writers to express their deepest emotions. Moreover, Cahan and his staff repeatedly highlighted the role that the “Bintel brief ” played in encouraging women to begin reading the newspaper, arguing that it might inspire them to peruse other sections of the paper as well. Cahan also cited examples of illiterate women who exhorted family or friends to read the column out loud or who used the “Bintel brief ” as an early primer to bolster their reading comprehension.45 While it is impossible to measure the gender breakdown of readership definitively, it was not necessarily true that women were disproportionately represented in “Bintel brief ” submissions or, at least, in letters published in the column, which over time broke up relatively evenly along gendered lines.46 The fact that Cahan and members of his staff highlighted the relationship between the “Bintel brief ” and female writers and readers reflects less about the actual dynamics of the column and more about Cahan’s desires to use discussions of the “Bintel brief ” and its readers to signal the paper’s mass appeal. Though many of Cahan’s rivals criticized the “Bintel brief,” saying it catered to readers’ basest instincts, almost every Yiddish daily eventually introduced a feature meant to mimic the Forverts’s column. Many imitators drew on the romantic or gendered elements of the “Bintel brief ’s” appeal. The Varhayt’s “Baleytse,” for instance, asked readers to contribute stories on “love, jealousy, family troubles.”47 The Tog, in contrast, was founded in 1914 and saw itself as more intellectual than other Yiddish dailies. It therefore remained one of the last holdouts, as editors worried that an entertainment-­driven advice column would go against its aims to elevate Yiddish journalism. By 1930, its editors felt they could not compete with rivals without a “Bintel brief ”–­like column, so they introduced “Mener un froyen” (Men and women). Every column varied slightly from the “Bintel brief,” but each found ways to emphasize the audience’s keen interest and that readers looked to these columns as wellsprings of entertainment and emotion as well as advice.48 As was true in the Forverts, staff members in charge of advice columns in other Yiddish newspapers also contributed editorials, fiction, or other write-­in features to the publications in which their advice columns ran.49 This was partly a practical arrangement, as these newspapers did

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not always have large staffs. But this decision also added thematic coherence, heightening the interactive nature of these publications. Editors of dailies like the Forverts and Tageblat also used letters from readers as inspiration for editorials.50 David Hermalin, a mainstay of the Varhayt’s features page, often posed questions in his editorials that became the basis of the newspaper’s write-­in contests.51 In each of these newspapers, human-­interest-­tinged advice columns ran concurrently with other advice and write-­in columns that were drastically different in content and tone. Every Yiddish daily printed letters to the editor as well as columns focused on narrower topics, such as employment, child care, or health.52 The papers also continued to run a “Briefkasten” column, even after the advent of their more narrative columns. Over time, in addition to responding to factual questions, some publications began using the “Briefkasten” to correspond with aspiring writers—­rejecting submissions or offering feedback—­or to answer questions about the lives of staff members. The writer A. Almi (aka Elyahu Sheps) noted in his memoir that he used the Tageblat’s “Briefkasten” to reject marriage proposals directed at one of his female pseudonyms, Dvoyre Feygen.53 In this way, write-­in columns projected an image of the paper as an interactive space while also purporting to offer readers insight into the inner workings of their favorite publication. These varied columns invited different reading practices from Yiddish newspaper audiences. Readers looking for more “serious,” informative guidance could read the Forverts’s column answering union-­related questions or the Tog’s column answering readers’ questions about the civil service exams, while those looking for entertainment could read the “Bintel brief ” or “Mener un froyen” with that aim in mind. In addition, editors designed many of these columns to be read in multiple ways. Someone could read a letter full of woe from a fellow reader and relate the advice this letter writer received to their own struggles. Or they could read it for its pure entertainment value. Or, of course, their reading could be guided by a combination of these impulses.54 The flexibility of this material became more important over time, as the reading audience of Yiddish newspapers diversified. After 1905, the first waves of eastern European Jewish immigrants were joined by newer arrivals, who were more likely to have begun to experience secularization or urbanization in Europe. Post-­1905 immigrants also tended to

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be more highly educated, and many had previous exposure to radical political movements like the Bund. Moreover, many had already begun to read Yiddish newspapers while in Europe, either American papers imported into the Russian Empire or eastern European dailies like Der fraynd (The friend) that emerged after 1903.55 Some newer readers thus came to the American Yiddish press with preexisting expectations about what a Yiddish daily should include that previous immigrants generally had not. By diversifying the papers’ reader-­response columns and including columns that could be read in different ways, the Yiddish press found ways to signal to readers that they had their particular interests in mind. Sources from various newspapers suggest that readers and editors both played a role in deciding how and where newspapers responded to questions. Cahan asserted that the Forverts staff decided whether letters would be answered in the “Briefkasten,” the “Bintel brief,” or not at all.56 In contrast, unpublished letters to the Tog suggest more of an interplay between readers’ and editors’ desires. Some readers sent letters to a specific column or editor. At other times, editors sorted queries on the basis of their own priorities.57 Both editors and readers of the Yiddish press were well aware of the potential entertainment functions of advice columns, and editors often selected, fabricated, or rewrote letters to make sure they were applicable to the problems faced by readers, while also making sure that they were as full of human interest as possible.

Advice Columns as Guides to Daily Life However entertaining, advice in the Yiddish press played a crucial role in the acclimation of new immigrants to life in the United States. Through columns that included responses from editors—­whether longer, more narrative ones like the “Bintel brief ” or shorter ones like the “Briefkasten”—­newspapers provided readers with valuable information on how to navigate their surroundings. In the process, editors and writers encouraged readers to view newspapers as sources of authoritative information and as active participants in shaping Jewish life in the United States. As will be explored in the next section, readers did not always follow newspapers’ advice. Some actively pushed back against the type of guidance that newspapers provided. Nevertheless, advice

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columns became a space where Yiddish newspapers marketed themselves as multifaceted, authoritative resources. Like Yiddish advice columns’ connections to human interest, the guidance element of these columns also built off similar functions performed by Anglophone newspapers. The first American advice columns appeared in reaction to profound changes in urban life in the United States in the late nineteenth century. With the rise of industrialization, people began migrating to cities from rural areas and from abroad. New city dwellers often felt disconnected from prior ways of life and from previous social networks. Increasingly, people turned to newspapers and other media to understand these changes. In response, newspapers began including etiquette guides, letter-­writing templates, and “tips for urban survival”—­advice on navigating cities for newcomers as well as for prior residents who found cities transformed by the arrival of new groups.58 The Yiddish press was not alone, therefore, in offering authoritative guidance to readers. But Yiddish and other non-­English media mainly served immigrants with little or no prior knowledge of English, who often had fewer resources to help them understand their changing circumstances. Many eastern European Jewish immigrants, especially those who came to the United States before 1905, encountered urban life for the first time upon arrival to the United States. In eastern Europe, most Jews worked as artisans or traders, while in the United States, many shifted to working in factories. Migration also separated many individuals from family, friends, and a world organized around religious authority. As was previously mentioned, immigrants who came to the United States after 1905 were more likely to have experienced some or all of these transformations prior to immigrating. But even later immigrants tended to feel disoriented by the processes of immigration and sought new sources of guidance for how to acclimate to their new surroundings. For many, the Yiddish press was one of several sources that filled these roles, along with etiquette manuals, briefnshteller (­letter-­writing templates), social workers, settlement houses, and other immigrants, both Jewish and not.59 The desire to promote newspapers as guides reflected the educational aims of the pioneers of Yiddish journalism. As Irving Howe noted, every Yiddish newspaper, regardless of outlook, hoped to serve as

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“kindergarten and university” for their readers.60 For the socialist press, a central goal was oyfklerung—­enlightenment of the Yiddish-­speaking masses through general and political education. For the religious press, this educational component stemmed from publishers’ relationships with the Haskalah, which also viewed the Jewish masses as in need of education.61 While the didactic nature of the Yiddish press stemmed from ideological aims, American mainstream newspapers also hoped to serve as “both a daily school-­house and a daily forum.”62 In incorporating genres like advice columns, Yiddish papers continued to promote their ideological missions while also adapting to contemporary journalistic trends. As was true in the American mainstream press, the advice and information provided by Yiddish dailies was filtered through the goals and affiliations of each newspaper.63 Newspaper producers balanced their desires for commercial success, ideological potency, American cultural cachet, and communal authority, and each of these priorities colored roles they suggested newspapers could play in readers’ lives. Just as editors and publishers parsed which letters to include in advice columns, they selected aspects of American and Jewish life to emphasize to readers. By reframing advising and informing readers as a process of curation, it becomes easier to discern the particular vision of American Jewish life put forward in these publications.

Advice and “Americanization” Because advice columns and similar features offered guidance to readers on how to navigate their lives, they were central to what scholars have called the “Americanization” function of the Yiddish press. When scholars describe the Yiddish press as “an Americanizing agency,” they refer to the press’s self-­appointed task of helping readers negotiate differences between life, religion, and culture in eastern Europe and the United States.64 In addition to articles on religious practice or socialist ideology, each Yiddish daily included articles on US history, translations of the Constitution, voting guides, or English lessons.65 The didactic nature of advice columns contributed to this purpose. At the most basic level, many of the queries featured in advice columns dealt with acclimating to life in the United States. How does one meet

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a potential partner if shadkhns (matchmakers) are seen as passé? How should parents and children contend with different levels of engagement with American culture? How does one pursue a profession or acquire an education in the United States? In addition to exploring these themes through columns like the “Bintel brief ” or “Khosn-­kale frage,” Yiddish papers also printed etiquette guides and other general advice in the belief that readers hungered for guidance on how to adapt to the broader culture surrounding them. In promising to fulfill that desire, newspapers were inherently guiding readers’ encounters with the United States.66 By referring to this as a process of “Americanization,” scholars rely on the term used by those who were involved in the Yiddish press to describe their desire to introduce readers to American customs, politics, and culture.67 But in many ways, this term obscures as much as it reveals. When the Yiddish press provided guidance on how to acclimate to life in the United States, what did that mean in practice? What streams of American culture did editors and publishers draw on in shaping the vision of the United States they put forward for their readers? Yiddish newspapers, for example, often shaped readers’ encounter with the United States by filtering advice through their political or religious agenda. Lessons on civics comprised sample ballots filled out for the Socialist Party in the Forverts or suggestions to vote for Tammany Hall candidates, or later for Republican Party candidates, in the Tageblat.68 Furthermore, each paper attempted to convey that acculturation was not inconsistent with the ideology that their newspaper espoused. In an editorial commemorating the thirty-­second anniversary of the publication, the Tageblat highlighted the “Americanizing influence” that the paper exerted but asserted, in contrast to rivals, that its Americanizing influence “did not destroy Jewish idealism and the Jewish faith of those seekers after freedom from Russia, Roumania, and Galicia.”69 In the process, writers redefined both acculturation and ideology in ways that made these categories appear compatible. Attempting to filter guidance through a religious or political lens was a complicated process. For instance, advice columns in the Tageblat sometimes advised readers to seek out rabbinic authorities when they had religious questions, as opposed to relying solely on newspapers for advice.70 This reflected a desire by the paper’s staff not to let their publication’s success undermine preexisting sources of religious authority.

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Instead, they hoped to use their newspaper to support these authority structures. Moreover, readers’ ideologies did not always align with those of the papers they read. Advice seekers in the “Bintel brief ” included those who were religiously observant as well as secular. And readers sometimes took copies of the religious Morgn-­zhurnal or Tageblat with them when they attended socialist rallies.71 In interpreting the United States, Yiddish newspapers had to balance their desire to assert a particular political or religious vision to their readers and their interest in appealing to as many readers as possible. In addition, the advisory project of the Yiddish daily press was also mediated by the commercial nature of these publications. Within Yiddish newspapers, advice columns and civics lessons ran side by side with advertisements that carried implicit and explicit messages about how readers should conduct their lives. Some companies even wrote ad copy specifically for a Jewish audience, promising, for example, that Pillsbury’s flour produced the best challah (figure 2.2). Ads like these suggested that taking part in American consumer culture was not incompatible with Jewish tradition and could be seamlessly incorporated into religious rituals.72 Translations of ad copy were sometimes performed by members of newspapers’ staffs. But at other times, translations came from advertising agencies. According to the historian Andrew Heinze, new newspaper readers could not always distinguish between advertisements, editorials, and features—­and often had an easier time reading large, simple ad copy than articles.73 In practice, this meant that newspapers did not fully control the messages readers absorbed within their publications. Furthermore, though socialist papers carried more advertisements for rallies and Arbeter ring (Workmen’s Circle, now called the Workers Circle) events than religious papers did, both featured a significant number of overlapping advertisements, especially after the first decade of the twentieth century. At various times, papers with differing agendas even contracted out to the same advertising agencies, which helps to explain why the same ads appeared in multiple publications.74 This meant that Pillsbury’s advertisements highlighting the seamless integration of products into Jewish practice appeared in the context of socialist newspapers that had complicated relationships with capitalism and religious practice as well as religious newspapers that espoused “traditional”

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Figure 2.2. This advertisement, promoting Pillsbury’s Best XXXX Flour as producing the best challahs, appeared in the Morgn-­zhurnal, Tog, and Forverts on February 4 or 5, 1920. (From the Collection of the National Library of Israel and the New York Public Library; Historical Jewish Press website—­www.Jpress.org.il—­founded by the National Library and Tel Aviv University)

understandings of Judaism. Though these publications promoted very different visions of Jewish life in the United States, to national advertisers, all were subsumed under the category of “the Jewish market.” This meant that readers received certain shared messages about consumption and acculturation no matter what publication they were reading.

Advice Columns and Jewish Institutional Life In many cases, the producers of Yiddish newspapers also used advice columns and other guidance-­related content to strengthen local institutions and connect readers with organizations created to support their needs. They advised readers seeking material aid or help finding lost relatives to contact organizations like the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) or the Bureau for Jewish Social Research. They also published

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specialized advice columns helmed by lawyers and social workers, using the pages of the paper itself to connect readers with local experts.75 This coverage served the dual purpose of connecting readers to resources while also bolstering local institutions—­many of which had deep ties to the press. Publishers and writers associated with the Tageblat were involved, for example, with the founding of Young Israel, HIAS, and the Zionist Organization of America. And editors and writers for the Tog were also involved in the Kehillah (the short-­lived supracommunal organization in New York) and the American Jewish Committee, among other organizations.76 In directing readers toward these resources, the people involved in the press were also cultivating their own institutional networks. This dynamic was enhanced by the close geographic proximity of these institutions to one another and to a large percentage of readers. By 1910, most major Yiddish dailies had offices on Yiddish Newspaper Row: a handful of blocks on East Broadway in Lower Manhattan. Many immigrant aid or cultural institutions—­such as the Educational Alliance, Young Israel, and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society—­had offices in the blocks surrounding Yiddish Newspaper Row, making it easy for staff or readers to go back and forth. Many readers also lived in close proximity to these institutions during their first years in the United States. Of the over two million Jews who came to the United States between the 1880s and 1920s, 75 percent of them lived on the Lower East Side for some period of time.77 While Yiddish newspapers never served a solely local population, the fact that these publications were in such close quarters with one another, the seats of Jewish organizational life, and many readers was crucial to newspapers’ attempts to center themselves at the heart of American Jewish life. In some cases, the broader function that newspapers assumed meant that their writers and editors needed to work across ideological lines in order to cultivate a sense of Jewish communal culture in the United States. The historian Arthur Goren, for example, has highlighted the role that newspapers played in orchestrating the funerals of Jewish public figures as well as the victims of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire.78 Like advice columns, these events fused sentiment and ideology and bolstered the creation of a sense of Jewish institutional and communal culture in the United States.

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While cooperation emerged at key moments, fierce rivalries also simmered constantly within the Yiddish press. Each paper emphasized that it supported its readers more effectively than rivals and provided better, more reliable advice. Editorials in the Yidishe velt, for example, criticized the advice that “Zelda” (aka Rose Harriet Pastor) doled out in her columns in the Tageblat.79 And the Forverts published numerous articles asserting that columns in rival publications relied on fabricated letters and offered less authentic advice.80 This was particularly ironic given the accusations of fabrication leveled against the “Bintel brief ” itself. Ellen Kellman has argued that competition had a particularly strong effect in shaping another Forverts column, the “Galerye fun farshvundene mener” (Gallery of missing husbands), an outgrowth of the “Bintel brief,” where readers wrote in with descriptions and photographs of husbands who had abandoned their families. As this column grew in popularity, representatives of the United Hebrew Charities’ National Desertion Bureau approached Cahan, asking for his permission to allow the Tageblat to inaugurate a similar feature. Cahan refused, arguing that the “Gallery” had been so successful that he could not allow rivals to benefit from a similar circulation boost.81 Anecdotes like this highlight the intersection and tension between the business interests and community functions of Yiddish newspapers.

Describing Advice in the Yiddish Press: Gender and Authority In addition to Yiddish dailies asserting their supremacy over other Yiddish publications, they also found ways to project that they met readers’ needs more effectively than non-­Yiddish sources did. Though editors, writers, and publishers associated with the Yiddish press acknowledged the influence of non-­Yiddish American newspapers on their own, they also asserted the distinctly close relationship the Yiddish press enjoyed with readers. Miriam Weinstein of the Tog, for example, asserted that “although countless Americans of all origins are loyal to their favorite newspaper, such loyalty cannot compare with that of the Yiddish reader. The general newspaper is a welcome visitor in the American home; the Yiddish newspaper is a member of the family with all the advantages and disadvantages such a relationship brings.”82

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Echoing this theme, scholars have also argued that this multifaceted relationship between the readers and producers set the Yiddish press apart from contemporary publishing spheres. They point to the proximity of the offices of these newspapers to local readers and the roles that Yiddish newspapers served as educators, advisers, and guides as contributing to this particularly close bond.83 But many of these characteristics actually reflected similar functions performed by the American popular press.84 If Anglophone newspapers had not begun to market themselves as guides capable of building close relationships with readers, the Yiddish press would likely not have developed into such a strong, powerful force in Jewish life. While it is true that Yiddish newspapers were eager to cultivate relationships with readers, these statements should not be seen as merely descriptions of fact but also as marketing strategies projecting an image of Yiddish newspapers as uniquely qualified advisers for their readers. As had been true since the advent of Yiddish newspapers, questions of gender became crucial to marketing Yiddish newspapers as invaluable sources of advice. Unlike advice columns in the Anglophone press, which were usually spaces governed by female journalists, the most successful, and most broadly pitched, Yiddish advice columns instead projected an image of male authority.85 Letters sent to columns like “Mener un froyen,” “Khosn-­kale frage,” and the “Bintel brief ” addressed the male editors of these newspapers. Behind the scenes, it was sometimes the case that female staff members were actually the ones responding to readers’ letters. For example, much of the Tog’s correspondence with readers in the 1920s was handled by a woman named Helen Atkins. However, readers tended to assume that, when writing to their favorite newspaper, they would be interacting with male authority figures.86 The exceptions to this rule were columns like “Just Between Ourselves, Girls,” which were often the purview of female writers like Rose Harriet Pastor. Pitched as columns for young and/or female audiences, these columns may have seemed more suited to feminine authority. But when the Tageblat introduced a more broadly pitched, informational advice column on its English page, editors titled it “Sir Oracle,” again suggesting that the advice that served a broader community of readers should come from a masculine-­coded source.87

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In the early years of the “Bintel brief,” the Forverts had experimented with incorporating a separate space for female guidance and authority by creating a simultaneous, somewhat-­overlapping advice column by Matilda Lunts. This column first appeared in March 1906, two months after the “Bintel brief.” A self-­described “emancipated woman,” Lunts took an overtly political approach in advising readers and addressed her audiences as fellow “female socialists.” She also contrasted the types of advice readers would find in her column with that found in non-­ Yiddish newspapers, where advice columnists’ guidance was as likely to be steered by advertisers’ priorities as by deep commitments to female emancipation.88 As was true of early women’s columnists in the Tageblat, Lunts looked to a variety of sources when devising the topics of her columns, including current events, books she had recently read, or letters from readers. But in some cases, she and Cahan framed her column as an extension of the “Bintel brief ” by notifying readers that certain “Bintel brief ” submissions would be answered within Lunts’s column.89 By the end May 1906, the Forverts had ceased to publish Lunts’s women’s columns, and the “Bintel brief ” became the newspaper’s main venue for narrative-­driven advice.90 But this early moment of experimentation shows that the masculine brand of authority projected in the “Bintel brief ” was not necessarily inevitable. Throughout the publishing history of Yiddish newspapers, journalists shifted between describing advice columns as comprising entertaining reading material and practical, useful guidance. In attempting to delineate between these different functions, newspapers and their staffs experimented with different gendered ways of describing writers and reading audiences alike. Cahan and the Forverts staff, for example, sometimes used the “Bintel brief ’s” female audience, and the column’s affinity with advice columns like “Advice to the Lovelorn,” to portray the “Bintel brief ” as full of human interest. In contrast, when the Forverts wanted to describe the communal functions performed by the “Bintel brief,” it used language that implied that these features did not just cater to a female audience but instead were full of “important” questions from the paper’s esteemed readership. In an anonymous editorial two months after the “Bintel brief ” first appeared, the newspaper countered critiques that the “Bintel brief ”

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lowered the caliber of socialist journalism. The writer contrasted the serious, nuanced content of the column with features in the American popular press, which they dismissed as solely “advice about love-­things.” They insisted that, while “the intelligent readers of the English press do not read these sections and do not write to them,” the same was not true of the Forverts’s column.91 Similarly, Matilda Lunts began one column by expressing her gratitude to Cahan for the “honor” of allowing her to respond to the “important” “Bintel brief ” submissions within her column. In her assessment, any reader of the “Bintel brief ” “must come away with a deep impression as to the above-­average intelligence of the ‘Forverts’ readers.” Engaging with these questions thus elevated her columns, as well as her own authority.92

Advice On and Off the Page Through moments of cooperation and competition, newspapers’ staffs encouraged readers to view their publications as powerful communal institutions and as authoritative sources of advice and aid. In dozens of articles, publications touted their success in transforming readers’ lives, especially their ability to reunite long-­lost family members through their columns.93 Other articles stressed the tragic consequences of not following advice. One Forverts article described a murder-­suicide, in which a young man killed himself and his beloved after she refused to marry him. The Forverts revealed that this man had written to the “Bintel brief ” to seek advice and that he was carrying a clipping with the paper’s response at the time of his death. If he had followed the “Bintel brief ’s” advice, the Forverts asserted, this crime would not have occurred, as the paper had counseled him to move on.94 Like most features, these articles could be read in several ways: they had an instructive purpose while also adding sensationalism to the paper. Yiddish newspapers also found ways to emphasize their utility in other sections of the paper. An early example of this phenomenon was the Forverts’s coverage of kosher meat boycotts in 1902, in which housewives in New York protested against increased meat prices. In an article about the boycotts, the historian Paula Hyman describes the supportive attention that socialist and Orthodox newspapers gave to this agitation.95 But the Forverts also used its coverage to emphasize the role that

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the newspaper itself played in strike activities. One article recounted strikers’ agitation at a local synagogue. Many strikers, they asserted, were religious Jews and, as women, would not speak in front of a congregation. They needed a man to speak on their behalf, “but they could not find anyone that could speak before an audience.” Luckily, one man found a copy of the Forverts on the bime (podium) and read aloud from the “Sedre,” a column wherein Cahan explicated socialist principles or current events in ways that made them understandable to religiously oriented readers. This edition expressed support for the strike.96 “You see,” one woman remarked, “even the ‘Sedre’ is on our side.”97 By highlighting the fact that a copy the Forverts was already on the podium, the newspaper’s staff emphasized the extent to which Yiddish speakers—­even religiously observant ones—­had already incorporated the Forverts into their routines. And by describing the “Sedre” as a perfect mouthpiece for strikers’ demands, editors demonstrated how the newspaper could further readers’ political educations. In another strike-­related article, the Forverts recounted one reader’s visit to the paper’s office, asking for a dispensation to buy meat for his ailing wife. The article described the reader’s query as a “shayle,” a term usually referring to a question on religious law, posed to a rabbi.98 By recounting the interaction in this way, the Forverts highlighted the counseling role that the newspaper had assumed for readers, some of whom used it to replace more traditional forms of religious authority. The Forverts also emphasized its intimate connection to its readership by describing how this man was welcomed by the newspaper’s staff, receiving personal advice on how to balance ideology with everyday needs. The boycott happened two months after Cahan’s return to the Forverts, at a time when he was actively attempting to build relationships with readers. The paper’s coverage of the boycott reveals how the paper found ways to harness news coverage to encourage readers to view the Forverts as an indispensable resource. While the physical proximity of newspaper offices to many readers allowed Yiddish dailies to take on particularly potent advisory roles, they never viewed themselves as speaking solely to a local audience. Instead, newspapers marketed themselves as resources that readers living in other regions could draw on to remain tied to Jewish culture, however defined, or to one another. The desire to meet the needs of local,

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national, and even global audiences sometimes led to complications. The types of advice that a reader living in rural Pennsylvania might need to adjust to life in the United States varied significantly from the advice needed by a reader within walking distance of Yiddish Newspaper Row. Economic activities, interactions with non-­Jewish society, and institutional life varied greatly between cities with large, concentrated Jewish populations and smaller enclaves around the country. The desire of newspaper producers to guide the acclimation experiences of a mass audience was sometimes at odds with their desires to create a strong, centralized community of readers radiating out from Lower Manhattan.99 Leading Yiddish newspapers attempted to address this imbalance in several ways. Some published local editions in cities with larger Jewish populations, like Boston, Chicago, or Philadelphia.100 Others used write­in columns to encourage readers to correspond with one another. In March 1915, the Tageblat’s editors harnessed their power to bring readers together by introducing “Aunt Ray’s Club.” This column appeared on the Tageblat’s English page, reintroduced in 1914 after an eight-­year hiatus. “Aunt Ray’s Club” attracted a younger audience, initially children aged six to thirteen, and recounted events from Jewish history or counseled readers on how to remain true to their religion. Aunt Ray also asked readers to contribute stories and questions, encouraging them, “feel that in me you have found a friend who will always be interested in you and in what you do.”101 But the central function of Aunt Ray’s column was “to bring together the scattered children of Israel into a happy union” by fostering conversations between readers. Aunt Ray set up a “Correspondence Exchange” and asserted that readers met this opportunity with enthusiasm. She printed the names, ages, and addresses of hundreds of subscribers, and soon she expanded to include separate content and correspondence networks for high-­school-­aged readers.102 Beginning in 1916, Aunt Ray also discussed creating local branches where readers could meet in person. It is impossible to corroborate whether letters from Paul Cohen of St. Louis, Missouri, or Ethel Friedman of Yonkers, New York, were authentic.103 But this column at least projected an image of the Tageblat as creating a sense of virtual community among its far-­flung readers. In her column, Aunt Ray emphasized the importance of setting up these exchanges. Through this club, she hoped “to make girls and boys

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more interested in things Jewish,” “to give advice and help to those in need,” and “to brighten the lives of lonely nieces and nephews who live in little towns and cities.” These aims fit neatly with the Tageblat’s desires to encourage the maintenance of religious life among a younger generation. Through corresponding with other readers, even subscribers in small towns without large Jewish communities could be made to feel more connected with one another, which might make them less likely to stray from religious observance. At the same time, the column made sure to keep readers connected with the publication itself, making it a rule that “all members must be readers of the [Tageblat].”104 The infusion of advice columns, and other similar features, into the Yiddish press became fundamental to cultivating a sense of Jewish communal life that radiated out throughout the country. The majority of Jews who immigrated to the United States in the early twentieth century came from eastern Europe, but these immigrants did not necessarily see themselves as constituting one unified group. Instead, this migration was immensely varied with regard to class, subregional identity, religious observance, and political affiliation. Even readers living in close proximity once they arrived in the United States did not necessarily see themselves as inherently connected.105 By reading the same newspapers, many Yiddish-­speaking immigrants began to have common issues to discuss and shared ways to view and think about the world. Advice and guidance-­oriented material allowed readers to encounter newspapers as personal interlocutors and advisers, as well as to situate themselves as part of a collective reading audience.106

Readers Respond Yiddish newspapers were quick to highlight readers’ admiration of their advice columns. By apologizing to readers for not responding quickly enough to queries or admonishing readers for not sending the right types of submissions, Yiddish dailies gave their audiences the impression that they belonged to a broad community seeking counsel from newspapers.107 Although claims about the number of letters pouring in may be an exaggeration, there is substantial evidence that many readers did begin to see newspapers as valuable, multifaceted resources. Newspapers pervade autobiographies, oral histories, archival letters, and interviews

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by Jews who immigrated to the United States from eastern Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. They appear as reading material, tablecloths, floor coverings, packing supplies, food wrappings, and sources for dress patterns—­showing how enmeshed these publications became in readers’ lives.108 Readers living in immigrant neighborhoods generally first encountered Yiddish newspapers through newsboys, newsstands, neighbors, friends, or relatives. The memoirist Rose Cohen described reading discarded newspapers strewn about the Lower East Side—­allowing her to access these publications without having to buy them herself.109 Others passed newspapers around between households or read them aloud on stoops or in factories. This suggests that the audience for Yiddish newspapers was much larger than their circulation figures and also gives us insight into the ways that those who could not yet read began to absorb the contents of Yiddish newspapers.110 New York–­based memoirs also reveal the intimate form of authority afforded to newspapers and writers by their close proximity to local readers. The anarchist activist Marie Ganz described the thrill she felt as a child when she spotted the Forverts writer Ben Rubin at a neighborhood wedding. In Ganz’s recollection, Rubin’s position set him apart as “a much more impressive figure” than other attendees. She also highlighted how Rubin’s embeddedness in the neighborhood held the key to the power of his reportage, as “bits of [local] gossip” often made their way into his articles.111 This mix of intimacy and authority led many local readers to view Yiddish newspapers as personal interlocutors—­so much so that readers began stopping by newspapers’ offices to ask for counsel or aid. Cahan referred to these visits as the “spoken Bintel,” suggesting that these visits drew on dynamics set up by advice columns. These visits became so frequent that the Forverts initiated office hours, from four to six p.m., and staff members began to view these interactions as an informal “Social Services Department.”112 Other newspapers held similar office hours and hired staff members who devoted significant time not to drafting content for the paper but to engaging directly with readers by providing information and advice.113 These visits suggest how thoroughly some readers absorbed news­ papers’ attempts to market themselves as interactive resources—­sometimes

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in ways that these papers may have not intended or preferred. As Ganz and her friends became more politically active, they began pushing back against the guidance, literature, and reportage in the Forverts. When they found one serialized novel by Rubin to be particularly subpar, they “sent a committee to the editor, Rubin’s boss, to tell him so.” In the next issue, Ganz and her friends realized how successful their intercession had been, as they “found that Ben Rubin had obeyed his orders. He had put all his characters into a barn, set fire to the hay and burned them up,” bringing the novel to a speedy conclusion.114 Later, Ganz came to the Forverts office to ask the staff for charitable donations. When they declined, Ganz invoked the Forverts’s newly remodeled office building, insinuating that refusing to donate would suggest that the paper’s financial priorities did not live up to its editorial line.115 In Ganz’s telling, the relationships forged between Yiddish newspapers and readers sometimes afforded readers a remarkable amount of power in shaping how these publications conducted themselves on and off the page. For people living farther afield, in contrast, becoming newspaper readers was often facilitated by news agents employed by the Yiddish press.116 In 1910, A. S. Shokhet, a news agent for the Tageblat, described the relationships he cultivated during his travels. “If a bystander should consider with what love, with what honor, with what pleasure the newspaper-­ envoy is met in smaller country towns, and did not know this was a newspaper agent, he would surely think that new visitor in town was some sort of . . . relative.” Subscribers asked him to reveal the plot of the next installment of their favorite story. Others offered to introduce the Lithuanian Wisewoman (the female persona created by the editor Getsel Zelikovits) to potential spouses if she was single. Others asked Shokhet personally to convey questions to the editors of the “Briefkasten” or asked for details about “how their beloved newspaper is made, written, put together, and printed.” In Shokhet’s telling, news agents became extensions of the intimacy and authority that newspapers hoped to engender with readers. Shokhet described being invited inside readers’ homes and to communal events. At these events, Shokhet moved back and forth between being treated as a fellow community member and as a figure of authority, asked to adjudicate local disputes.117 These interactions also imply the settings in which far-­flung readers interacted with newspapers. Unlike Rose Cohen’s experiences in New York, not all

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readers would have encountered discarded Yiddish newspapers on the street. Nor could they obtain them from newsstands. Instead, newspapers were sent to readers’ homes. Nevertheless, these publications—­and their emissaries—­also portrayed themselves as integral parts of local events and communal life. Memoirs and oral histories also reveal the divergent ways that audiences read these publications. For some, newspaper reading was a form of escapism. In the writer Michael Gold’s (aka Itzok Isaac Granich) fictionalized account of his childhood, he described sensational reportage as his father’s only respite from depression and chronic illness: “His only distraction was to read the Yiddish newspapers, and to make gloomy conversation at night over the suicides, the hungry families, the robberies, murders and catastrophes that newspapers record.”118 Similarly, readers often used newspaper reading to break up the tedium of factory work or housework or to connect with family members after long workdays.119 Others, in contrast, viewed newspapers as serving a more educational role. One Forverts reader, named Minnie Goldstein, taught herself how to read using the “Bintel brief.”120 Cahan often asserted that this column served as an early reading primer for previously uneducated housewives, so Goldstein’s account suggests that there was at least some truth to these claims.121 Others viewed newspapers as central to their process of political awakening. The labor organizer Pauline Newman credited the Forverts with facilitating her entry into politics.122 Similarly, Clara Lemlich, one of the organizers of the New York shirtwaist strike of 1909, described how she and other organizers went to the Forverts office to ask for advice in getting their efforts off the ground.123 Still others looked to newspapers for a much more practical form of support: classifieds and want ads were invaluable resources for finding employment. The memoirist Elizabeth Hasanovitz, for example, described factoring newspapers into her meager budget to determine which companies were hiring. For her, newspapers were not a form of escapism but a crucial lifeline.124 The value of want ads also helps to explain the success of the conservative, Orthodox daily the Morgn-­ zhurnal. When it first appeared in 1901, it was the only Yiddish daily with a morning edition, making its want ads particularly useful for readers, who turned to the publication for this reason, even if they did not support the paper’s editorial line.125

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For many people, Yiddish newspaper reading was not a static experience. Instead, readers described changes in their reading habits and understandings of the role of newspapers over time. The labor organizer Abraham Bisno, for example, described how he initially learned to read Yiddish from newspapers and chapbooks upon his arrival to the United States in 1881. He was first drawn to popular fiction by writers like Shomer, whose work he would “absorb . . . enthusiastically and eagerly.” Over time, he began to critique popular fiction or sensationalized news coverage that did not reflect the realities of working-­class life: “There were . . . numerous sob stories of sick and hard-­working families, but very seldom were they given a social meaning.”126 Like Ganz, Bisno began to push back against the very aspects of newspapers that had drawn him to them in the first place. For other readers, this evolution found expression in shifting allegiances to different publications over time. In the sociologist Robert Park’s study of non-­Anglophone newspapers, he cast the Yiddish press as a transitional publication for readers who could not yet read Anglophone newspapers.127 But many readers actually continued to subscribe to the Yiddish press after they began reading in English.128 Many also read several Yiddish papers simultaneously. Adolph Held of the Forverts, for example, recounted that his father subscribed both to the socialist Abend blat and the religious Tageblat.129 Moreover, many readers changed the newspapers they read over the years. Upon their arrival in the United States, many initially read the Forverts, finding its simple prose and entertaining features to be the most accessible. Over time, some decided to switch to the communist Frayhayt, the anarchist Fraye arbeter shtime, or the nonpartisan Tog, which readers viewed as more intellectually complex. Others began to supplement daily newspapers with literary or political journals, which catered to more select audiences. In recounting their reading habits, readers reflected a sense of internal hierarchy within Yiddish publishing, where not only were different features meant to serve different needs but different publications were seen as meeting the needs of different readers.130 Readers’ responses can also be gleaned from unpublished queries to Yiddish newspapers. Most Yiddish newspapers were not in in the habit of keeping letters from readers in their permanent files. But the institutional archive of one Yiddish daily, the Tog, houses a treasure

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trove of unpublished letters. Included with many of these letters are drafts of the Tog’s responses signed by the paper’s “Information Department,” “Editors,” and “Editorial Secretary,” although most were written by Helen Atkins.131 Though the paper was founded in 1914, most extant letters were written in the 1920s and 1930s. No records in the archive explain what was kept and why, so it remains unclear why this archive is so weighted to materials from those years or whether these letters are representative of letters before or after this period. However, even with these questions left unanswered, these letters provide a fascinating window into the many forms of interaction between this newspaper and its readers. Readers wrote to the Tog with comments and questions about articles they read in the paper. They added their own wisdom to the advice from editors. They excoriated columnists when they dared to take vacations. But many also wrote with queries unrelated to the paper’s content—­asking for job recommendations, research assistance, and advice on communal institutions to avail themselves of or to support with donations.132 These letters reveal the variety of roles readers viewed the Tog as playing in their lives. Some asked the Tog to act as an information service, answering questions or gathering data. One particularly desperate reader, S. Lerman of Campbellsville, Kentucky, viewed the Tog as a mix of personal secretary and cosmopolitan lifeline. He asked the paper’s staff to type up handwritten letters in Russian so that he could send them to their intended recipients. “As I live in Kentucky, where one cannot find a Russian typewriter,” he explained, “I must come to you.”133 Others saw the paper as a matchmaker, asking to be set up with suitable partners. A young widow named Pauline Freedman, for example, wrote to the Tog asking for advice on how to meet men who were more “settled” than those she met at dances.134 Still others saw the paper as a general authority on Jewish life, asking for information about Jewish communities throughout the country. Samuel Yochelson of Buffalo, New York, wrote in with a detailed list of questions about life in Tucson, Arizona, a city where he intended to move. “Who are the leading Jewish citizens of that city,” he wanted to know. “Are there any second-­hand clothing stores in this region, and is peddling profitable?” “Are the majority of gentiles in this city anti-­semitic or liberal?”135

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Several of these letters credited advice columns with inspiring them to write to the paper. In Freedman’s query, she identified herself as “a frequent reader of your paper” who was “especially interested in your advice column.”136 Similarly, Sarah Abramson began her letter by recounting, “since my father has often read letters to me, printed in your paper, in which advice is asked, I am taking the liberty to ask whether you can help me.”137 However, many of these information and advice seekers explicitly asked for their letters not to be published—­suggesting that readers saw the advisory function of the Tog as extending beyond the pages of the paper and as constituting a personal, private relationship. Though exchanges between readers and editors happening off the page were certainly less mediated than those on the page, letters from readers still reflected the influence of tropes surrounding reader-­editor interaction set up by the newspaper’s advice columns. Most letters to the Tog, for example, began or ended with a statement that described the writer’s relationship with the paper—­emphasizing that they or their family were longtime readers. Almost all said that they were including a “self-­addressed, stamped envelope.” These formulas established why the letter writer felt they could call on the paper for advice and provided a means for the paper to reply. But the wording used in these letters was so formulaic that it suggests readers were conditioned to write these letters in this way from their reading of the paper itself. One letter writer, for example, said that his query was “kurts and tsum punkt,” short and to the point—­the exact phrasing newspapers used to describe the letters they welcomed from their readers.138 In George Wolfe’s study of the “Bintel brief,” he described a similar dynamic in unprinted and printed letters to the Forverts. All of them began by stating their relationship with the paper, though he noted that editors often embellished these statements when preparing letters for print. However, even unpublished letters revealed that readers had learned over time both to view newspapers as resources and how to ask for that guidance from their favorite newspaper.139 In Magdalena J. Zaborowska’s work on memoirs by eastern European immigrants, she highlights different forms of mediation in the writing of turn-­of-­the century immigrants. Like all memoirs, these sources reflect the authors’ retrospective understandings of their lives, as well as the political and cultural context in which they were written. In the 1910s

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and early 1920s, for example, many young Jewish women, such as Mary Antin, Rose Cohen, and Elizabeth Stern, published popular memoirs describing their acclimation into American society. According to Zaborowska, all of these sources reflected a cultural climate where eastern European immigrants faced particular suspicion and scrutiny. These memoirs were meant to serve, at least in part, as a counterweight to these suspicions, and authors emphasized the ways in which their lives conformed to the contours of the American Dream. Moreover, many writers rewrote the stories of their lives at different moments—­changing themes and details in each retelling. In addition, as Zaborowska notes, the ways in which these authors narrated their life stories was also influenced by their reading habits: many of these authors read each other’s narratives and were inspired by them when recounting their own life experiences. These sources reveal how crucial reading practices were not just for incorporating materials like newspapers into readers’ lives but also in shaping how readers understood and retold their lives in retrospect.140 Similar dynamics pervade another invaluable resource on readers’ responses to the Yiddish press: oral histories conducted by Jewish organizations. In the early 1960s, YIVO sponsored an oral history project, wherein the sociologist Moses Kligsberg interviewed almost four dozen participants in the Jewish labor movement who had migrated to the United States in the preceding decades. These interviews, conducted in Yiddish and English, provide a fascinating window into individuals’ experiences of cultural adaptation. Without fail, interviewees identified themselves as frequent readers of the Yiddish press and cited the crucial roles that newspapers played as educators, political advisers, and sources of entertaining reading material. However, interview transcripts reveal that these responses about the close, multifaceted relationships that readers enjoyed with their Yiddish newspapers were not spontaneous. Instead, newspaper reading came up in these interviews because the interviewer explicitly asked subjects to describe their relationships with newspapers. Moreover, these questions were asked in a way that prompted readers to view their relationships with newspapers as evolving over time. Most interviews featured some variation of the question, “Can you tell me, what newspapers you read in the first years [after you came to the United States] and which you read

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now?”141 Others also include questions about the role of newspapers in the interviewee’s acculturation process. These questions suggested how readers should have incorporated newspapers into their lives and that their reading habits should have changed over time. Like newspapers themselves, this format encouraged subjects to understand their relationships with the Yiddish press in certain ways. To be sure, interviewees did not necessarily follow the scripts laid out for them. While the interviewer asked one subject, Shlomo Shapiro, to begin his interview by recounting his immigration to the United States, Shapiro insisted on beginning with his childhood in Europe.142 Many interviews were also interrupted by third parties—­in the case of male interviewees, their wives often contributed commentary. Although Abraham Belson was the nominal subject of one interview, his wife offered her own insights on his life. Belson eventually suggested that the interviewer direct certain questions to his wife instead of him, as she was “the intelligent one in the house.”143 Interviews conducted by Irving Howe for his book World of Our Fathers reflected a similar dynamic. When Howe asked one interviewee, Abe Zwerkin, about his changing reading habits, his wife corrected her husband’s answers when she felt they were misleading. Zwerkin attested at one point that only his wife still read the communist Frayhayt, and his wife reminded him that he also often “looks through it.”144 Moments like these suggest that interviewers and their subjects did not always agree on the proper way to recount their life stories—­nor did subjects’ relatives always agree on how to best narrate these events.

Conclusion Sources from readers and newspapers alike detail a complex and long-­running relationship between the Yiddish press and its readers. Audiences read and wrote to the papers’ different advice columns as a source of entertainment, catharsis, identification, and information. But they also created relationships with newspapers informed by, but extending beyond, their reading habits. Because newspapers marketed themselves as guides, readers began to turn to them as advisers, confidants, and teachers on a range of subjects. Thus, through introducing advice columns, write-­in columns, and other guidance-­based features,

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the Yiddish press drew on American models to become central, multifaceted resources in Jewish life. As had been true since the advent of Yiddish daily newspapers in the United States in the 1880s, questions of gender became crucial to Yiddish newspapers’ attempts to use advice columns to diversify their audiences and market themselves as multivalent, invaluable resources. At different junctures, editors, writers, and readers chose to emphasize or to downplay newspapers’ roles as fountains of advice, entertainment, authority, and community. In each instance, shifting back and forth between describing the masculine and feminine nature of advice and guidance within the Yiddish press became a powerful rhetorical strategy to delineate between these functions. Drawing on gendered tropes within American popular culture and international Yiddish culture alike, Yiddish newspapers thus cultivated a complex, evolving relationship with their reading audience. In addition to incorporating advice columns with shifting gendered connotations, each Yiddish daily also experimented with women’s columns in the first decades of the twentieth century. By explicitly addressing a female audience, these features appeared on the surface to constitute a separate sphere from other sections of Yiddish newspapers. But in reality, they were very much in conversation with the rest of the publications in which they ran. As is explored in chapter 3, writers associated with various Yiddish dailies used the space of women’s columns and other related features to direct ideological messages toward readers; to balance their publications’ various ideological, commercial, and literary commitments; to redirect readers to other sections of the newspaper; and to shape the reading habits that their audience used to approach Yiddish newspapers as a whole.

3

“From a Woman to Women” Conversations in and around Women’s Columns

In 1915, the Forverts introduced a column called “Fun a foy tsu froyen” (From a woman to women). Editor Abraham Cahan had long expressed a desire to use features like “A bintel brief,” human-­interest stories, and serialized fiction to entice women to read the Forverts. However, this column constituted one of the paper’s first sustained attempts to introduce an explicitly labeled women’s column. Within the column, a writer identified as Klara Ginzburg spoke to readers about fashion and love and offered commentary on the news of the day.1 If letters published in the Forverts are any indication, readers were both intrigued and perplexed by Ginzburg’s column. Though the paper had included sporadic articles by women writers in the past, readers highlighted the novelty of regularly seeing a woman’s name in print in the socialist daily. One reader, Polly Shvidel, described her excitement to find “that in a socialist paper a woman was writing to women,” noting that it made her “heart beat with joy.”2 Another, Hirsh Reyf, noted that he was “not accustomed to a woman writing in newspaper[s], which [are] always filled with articles by men.”3 On this front, the Forverts was not alone. Before American Yiddish dailies introduced formally designated women’s pages, they each began with more limited content addressing a female audience, most of which was written by men. While readers expressed enthusiasm about seeing a female writer regularly featured in the Forverts, they also voiced their doubts about how the content of Ginzburg’s columns related to the political project of the newspaper as a whole. Shvidel wondered if a column that dealt mainly with fashion, housekeeping, or love was truly an appropriate feature for a socialist paper. She had initially assumed the column would focus on female emancipation. But when she read it, she noticed that rather than advising readers “to live and strive for freedom, [Ginzburg] tells them, 101

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first, to wear pretty hats according to her taste, and, second, to always stand and wash out their cups with soap and clean their ovens with polish so they shine.”4 Reyf so disagreed with Ginzburg’s advice that he wondered “whether that which Klara Ginzburg writes in the ‘Forverts’ is only [written] with the goal of generating debate, or if it is simply because she writes the way she does, that I must always think the opposite of what she says.”5 The Forverts probably published these responses in an effort to publicize Ginzburg’s column. As was true of advice columns, letters from readers featured in other sections of a newspaper did not always reflect reader response in aggregate and may or may not have been authentic. But the concerns expressed in these letters testified to key dilemmas faced by every Yiddish daily in the first decades of the twentieth century. Editors and publishers, taking their cue from the American mainstream press, assumed that women’s content was a crucial component of a popular, commercially viable newspaper. But what did it mean to incorporate this content into a radical or religious Yiddish newspaper? Should this content conform to the paper’s ideological project? Or should it balance out more doctrinaire content by infusing the paper with human interest? And who should write this material, men or women? These questions pervaded the American Yiddish newspaper market. After the turn of the century, and increasingly in the lead-­up to World War I, Yiddish newspapers experimented with a variety of women’s columns and other related features, ultimately culminating in the introduction of women’s pages in every major Yiddish daily between 1914 and 1926. Scholars who have focused on material for women in the Yiddish press have primarily explored the period after the advent of women’s pages, when writing for (and often by) women was mainly separated into one confined space.6 But many of these columns, and their authors’ careers, spanned the periods before and after the introduction of these sections. In the period before the advent of women’s pages, these features frequently engaged in conversation with other sections of the newspaper, either symbolically or literally. Many women’s columns even referenced news stories or advice columns within the same newspaper, encouraging readers to consume this content in tandem. In each Yiddish daily, women’s columns, and other related features, constituted attempts to direct ideological messages to female readers,

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usually a fusion of the paper’s political or religious perspective and an ethos that centered married women in the home and as the drivers of family consumption. But, as Yiddish newspaper publishers and editors were well aware, women were never the exclusive readers of women’s columns; nor did women readers necessarily confine their reading habits to the content explicitly marketed toward them. While this content usually overtly addressed a female audience, it also constituted a critical component of newspapers’ broader attempts to balance ideological potency with other commercial or literary goals. At times, these goals worked in tandem, one bolstering the other. In other cases, the tensions and contradictions between these aims became a topic of fierce debate. Considering three case studies—­Rose Pastor Stokes’s experiences working first for the Orthodox Tageblat and later for the socialist Forverts; Getsel Zelikovits’s warring women’s and men’s columns in the Tageblat; and the Forverts’s fusion of consumption, entertainment, and radicalism in its advertisements and news coverage—­illuminates the crucial and complex roles that content for and about women, and the conversations it generated, played in the development of the Yiddish press before the introduction of women’s pages. Together, these cases expose women’s columns as deeply conversational spaces, where gendered debates became tropes through which to explore the variety of complex motivations animating Yiddish newspaper publishing.

Rose Pastor Stokes: “Just Between Ourselves, Girls” In 1918, the radical activist Rose Pastor Stokes was tried and convicted of espionage after criticizing the United States’ involvement in World War I. During the trial, Pastor mistakenly stated, or newspapers mistakenly reported, that she had moved to New York almost two decades prior to become the editor of the Tageblat.7 In response, the paper’s publishers put out a press release refuting these claims. While Pastor had indeed worked for the Tageblat before her marriage to the millionaire socialist J. G. Phelps Stokes, the paper’s management asserted, she had not been the paper’s editor but “a contributor to the girls’ page only.” In reporting on this exchange, the Christian Science Monitor sympathetically, and condescendingly, noted that it was probably not Pastor’s intention to lie

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about her position. “It is quite a common thing for those who contribute to a department of a newspaper to mistake themselves for editors.”8 By asserting that Pastor had worked “only” for the paper’s “girls’ page,” the Tageblat’s management hoped to minimize Pastor’s connection to the paper. They implied that its women’s content was separate from the rest of the publication, spatially and with regard to importance, and thus that Pastor’s contributions should not tarnish the reputation of the paper as a whole. But in the paper’s rebuttal, the Tageblat missed the mark. Pastor had not worked on “the girls’ page only” during her tenure at the Tageblat, as the newspaper did not introduce a women’s page until almost a decade after Pastor ceased working there. Instead, Pastor worked as a writer, secretary, and assistant editor for the paper’s English Department. To be sure, much of the writing she published fit within the category of “women’s content”—­material such as human-­interest columns, short fiction, or poetry, which editors felt that women readers would be most interested in reading and that women writers were most capable of writing.9 However, she also contributed content to the publication anonymously and under pseudonyms—­some of which fell outside of the usual confines editors and publishers imposed on women’s writing. Moreover, by some accounts, Pastor’s women’s columns were the most popular articles on the Tageblat’s English page among male and female readers alike. In fact, according to one journalist, Joseph Chaikin, it was Pastor’s popularity with the Tageblat’s readership that spurred the paper’s decision to discontinue its English Department soon after her departure. Editors were afraid that news of Pastor’s marriage to a non-­Jewish man might influence Tageblat readers to intermarry themselves.10 Both at the time and in retrospect, discussing Pastor’s journalistic output and experiences became a meditation on gender, genre, and authority within the Yiddish press. Pastor’s life and career were in many ways unique. She attained an editorial position—­a rare feat for women throughout the history of the Yiddish press—­and her association with the Tageblat eventually served as a springboard that launched her into a much-­publicized marriage, a career in activism, and worldwide fame. However, the parameters of her journalistic career reflected broader dynamics in the Yiddish press, highlighting patterns that carried through to the careers of many of the women and men who wrote women’s columns. Like several of these

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figures, Pastor actually wrote a variety of content, not just women’s columns, though this fact might not have been apparent to readers on the basis of newspaper bylines. Moreover, like many other writers, she wrote for multiple Yiddish newspapers espousing different ideological agendas, in her case the Orthodox Tageblat and the socialist Forverts. Pastor sometimes conformed her writing to fit these divergent venues. At other times, she found ways to infuse her columns with her own political outlook, even when these messages did not fit with the ideology of the newspapers in which her work ran. As was true for most women’s columnists who worked for the Yiddish press, both male and female, Pastor expressed a complicated relationship with her writing. And at various times, editors and publishers highlighted, elided, or mischaracterized Pastor’s relationship to their papers in order to make claims about these publications as a whole. Because of Pastor’s prolific career and later fame, we have ample sources to reconstruct her experiences working for the Yiddish press—­a luxury not afforded for many women writers.11 Pastor’s career thus serves as a window into broader patterns of what it meant to be a women’s columnist in the pre-­women’s-­page Yiddish press.

“A Process of Breaking Me In”: Pastor and the Tageblat In 1901, twenty-­one-­year-­old Rose Harriet Pastor was working at a cigar factory in Cleveland, Ohio, when she responded to a call for readers to submit letters to the Tageblat. She had immigrated with her mother, stepfather, and siblings to the United States a decade prior, and her letter described her experiences at the factory and her nascent interest in writing. As was described in chapter 2, this letter led to her appointment as a freelance writer for the paper’s English Department, sending dispatches to the paper’s office from her home in Ohio.12 For a year and a half, Pastor “burnt the candle at both ends,” working in the factory all day and writing all night. Soon this double shift became overwhelming, and Pastor’s mother implored her to give up writing for the sake of her health. At this point, Pastor was her family’s primary breadwinner. Her stepfather had abandoned them—­too ashamed, in Pastor’s telling, that he could not provide for his family. As freelance writing paid less than factory work, Pastor gave up her columns. She

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only returned to the paper six months later at the urging of the English-­ page editor, A. H. Fromenson. Fromenson had received “hundreds of letters” from readers asking when she would return. This outcry allowed Fromenson to convince the paper’s publishers, the Sarasohns, that Pastor would make a valuable member of their staff. The Sarasohns agreed to promote Pastor to a full-­time position by having her serve as a secretary as well as a writer.13 Pastor’s early forays into journalism highlight the complicated financial realities of working for the Yiddish press, regardless of gender. Though the Tageblat and other papers had writers on staff, many contributors worked freelance. According to the historian Norma Fain Pratt, it was especially common for women to contribute freelance to the Yiddish press, a dynamic that continued even after the advent of women’s pages.14 As Pastor’s early career reflects, freelancing for Yiddish publications was not a particularly lucrative or stable career. While Pastor earned two dollars each time editors agreed to publish a column, which was by no means guaranteed, Pastor steadily earned five or six dollars per week in factories. Only after obtaining a full-­time position, one that combined writing with administrative duties, could Pastor pursue a career in journalism. Her new job at the Tageblat paid fifteen dollars per week, over twice as much as she earned at the factory and, according to his memoir, the same salary Cahan received during his initial stint as Forverts editor in 1897.15 With this offer in hand, Pastor moved from Ohio to New York to become a full-­time member of the Tageblat’s staff. Before the advent of women’s pages, there were very few women with regular bylines in Yiddish newspapers. Writers like Yente Serdatsky or Miriam Karpilove occasionally contributed works of fiction or, much less frequently, political commentary, especially to publications espousing radical politics. However, it was exceedingly rare for women to achieve full-­time positions, let alone editorial positions.16 The English Department of the Tageblat was the major exception to this rule, which frequently included content by women writers, including translations, short stories, and columns by writers like Miriam Shomer, as well as reprinted content by American and British authors like Grace Aguilar, Rebecca Altman, and Esther Ruskay. The Tageblat introduced its English Department in 1897 in an attempt to attract a younger audience and

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modernize the newspaper. To achieve these aims, the paper filled its English page with human-­interest pieces, women’s columns, and fiction adapted from, or in the style of, the American popular press. As the page’s editor, Fromenson hired young writers, including several women, to write articles or to comb through the pages of other publications for content to reprint.17 In contrast, the Yiddish-­language women’s columns during Pastor’s era were all written by men. As was true of many female journalists in this period—­in the Yiddish press and elsewhere—­Pastor often felt constrained by editors’ assumptions about what she should contribute to the newspaper.18 Her most regular contribution was a women’s column, “Just Between Ourselves, Girls,” which she published under the pseudonym Zelda. In addition, she also regularly published a column of aphorisms called “Ethics of the Dustpan,” as well as poems and short stories. Pastor later recalled that Fromenson asked her to confine the subjects of her articles to “personal relationships; problems of the home,” topics about which Pastor was not always enthusiastic. Moreover, Fromenson also attempted to shape the arguments she conveyed within her columns, so that they would conform with the paper’s emphasis on religious observance and social conservatism: “Not being politically awake, I was unaware of being guided. I took every suggestion gratefully and in good faith. Reading back, I find my material dominated by the traditional viewpoint.”19 Typical columns by Pastor admonished readers for not being kinder to their mothers, considering intermarriage, or reading cheap fiction. She also encouraged readers’ religious observance and invoked religious texts in her columns, reframing the biblical story of Joseph, for example, as a morality tale about the dangers of gaudy fashion.20 While the conservative, religiously tinged advice Pastor offered in her columns is not surprising given the Tageblat’s framework, it does not necessarily comport with the trajectory of Pastor’s own life or with the causes she championed in her subsequent activism. In one column, for instance, Pastor advised a female reader not to continue dating a socialist boyfriend.21 In another, she counseled a reader against marrying a non-­Jewish beau. Pastor argued that reaching out for advice was itself a sign that this union was not a good idea: “It is because you are not so absolutely sure it is nice to marry a Christian. . . . That is why you write and ask for advice.”22 Two years later, Pastor made headlines by marrying the

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non-­Jewish J. G. Phelps Stokes, following a very different path from the counsel she provided in the Tageblat. In the Anglophone press, it was not uncommon for female columnists to create personas whose names or purported life experiences differed from their own. Two of the United States’ most celebrated advice givers, Beatrix Fairfax and Dorothy Dix, were pseudonyms for Marie Manning and Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer, respectively. While “Fairfax” and “Dix” asserted that their advice stemmed from their own experiences as wives or mothers, these narratives belied the more complex personal lives of Manning and Gilmer. While Gilmer never had children and was estranged from her abusive husband, for instance, her journalistic persona, Dorothy Dix, was a happily married maternal figure.23 The divergence between Pastor’s life and the counsel she provided to the Tageblat’s readers highlights changes in Pastor’s political trajectory over time, while also reflecting the fact that serving as an advice columnist was a form of public performance—­one that balanced the entertainment and informative functions of newspaper writing, as well as the perceived or real interests of writers, editors, and readers alike. While Pastor chafed at the types of columns she was assigned while working for the Tageblat, the paper frequently published letters from readers expressing their appreciation for Pastor’s guidance. In addition to letters from female devotees, Pastor also reprinted letters from male readers, one of whom praised her for her conservative, religiously tinged guidance: “I think they are to the young generation what the ‘toitch khumesh’ [sic; a religious text written for female readers] was to their mothers. You teach them to be good and ‘frum’ [religiously observant].”24 Pastor featured letters from this same reader, identified as Yankel, on several occasions. He also wrote to complain about young women he encountered or to refute purported charges that “Yankel” was a pseudonym and not a real person.25 These exchanges suggested the avid nature of Pastor’s male and female fan base, while also perhaps constituting an attempt by Yankel himself to make inroads as a writer in the Yiddish press. As Pastor found herself drawn more to radical political causes, she found ways to infuse these ideas into her writing as well. In one poem, Pastor reflected on how people with wealth gained their riches by exploiting the labor of others:

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The wealth by rich men reached and kept Was not obtained by fingers ten; Ah no! For while the rich men slept The wealth-­producers worked for them.26

According to Pastor, she was able to publish poems like this because Fromenson did not pay consistently close attention to the content she wrote for the Tageblat: “Such deviations usually slipped through . . . only because of the carelessness on the part of the responsible editors.”27 Though Fromenson encouraged Pastor to infuse her writing with conservative messages, he did not always make sure she followed through. This allowed Pastor the freedom occasionally to shift her women’s columns and other writing away from the Tageblat’s ideological line. While the bylines on the Tageblat’s English page made it seem as if Pastor was almost exclusively writing women’s content for the publication, her memoirs reveal that her contributions to the publication sometimes extended beyond these boundaries. Pastor, for instance, often contributed to the paper’s popular “East Side Observer” column—­short sketches about life on the Lower East Side—­as well as writing the English page’s unsigned editorials when Fromenson was out of town. All of these duties were confined to the English Department, not the more robust Yiddish sections of the paper. This suggests that different cultural hierarchies or editorial priorities governed these two sections of the paper and perhaps that Fromenson was even more interested in infusing his section of the Tageblat with commercial appeal and features inspired by the American popular press than were his counterparts on the paper’s Yiddish pages. These forays into non-­women-­centric content by Pastor did not necessarily reflect the paper’s desires to diversify the content it tasked women with writing. Instead, it reflected the fact that the Tageblat, while no longer the one-­man operation it was in its first decade, was still short-­staffed, which compelled staff members to produce as much material as possible.28 In addition to revealing the variety of content Pastor contributed to the Tageblat, her memoirs also reveal that there were other women working behind the scenes at the newspaper, performing many of the administrative duties necessary to keep the paper running. In recalling her time at the Tageblat, Pastor devoted particular attention to her

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friendship with another secretary working for the publication, Belle Sapiro, who invited Pastor to live with her when Pastor first arrived in New York. During Pastor’s tenure at the Tageblat, Sapiro married Abraham Sarasohn, the Tageblat publisher’s younger son. Though Pastor’s and Sapiro’s lives diverged significantly over time, the two maintained a close friendship.29 Women like Sapiro were crucial for ensuring that the Tageblat appeared each day, while also helping Pastor navigate her early years in New York and at the Tageblat. *** Pastor’s publishing under her own name, under pseudonyms, and anonymously allowed her to try her hand at different journalistic genres. However, producing so much material, and combining writing with administrative duties, also proved quite taxing. Though Pastor initially expected that moving to New York would be an emancipatory experience, she soon wondered whether the relentless pace of journalism was any better than factory work: “The paper is a devil-­fish,” she recalled in her memoir. “I feel its tentacles about me, no time to read, no time to think, no more books. I am sucked up into a maw hungrier than that of the factory.”30 As Pastor became more politically aware, she also became increasingly disenchanted with the political scene surrounding the Tageblat. When working in the office, she witnessed Democratic and Republican politicians meeting with publisher Kasriel Sarasohn, noticing that officials from both parties left feeling assured that they had bought the magnate’s support. She watched these interactions with her friend Israel Zevin, who wrote under the penname Tashrak. A veteran writer, Zevin explained to Pastor that these interactions were not uncommon: “Newspapers are like that. Corrupt. Take money from both capitalist parties—­sell their columns outright.”31 Looking back on this period in her memoirs, Pastor highlighted the inconsistencies in the political and cultural projects of her onetime employer. Not only did Pastor find the workload and politics at the Tageblat stifling, but she maintained a particularly fraught relationship with Fromenson. According to Pastor, the two had initially struck up an epistolary friendship before she came to New York, which eventually took on a romantic tone. But from the moment Pastor arrived in New York, Fromenson became cold and distant. It soon became clear that he was,

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in fact, engaged to another woman, whom he soon married.32 Though Pastor did not explicitly say so in her memoir, it seems likely that this personal disillusionment compounded her professional dissatisfaction. Fromenson had invited Pastor to New York under what she saw as false pretenses—­promises of love, the financial stability of marriage, and professional fulfillment, all of which were frustrated upon her arrival. While working together, Fromenson vacillated between ignoring her and providing overbearing guidance. Over time, Pastor began pushing back against this brand of editorial authority. In Pastor’s telling, these tensions came to a head in the summer of 1903, when Fromenson assigned her to conduct a series of interviews with settlement-­house workers on the Lower East Side. She attempted to relinquish the assignment, accusing Fromenson of being too forceful in his attempts to “ ‘direct the tone’ of the interviews.” However, she soon relented, after he threatened to fire her if she refused. Conducting these interviews would turn out to be a transformative experience for Pastor, as it was through one of them that she met her future husband. After the interview, Pastor and Stokes became friends and eventually fell in love. Pastor quit the Tageblat soon after their engagement in 1905.33 Much of what we know about Pastor’s time at the Tageblat comes from her unfinished memoir, which she wrote in the early 1930s. In this work, she recounted her life story as one of gradual political awakening, anticipating her eventual role as one of the founders of the Communist Party of America in 1919. In successive drafts of her memoir, she rewrote her experiences to better conform with the changing ideologies of the Communist Party.34 Her account emphasized the tension between her growing political awareness and her duties at the politically and socially conservative Tageblat. At the same time, the memoir also provides insight into the ways in which Pastor’s career was shaped by the expectations that publications like the Tageblat carried in relation to female readers and writers, while also revealing how female staff members found ways to subvert or step beyond these expectations.

From “Zelda” to “Comrade Rose Pastor Stokes” Though Pastor’s time working for the Tageblat constituted her most sustained period of engagement with the Yiddish press, it was not her only

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experience writing for Yiddish newspapers. Two years after her marriage, Pastor, now known as Rose Pastor Stokes, began serving as an advice columnist for the Forverts, answering queries sent to the paper’s most famous advice column, the “Bintel brief.” In some ways, the fact that Pastor switched venues from the Orthodox Tageblat to the socialist Forverts signaled her evolution into a radical activist. However, it was also common for writers to work for multiple Yiddish publications over time or for a mix of papers in Yiddish and other languages. In many cases, this meant that writers wrote for newspapers that espoused very different ideological agendas. In the period before the advent of women’s pages, when most advice columnists and women’s columnists in the Yiddish press were men, male writers often performed these roles for different papers over the course of their careers.35 Like Pastor, while these male writers also wrote non-­women’s-­centric content, they often felt constrained by their association with women’s columns. A prime example of this phenomenon was David Hermalin, who wrote for both socialist and nonpartisan newspapers. In these positions, Hermalin gained a particular reputation for writing compelling women’s columns, which did not necessarily garner him respect in the Yiddish publishing sphere. In 1909, the humor periodical Der groyser kundes lampooned Hermalin’s reputation as the “women’s editor of the ‘Varhayt,’ ” depicting him flanked by and caressing an adoring female public (figure 3.1). When Hermalin left the staff of the socialist Varhayt to join the nonpartisan Tog in 1914, he hoped that this transition would begin a more “respectable” phase of his career—­working as the paper’s editor in chief or news editor. But, according Tog staff member Moyshe Katz, the management appointed him instead as “exclusively the writer of ‘editorials’ about morals, religion, family-­things, and in general about ‘human interest.’ ”36 For Hermalin, shifting to the Tog was an attempt to escape the less prestigious field of women’s content. For his colleagues, the fact that he could not do so reflected his lack of journalistic prowess. Thus, it was not solely female journalists like Pastor whose association with women’s content shaped their journalistic reputations. Editors and publishers of Yiddish newspapers often equated content associated with female readers with financial success, popularization, or entertainment-­ driven content, categories that did not always garner prestige for writers. The careers of writers like Pastor and Hermalin uncover the paradoxical

Figure 3.1. S. Raskin, “Hermalin—­(‘H’)—­The Women’s Editor of the ‘Varhayt,’ ” Der groyser kundes, December 10, 1909. (From the Library of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research)

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place of women’s content and those who wrote it within the sphere of Yiddish journalism, as both were seen simultaneously as immensely valuable commercially but as second rate with regard to cultural importance. In the case of Pastor, these dynamics took on new complications when she shifted from working on the staff of the Orthodox Tageblat to working freelance for the socialist Forverts. In some ways, her previous experiences colored how the Forverts described her association with the paper. But in other ways, her time at the Forverts diverged from her previous experiences. In the lead-­up to Pastor’s debut, the Forverts began publicizing Pastor’s column in Yiddish-­and English-­language venues. When discussing Pastor’s connection with the paper, the Forverts and other newspapers experimented with different ways of describing her column and its relationship to the rest of the paper. On its own pages, the Forverts sometimes emphasized the political alignment between the paper and Pastor, asserting that it was only fitting that such a prominent radical figure be featured in one of the world’s premier socialist publications. It also informed readers that “Comrade Rose Pastor Stokes” would respond to letters submitted to the “Bintel brief.” These descriptions suggested that Pastor’s radical bona fides would bolster the paper’s credentials and that her contributions would build off the paper’s previous repertoire.37 At the same time, the Forverts also suggested that incorporating Pastor’s column added an element of sensationalism and entertainment value to the paper. As a result of her marriage, Pastor had achieved a remarkable level of fame. Mainstream newspapers covered her engagement with great zeal, and several even reprinted articles that Pastor had previously published in the Tageblat.38 Before the appearance of her new column, the Forverts announced this series in an article calling Pastor “The Sensation of the English Newspapers,” referring both to the notoriety surrounding her marriage and to the recent news coverage devoted to her new partnership with the Forverts. The article included a photograph of Pastor, pen in hand, staring directly into the camera (figure 3.2).39 This same image ran atop Pastor’s Forverts column throughout its run—­an honor usually reserved for Yiddish newspapers’ most prominent journalists. While the “Bintel brief ” and other columns cultivated a personal relationship between editors and readers, incorporating images bolstered this dynamic by ensuring that Pastor’s celebrity status fed

Figure 3.2. Rose Paster Stokes: “The Sensation of the English Newspapers,” Forverts, August 8, 1907. This same image accompanied Pastor’s series of columns. (From the Collection of the National Library of Israel, The Forward Association, and the New York Public Library; Historical Jewish Press website—­www.Jpress.org.il—­founded by the National Library and Tel Aviv University)

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into these columns and into the sales of the Forverts.40 Cahan touched briefly on Pastor’s time working for the Forverts in his memoir, particularly highlighting this visual aspect: “if you rifle through the pages of the ‘Forverts’ [in 1907 and 1908], you will see her name and her picture on the ‘Bintel brief.’ ”41 In the Forverts itself, therefore, the paper’s management shifted back and forth between highlighting Pastor’s radical bona fides and her celebrity status. In contrast, in their coverage of this new partnership, mainstream Anglophone newspapers described Pastor’s column in ways that evoked her previous experiences as a women’s columnist and elided her radicalism. The Washington Post stated that Pastor was taking over the Forverts’s preexisting “ ‘Balm for Lovers’ column.”42 Others characterized her column in the Forverts as “advice to young girls” or confused it with her previous Tageblat column, calling it “Just among Ourselves, Girls,” as opposed to the actual title, “Letters from ‘Forverts’ Readers Answered by Comrade Rose Pastor Stokes.”43 While it is possible that Anglophone reporters misunderstood the series’s goals or inaccurately translated its title, it seems likely that these descriptions of Pastor’s column came from Cahan, reflecting how he wanted the column to be described in these venues. In marketing this column for English-­language audiences, what mattered most to Cahan was highlighting sensationalism and human interest. In reality, although parallels existed between Pastor’s columns in the Tageblat and the Forverts, there were also significant divergences between the columns with regard to language, politics, and audience. In the Forverts, Pastor shifted from describing or excerpting the content of reader letters, as she did in her columns in the Tageblat, to reprinting readers’ letters in full, making her column conform to the style of the “Bintel brief.” While she had written her Tageblat columns in English, she published her Forverts columns in Yiddish. In Pastor’s writing for the Forverts, her audience also shifted from one coded as primarily young and female to one coded as broader and more politically aware. Pastor’s first two columns in the Forverts featured letters from female readers (just as the “Bintel brief ” had when it began), but for the rest of her tenure, Pastor answered questions from male and female readers alike.44 With few exceptions, most of Pastor’s Tageblat columns were laced with politically and socially conservative messages. In contrast, many of

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her Forverts columns explicitly critiqued capitalism. For example, Pastor advised one reader who was torn between his parents, who wanted him to pursue a lucrative career in junk dealing, and his socialist ideals, which pushed him toward factory work. In responding, Pastor encouraged the reader’s political development but also suggested that becoming a junk dealer need not negate his political progression. “Under the current economic system most people—­so socialism teaches us—­are either wage-­slaves or bosses over these slaves. . . . Under a socialist society, where the production is run with the greatest economy, we might not need junk dealers. Today however they are useful and needed.”45 This change reflected her change of venue—­from an Orthodox, socially conservative publication to a socialist one. But it also signaled her growing commitment to radical causes. In shifting back and forth between highlighting Pastor’s radical beliefs and her celebrity status, the Forverts vacillated in how it characterized the relationship of this column to the rest of the publication. Moreover, in subsequent years, Cahan and others used similar descriptors to frame Pastor’s column as a human-­interest-­tinged foil for the “Bintel brief.” In 1912, for example, the New York Evening Post published an article about Cahan, probably based on interviews with him, that described the “Bintel brief ” as evidence of Cahan’s immense influence over his readers: “Cahan places himself squarely at the heart of the profoundest problems that affect his readers. . . . But over and above all, Cahan tries to spread his message of socialism and to do it in what he likes to speak of as the human spirit.” In contrast, it described Pastor’s column as “advice to the lovelorn in a department conducted by Rose Pastor, who afterwards added Stokes to her name.” This description inaccurately reported the dates that Pastor wrote for the Forverts, suggesting that it was before her marriage instead of after. Moreover, it also represented her column as more romantic, and perhaps less serious, than the “Bintel brief.”46 Ten years later, the sociologist Robert Park relied on the Evening Post’s description in his study The Immigrant Press and Its Control, suggesting how this coverage shaped historical understandings of the Yiddish press.47 During Pastor’s decade of sustained engagement with the Yiddish press, she contributed in a variety of ways to two prominent dailies. She wrote articles under her own name, under pseudonyms, and

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anonymously, in addition to performing work behind the scenes as an editor and secretary. But the authority afforded to Pastor as an advice columnist, and the notoriety generated by her marriage, also led Pastor’s career to take on symbolic importance for the Yiddish press. At different times, the Tageblat and Forverts highlighted, played down, or misrepresented her career in order to make claims about these newspapers as a whole. In many ways, these descriptions reflected the divergent meanings the Yiddish press infused into its women’s content—­which editors and publishers sometimes described as crucial to the success of these publications but at other times characterized as marginal or lacking in prestige. Moreover, these descriptions also reflected Yiddish newspapers’ various understandings of the roles of women as writers and public figures. Sometimes these publications focused on Pastor’s authority as a columnist or the ways she infused her political subjectivity into her writing. At others, her celebrity status and gender led newspapers to trivialize her authority in order to infuse sensationalism into their reportage. Pastor’s position as both an author and a subject of Yiddish journalism thus allows us a window into the complicated gender politics of the Yiddish press in the first decade of the twentieth century and the ways in which women readers and writers became at various junctures both valued contributors to the Yiddish public sphere and subjects of critique or trivialization.

“Merely-­a-­Man”: Gender, Audience, and the Tageblat After the Tageblat discontinued its English Department in 1906, a similar tension between ideology and marketability continued to infuse its Yiddish pages. From 1908 to 1912, the Tageblat published weekly columns addressed explicitly and separately to the paper’s female and male readers, usually called “A Corner for Ladies” and “Men’s Corner.” Each was signed with a pseudonym—­the “Lithuanian Wisewoman” and “Merely-­a-­Man,” respectively. But in reality, both were written by Getsel Zelikovits, the writer and editor who had first introduced women’s columns to the paper over a decade prior. On the surface, these columns seemed to divide readers by gender. However, they were actually meant to be read in tandem. Most articles

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in both series spoke to male and female readers alike, and the two personas argued back and forth over whether men or women were better at giving and receiving advice. Through writing overlapping men’s and women’s columns, Zelikovits infused the Tageblat with gendered dynamism while also aiming to bolster readers’ commitments to traditional Jewish practice. In some ways, these goals diverged, as the columns’ combative, tongue-­in-­cheek nature undermined the sincerity of Zelikovits’s guidance. But in other ways, their style increased their potency, as by repackaging advice in entertaining wrappings, Zelikovits hoped to ensure readers absorbed the columns’ ideological messaging. Zelikovits’s men’s and women’s columns were an outgrowth of Zelikovits’s Lithuanian Wisewoman columns, which he reintroduced to the Tageblat in 1907 after a long hiatus. The title of this column, “A Corner for Ladies,” echoed Zelikovits’s earlier series, “Ladies’ Corner,” which he published in the Tageblat and its sister publication, the Gazetn, in the early 1890s. In the interim, the Tageblat had experimented with women’s columns in English and Yiddish addressing older and younger readers, respectively. In contrast, Zelikovits’s new columns addressed both “the mothers and the daughters” and aimed to provide articles that would appeal to readers of any age or that mothers and daughters could enjoy together. Zelikovits wrote hundreds of columns as the Lithuanian Wisewoman between 1890 and 1919, though their relationship to the rest of the Tageblat changed over time. As discussed in chapter 1, in the 1890s, Zelikovits’s Lithuanian Wisewoman columns were part of an early effort to infuse the paper with mass appeal. After 1914, when the Tageblat introduced a women’s section, these columns were one element of a broader appeal to female readers. Between 1907 and 1914, “A Corner for Ladies” was by far the most frequent column explicitly addressed to female readers, generally running weekly, with a few scattered breaks.48 In this middle period, “A Corner for Ladies” performed several roles for the newspaper in which it ran: it served as a mouthpiece for the views that editors and writers championed on women’s roles in the domestic and public sphere; it redirected readers toward other sections of the paper and instructed them on how to read those sections; and it was part of editors’ attempts to infuse the paper with engrossing, dynamic content. Together, these readings of Zelikovits’s columns reflect

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the multiple meanings that women’s columns took on for the Tageblat and its readers.49 The first and most overt function of Zelikovits’s columns was to convey the paper’s views on women’s roles in society. Many columns encouraged married readers to focus their attention on the domestic sphere and to view domesticity as akin to a professional vocation. Zelikovits, writing as the Lithuanian Wisewoman, highlighted women’s “innate” attraction to housework and motherhood and complained in 1909 when the US Census listed housewives as having no occupation.50 Some articles spoke approvingly of women in the workforce.51 But in general, the Lithuanian Wisewoman assumed that, once married, women would devote their time to maintaining their households. In many ways, these articles reflected the fact that most Jewish women in the United States, even working-­class women, left the formal workforce after marrying whenever possible.52 For wives and mothers, these articles reinforced these patterns. For younger readers, they offered guidance as to what their future could or should look like. Zelikovits also highlighted the importance of women’s domestic labor for ensuring the future of Jewish observance in the United States. The Lithuanian Wisewoman wrote columns referring to different Jewish holidays as “holiday[s] for us women,” each arguing that women were central participants in these celebrations.53 Other columns encouraged readers to learn Hebrew, not so that they could engage with religious texts for their own sakes but so that they could oversee their children’s religious educations.54 In one article, the Lithuanian Wisewoman “strongly criticize[d] Pauline Wengeroff ’s book ‘Memoirs of a Grandmother,’ in which a Jewish woman nonchalantly describes the conversions of all of her children.” This criticism misrepresented Wengeroff ’s memoir, wherein the author lamented her family’s situation. But for Zelikovits, criticizing Wengeroff was primarily an opportunity to urge readers to discourage intermarriage within their own families.55 This understanding of the religious importance of female domesticity built on eastern European Jewish ideals. But it also reflected a new, more central role for observant Jewish women that emerged through the process of acculturation—­one that mirrored female responsibilities in various Christian denominations.56 In framing domesticity as a professional vocation, Zelikovits also echoed contemporary trends in

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American domestic science, in which (mostly male) professionals recast housewifery as a profession in order to preserve women’s place in the domestic sphere, using scientific language to make this case.57 Instead of invoking scientific theories, Zelikovits used religious arguments to bolster women’s roles within the home. While the Lithuanian Wisewoman encouraged readers’ devotion to the domestic sphere, she also conveyed support for women’s rights. She encouraged her readers to express their support for suffrage openly as well, arguing, “we women will only have the right to vote when we really demand it.”58 While she chastised men who did not understand the importance of women’s rights, she reserved her sternest words for women who had not been vocal enough in their support for the cause.59 At the same time, the Lithuanian Wisewoman also criticized women who acted aggressively in pursuit of suffrage. In 1910, she worried that the violent tactics of British suffragettes would set back the cause of women’s rights. After describing an incident in which a demonstrator slapped British prime minister H. H. Asquith, she wondered whether this woman was “blessed with a husband” and, if so, whether he was henpecked by this strong-­willed woman. She also compared this incident to a story from the Talmud, wherein a “shrew” broke candlesticks over the head of a great sage, who met her violence with forgiveness. Doubting that Asquith would show the same restraint, she counseled readers to consider the consequences of their actions. Likewise, she suggested that suffragettes could use the Jewish people as a model: “With we women it is the same thing as with Jews among the nations: when one Jew does something unpleasant, all Jews are guilty. Similarly, when one woman commits a blunder, soon men come and point their fingers and say ‘what can we expect from such beasts who are long on hair and short on brains?’ ”60 In these columns, Zelikovits reinforced many of the newspaper’s broader arguments on women, domesticity, and suffrage. Yiddish newspapers were rarely univocal instruments. Individual writers often expressed their own opinions within their writing, even if these messages conflicted with the paper’s editorial line.61 In this vein, the Tageblat cannot be said to have expressed one consistent message on issues related to women’s roles in society. However, like the Lithuanian Wisewoman, other Tageblat writers in this period also argued that married women’s

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primary responsibilities were in the home and that this domestic role was crucial to ensuring the maintenance of Jewish practice. One anonymous editorial from 1907 reported with amazement on the variety of jobs women were beginning to perform, “even as mechanics on trains, fire-­people and sailors.” While the author approved of women’s desire for economic independence, he also highlighted the potential negative impact on women’s home lives.62 Other writers, in contrast, openly criticized women who entered the public sphere through work or political agitation. I. L. Dalidansky asserted that “the Jewish concept of a ‘woman of valor’ is not the woman who gives great speeches . . . but the hero of the house.”63 Like Zelikovits, other writers highlighted the importance of increasing educational opportunities for women not so that they could be prepared for professional pursuits but so they could succeed in their roles as mothers.64 They were also careful to emphasize that advances in women’s rights or education in no way negated the fact that “the true dominion of women is not on the political field but in the home; she can bring far more happiness to humanity [by] doing her duty in child-­ rearing and homemaking than coming to political meetings and devoting herself to campaigns.”65 Similar to the Lithuanian Wisewoman’s columns on British suffragettes, these arguments served the dual purpose of demonstrating qualified support for women’s rights while shifting the conversation toward Jewish history or present-­day Jewish communal concerns. When the Tageblat’s writers wrote articles championing women’s rights, they often did so by asserting that gender equity had always been an innate element of Jewish tradition. For example, in 1908, a writer named Liza Tarlov wrote two articles, one on women and beauty and one on the etymology of the phrase “ladies first.” In each case, Tarlov used these subjects as segues into discussions of strong female role models from Jewish history, asserting, “we Jews have always observed the considerable virtues of respecting women and protecting women.”66 Tarlov’s was one of the only female bylines featured in the Tageblat in this period. But these arguments were consistent with those espoused by the paper’s male writers. Like the Lithuanian Wisewoman, other Tageblat writers also encouraged women who pursued women’s rights advocacy, or professional successes, to temper their actions with exemplary “feminine” behavior. For

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example, in an editorial called “The Jewish New Woman” from 1908, a writer argued that a domesticity-­centric approach to modern womanhood was both inherently superior and inherently Jewish. This editorial argued that the Jewish New Woman represented “a better type than the ‘New Woman’ of other peoples” because she entered the workforce or campaigned for equal rights without losing her “feminine grace, her charming modesty, her respect for elders, [or] her love of family life.”67 In these articles, writers and editors for the Tageblat joined a long lineage of Jewish public figures, in various contexts, who constructed usable pasts out of Jewish history.68 When they argued that Judaism was inherently the most “feminist” religion or when finding historical Jewish precedents for the New Woman, the Tageblat’s writers and editors were, to be sure, carefully selecting certain aspects of the Jewish past while neglecting or reshaping others. For these writers, it was less important that these arguments reflected something innate about Judaism and more that these arguments made the Jewish past more compatible with social and political trends that they wanted to promote for their readers in the present day. In so doing, they offered models to readers about how to acclimate to surrounding cultural and ideological trends while still remaining within the sphere of observant Jewish life. At the same time, this complex, somewhat ambivalent approach to women’s rights and the New Woman also reflected broader complications at the heart of the Tageblat. Attempting to serve as a bulwark against secularization while also marketing itself as a thoroughly “American,” commercially successful publication meant that the paper had to demonstrate simultaneous commitments to tradition and adaptation. By writing women’s columns that supported readers’ adjustments to surrounding gender norms, while also attempting to bolster Jewish tradition, editors and publishers reflected the dilemmas their readers faced in adapting to life in the United States, as well as the complications they faced in producing their newspaper.69 While many of Zelikovits’s women’s columns counseled readers about their roles in the public and private sphere, some columns instead advised readers on how they should engage with the Tageblat itself. In these instances, Lithuanian Wisewoman columns functioned as human-­ interest stories or sensational journalism, describing the daily lives of women in other countries or commenting on recent headlines. Some

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columns used other articles in the Tageblat as a jumping-­off point, redirecting readers toward other sections of the paper. Others summarized articles from the Anglophone press, offering those who only read Yiddish access to this content.70 The Lithuanian Wisewoman sometimes used these stories to impart moral messages—­exhorting readers, for example, to “learn from” the example set by a woman named Ann Bradley, who had recently been acquitted of murdering her lover, noting that “this trial has a remarkable warning for all women, about the great tragedy of a woman who strays from the normal path and goes in search of comfort in unlawful love.”71 Others instead offered light commentary, wondering, for instance, whether someone should arrange a “shidekh” (match) between two subjects of recent scandals, the actress Evelyn Nesbit Thaw and the novelist T. Jenkins Hains.72 In other columns, Zelikovits encouraged readers to engage with the Tageblat’s fiction, advertisements, or write-­in contests. In 1908, for example, the Lithuanian Wisewoman publicized the paper’s serialization of the diaries of Princess Louise of Saxony. In describing the series, the Lithuanian Wisewoman was careful to note that the princess, who left her husband and children for her lover, was by no means a role model: “Do not be mistaken, sisters, and think not that I consider correct all of Louise’s excuses for why she left her husband and children.” Instead, she suggested that the diary offered readers entertainment and insights into “the tactics of the evil inclination or devil which is so popular now in New York.”73 By discussing the new feature, the Lithuanian Wisewoman pointed readers toward a different section of the paper and provided guidance on precisely how to engage with it. While some Lithuanian Wisewoman columns steered readers toward the paper’s other features, others chastised women who only read fiction or women’s columns, as opposed to engaging more broadly with the Tageblat. The column often argued that women who did not read newspapers at all cut themselves off from “everything that should interest them,” such as articles on “murders, suicides, tragedies caused by fire and water, romantic events, political prophesies, bankruptcies, found relatives, unexpected inheritances, [and] divorce scandals,” a list emphasizing the cultural or sensational elements of reportage. She called on readers to use these arguments to entice friends to read the Tageblat. Instead of suggesting that female readers should take an interest in

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political or financial news for their own sakes, however, the Lithuanian Wisewoman suggested that women try reading these sections as if they were fiction or human-­interest stories. With the right perspective, even classifieds or front-­page news could transform into “the greatest chapter of life in a great city!”74 In these columns, Zelikovits offered readers a gendered approach to newspaper reading. These columns revealed an underlying assumption shared by many contemporary journalists: that women would be most interested in certain genres or styles of writing. While Zelikovits critiqued women who hewed too closely to these habits, he also reinforced them by suggesting that readers transform other genres into this kind of content through imaginative reading practices. As many Tageblat readers were still new to newspaper reading, these articles both reflected and shaped readers’ habits. Through engaging with these columns, readers learned what type of content they should expect from a newspaper. While in some ways, Zelikovits’s women’s columns separated themselves from other sections of the paper by addressing a female audience, they remained deeply connected to the rest of the publication. This sense of dialogue had been a constant feature of Zelikovits’s women’s columns since their inception in the early 1890s. In his first column as the Lithuanian Wisewoman, for example, Zelikovits’s female persona included a direct appeal to the paper’s male columnists, asking them not to address future columns to female readers in deference to her, including a particular appeal to the “Lithuanian Philosopher”—­another pseudonym employed by Zelikovits.75 By writing columns in which his pseudonyms addressed one another, Zelikovits bolstered the connections between different sections of the paper while also initiating a gendered debate that he would continue to invoke for decades to come. When Zelikovits reintroduced the column in 1907, he reinforced this dynamic by fostering an active dialogue between the Lithuanian Wisewoman and other personas that played out on the pages of the Tageblat. In 1908, Zelikovits published an article under his own name, admonishing the Lithuanian Wisewoman for praising British suffragettes in a recent column instead of offering readers examples of Jewish champions for women’s rights. Zelikovits, in contrast, suggested that the biblical prophet Deborah might be a more suitable role model for readers, describing her as one of many “Jewish daughters” who fought for equality

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long before the suffrage movement. Zelikovits also summarized Deborah’s story from the Bible, promising that it would hold readers’ interest because it read “like a wonderful chapter of a novel.”76 Like many articles in the Tageblat, this article connected debates about suffrage to Jewish tradition. It also reframed reading material—­in this case, the Bible—­so that it conformed to Zelikovits’s perceptions of women readers’ tastes. By writing under multiple names, Zelikovits created a sense of a lively, large newspaper staff and reinforced the idea that reading the Tageblat was an interactive process—­as articles spoke to one another and to readers who wanted to engage both with Jewish tradition and with contemporary debates in American society. However, he also blurred the line between so-­called women’s content and the rest of the newspaper by encouraging readers to read these articles in tandem. This dynamic continued over the next several years, as Zelikovits introduced a weekly column under the pseudonym “Merely-­a-­Man” (Nur-­ a-­Mansbil). Running under titles like “Men’s Corner” (Mansbil’s vinkel), these columns seemed at first to be a gender-­switched alternative to the Lithuanian Wisewoman’s columns. In this vein, Merely-­a-­Man began his first column with an appeal to male readers: “My introduction, worthy men, is short. I am no more than a man, and I write for you, fathers and sons, just like the ‘Lithuanian Wisewoman’ writes for mothers and daughters.” But he soon revealed that he was equally interested in attracting female readers: “because what does a woman prefer to read than something that clearly says that it is written not for her, but for men.”77 In these columns, Merely-­a-­Man upended the logic of women’s columns: that women and men required or desired separate reading material and that women had to be prodded to read articles not explicitly addressed to them. In fact, he argued the opposite, that the best way to ensure a female audience was to assert that these columns were not for women. At the same time, he also asserted that the Lithuanian Wisewoman had many avid male readers, further blurring the boundaries between women’s columns and other sections of the paper. Merely-­a-­Man also subverted the boundaries of women’s columns by questioning the authority of the women who wrote them, arguing that that female writers were not providing readers with adequate advice on housework, child care, or other frequent topics of women’s columns. According to him, it was now a man’s turn to offer advice gleaned from

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experience in the professional world that women could apply to the domestic sphere.78 This argument was particularly ironic given that the Lithuanian Wisewoman was not only a man but the same man. While his articles offered advice, Merely-­a-­Man also used them to provoke readers, criticizing women for being stubborn and gullible.79 These jabs foreshadowed the tongue-­in-­cheek, argumentative style that Merely-­a-­ Man’s column would take throughout their run. After this first column, the Tageblat published a lively debate between the Lithuanian Wisewoman and Merely-­a-­Man, with both personas asserting that they better served the needs of the paper’s readers. When the Lithuanian Wisewoman wrote an article about the hypocrisy of men who thought women talked too loudly in theaters without acknowledging their own heightened volumes, Merely-­a-­Man countered with a column that made this exact critique of female theatergoers.80 At another point, Merely-­a-­Man wrote a column claiming that men were better at business than women were at housework, and the Lithuanian Wisewoman responded by comparing him to a famous misogynist she had read about recently in the news.81 Both personas also incorporated into their columns readers’ letters that commented on these debates. Merely-­a-­Man asserted that the mail he received broke down relatively evenly along gendered lines—­with men sending praise and women sending complaints.82 The Lithuanian Wisewoman likewise stated that she had received “several” letters from female readers suggesting that she “challenge this shameless man to a duel.” One reader offered a less violent alternative, suggesting that the Lithuanian Wisewoman “should have a verbal debate with ‘Merely-­ a-­Man’ and Sambatyen should be referee!” “Sambatyen” was another pseudonym used by Zelikovits. So in this column, this reader (or perhaps Zelikovits himself) suggested a debate between Zelikovits and Zelikovits moderated by Zelikovits. In response, the Lithuanian Wisewoman counseled restraint, saying that confrontation was not necessary: “because we women must show tolerance and hear all beliefs, even the beliefs of an embittered man.”83 Eventually, in January 1912, the Lithuanian Wisewoman declared herself the winner of this feud, saying that she had “silenced” her rival once and for all.84 But over the course of the preceding years, debates between these personas comprised attempts to inject entertainment

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value into the Tageblat while also highlighting the complicated gender dynamics in this newspaper. Pairing women’s columns with men’s columns meant that Zelikovits offered guidance to readers on a variety of subjects—­including how to bolster religious observance and how to interact with the Tageblat itself—­and often undermined this guidance by infusing his columns with stereotypes and manufactured intrigue in order to infuse the paper with entertainment value. Within this back and forth, female and male readers became valued leaders or participants in observant Jewish life, objects of derision or scorn, and symbols of the paper’s commitments to popularization, modernization, or traditionalism.

“You Are the Customer! The Bosses Must Follow You!”: Consumption, Popularization, and Politics in the Forverts While Getsel Zelikovits used his women’s and men’s columns in the Tageblat to negotiate the paper’s commitments to bolstering Jewish tradition and entertaining readers, other newspapers found different ways to fuse their different motivations. As was true in the Tageblat, these attempts met with varying degrees of success. The socialist Forverts did not contain a single consistent women’s column before 1915. Instead, its editor, Abraham Cahan, introduced a variety of features meant to encourage women to read the paper. Undergirding these attempts lay an assumption that human-­interest or consumption-­ focused content represented the best vehicles to appeal to women and that appealing to women was crucial to ensuring that the newspaper remained popular and commercially viable. These assumptions pervaded every section of the Forverts, from features to advertisements to coverage of consumer boycotts. Sometimes the paper successfully balanced its commitments to socialism and commercial success. At other times, critics used the Forverts’s relationship to consumer culture as evidence of the paper’s penchant for selling out radicalism in favor of sensationalism. Together, these attempts reveal the complications inherent in being a socialist newspaper aiming to balance political ideology, mass appeal, and commercial viability. As an independent, socialist newspaper, one that did not rely on political parties for funding, advertisements had always constituted a

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crucial component of the Forverts’s business model. But the number and variety of advertisements included in the paper expanded as the Forverts transformed from a short, sectarian paper into a mass-­consumption-­ style daily. In the paper’s first years, most advertisements were for local businesses or events or for radical publications in Yiddish, Russian, and English. A typical issue from 1898 included advertisements for clothing stores on the Lower East Side, patent medicines, events sponsored by the Forverts, and the Social Democrat, a Chicago-­based socialist paper.85 In the paper’s early years, staff members also advertised their other business ventures. Two of the founders, Mikhail and Adella Kean Zametkin, promoted their availability as English tutors and piano teachers, and another, Louis Miller, advertised his law practice.86 These notices reflected the status of the early Forverts, a newspaper serving a predominantly local, staunchly political audience and staffed by editors and writers who held several jobs in order to make ends meet. In contrast, in the decade after Cahan’s return to the paper in 1902, the number and variety of advertisements began to expand. Ads for rallies sponsored by the Forverts ran next to ones for mass-­produced products such as Borden’s Condensed Milk or Nabisco’s Uneeda Biscuit. The look and size of advertisements began to change as well, including more images and words in English or “Yinglish” (Yiddish heavily inflected with English syntax or vocabulary).87 The revenue generated by these advertisements helped the Forverts expand from between two and four pages in its first years to eight pages by the end of 1902. Moreover, these changes signaled the paper’s evolution from a paper geared toward a small, staunchly socialist audience to a paper that saw itself as reaching, entertaining, and guiding a mass audience of readers. Such transformations were not exclusive to the socialist daily. Instead, they reflected broader transformations in American advertising culture that publishers and editors of Yiddish dailies incorporated into their publications. Like the Forverts, other dailies also began to attract large, national advertisers. By 1900, the Tageblat’s editors began debuting advertisements for mass-­produced products at the same time as they appeared in the Anglophone press. This suggested that advertisers viewed the Tageblat as prime advertising real estate. According to the historian Andrew Heinze, the speed and ease with which the Yiddish press incorporated national advertising stood in contrast to other non-­Anglophone

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newspapers. For example, Italian and German newspapers mostly included advertisements for local merchants until World War I.88 Editors and publishers of Yiddish newspapers often faced tensions between their commercial aims and ideological positions. The Orthodox Tageblat and Morgn-­zhurnal ran advertisements for department stores apprising readers of Saturday sales, even though shopping was not permitted on the Sabbath, or clothing ads featuring images of scantily clad women. And critics of the Forverts regularly argued that the Forverts Association’s drive for commercial success and advertising revenue overshadowed its commitment to socialist ideology.89 At the same time, the Forverts’s editors, writers, and business managers also attempted to fuse these impulses in its advertisements and news coverage by relying on a particular archetype: the radically oriented female consumer. This archetype first appeared in the Forverts in its early years. In 1901, the Forverts accompanied its advertisements with an announcement addressing “our readers and especially our female readers,” asking them to support businesses that advertised in the Forverts. “No advertisements can be obtained, especially for a worker’s newspaper, when one cannot demonstrate that the readers of the newspaper patronize the advertisers.”90 The fact that this notice singled out “female readers” suggests that the Forverts Association, even in its early years, shared the view held by many contemporary newspaper producers that women were the primary overseers of household consumption. By asking women to patronize advertisers, the management suggested that their commercial and ideological aims could work in tandem, if women channeled their consumption towards radical ends. Over time, these messages about gender and consumption bled into the paper’s coverage of consumer protests in New York as well. Like other newspapers, the Forverts often included articles on shopping, which tended to focus exclusively on consumption, and articles about female workers who went on strike, which focused more on demands for equal wages than on what women might buy with those wages.91 In contrast, its coverage of consumer protests often highlighted the interplay between women’s roles as consumers and political agitators. The 1902 kosher meat boycott has received the most scholarly attention, but it was only one of several consumer-­oriented protests in this period, including a rent strike in December 1907 and other meat boycotts in

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April 1910 and June 1912.92 In covering these events, the Forverts emphasized the roles that women played in supporting or leading protests. One article from 1910, for example, highlighted the leadership role played by Anna Pastor, Rose Pastor Stokes’s mother. Accompanying this article was a portrait of Anna Pastor, whose pose echoed the portrait accompanying her daughter’s columns in the Forverts that had debuted several years prior (figure 3.3).93 At other times, the Forverts called on women to use their power as consumers to help support unions that went on strike. In 1909, the Forverts noted approvingly how women “demonstrated their sympathy” for dry-­goods store clerks by refusing to cross picket lines, calling it a great “moral victory.”94 The next year, the Forverts called on “Jewish women” to support a striking bakers’ union. It invoked housewives’ support of previous strikes, asking women to again pressure local stores by withholding their business: “You are the customer! The bosses must follow you! Tell them to give in to the united workers!”95 As was true in the paper’s coverage of the 1902 kosher meat boycott, some of these articles emphasized the fact that women looked to the Forverts for support and guidance, asserting, “masses of women come daily to the office of the ‘Forverts’ and ask how to organize against the bread-­trust.”96 Others used women’s support of strikes as evidence that women deserved voting rights.97 In discussing Jewish women’s involvement in labor organizing in this period, the historian Daniel Katz has argued that the fact that this agitation focused on women’s roles as consumers made labor organizers particularly supportive of these efforts. In contrast, male leaders were less enthusiastic when women attempted to take on leadership roles within unions.98 In the Forverts’s coverage of consumer protests and in appeals to housewives to support workers on strike, the paper blurred the lines between news coverage and advertisements. Front-­page coverage described these events while also advising female readers on where to shop without crossing picket lines. In other cases, strike coverage bled into advertising copy as well. In 1916, the Forverts published an advertisement calling on women readers to patronize clothing stores on Division Street. These advertisements promoted the stores by saying that it was a “pleasure to ‘shop’ on Division Street.” Tellingly, they also prominently highlighted the fact that “the strike on Division Street has been settled” as a major selling point of shopping there (figure 3.4).

Figure 3.3. “The East Side Receives the Meat Strike,” Forverts, April 7, 1910, featuring a photograph of Anna Pastor, Rose Pastor Stokes’s mother. (From the Collection of the National Library of Israel, The Forward Association, and the New York Public Library; Historical Jewish Press website—­www.Jpress​ .org.il—­founded by the National Library and Tel Aviv University)

Figure 3.4. Advertisement for Division Street Center for Women’s Clothing, Forverts, April 1, 1916. Flanking the image of a woman dressed in the latest fashion is text announcing that “the strike on Division Street has been settled.” (From the Collection of the National Library of Israel, Courtesy of the The Forward Association and the New York Public Library; Historical Jewish Press website—­www.Jpress.org.il—­founded by the National Library and Tel Aviv University)

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These articles and advertisements reflected a complex relationship between the Forverts and its female audience, one informed by the advertising strategies and gender norms of the American popular press but also rooted in socialist ideologies about labor and consumption. The Forverts’s blend of advertising and reporting did not set it apart from other newspapers in this period. Many others used articles to promote advertisers’ products or included ads formatted to mimic news coverage.99 But in the Forverts, this amalgam of consumerism and reportage took on a particular political significance, as advertisements helped to fund the radical newspaper and often incorporated messaging that supported labor or consumer protests. This same fusion of consumption and consumer protest was a less comfortable fit, in contrast, when included in newspapers that supported political conservatism and religious observance. At the same time as the advertisement highlighting the end of a 1916 strike on Division Street ran in the socialist Forverts, it also ran in the Morgn-­zhurnal—­the most politically conservative Yiddish daily. Unlike the Forverts, the Morgn-­ zhurnal generally did not support labor activism.100 When placed in this religious paper, these advertisements suggested internal contradictions between the commercial and ideological projects of the Morgn-­zhurnal, which were not uncommon in the Yiddish press. It also reflected the fact that some radically affiliated readers read publications like the Morgn-­ zhurnal, either because they preferred the content or because it was a morning paper and contained more up-­to-­date job notices than newspapers that appeared in the afternoon. In Yiddish newspaper producers’ determinations of how best to appeal to their intended audiences, they had to balance their various ideological and commercial commitments with those of their ever-­diversifying audience. *** In creating an image of the radical housewife/consumer, the Forverts attempted to combine its ideological and commercial aims. In some instances, the newspaper’s efforts to fuse these impulses also became a topic of fierce debate among the paper’s rivals and detractors. This tension was particularly evident in the uproar surrounding the Forverts’s translation of August Bebel’s landmark book Die Frau und der Sozialismus (The woman and socialism) in 1912 and the advertising strategy

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the Forverts used to publicize it. As had been true a decade earlier, after Cahan’s return to the Forverts, discussing the needs and interests of female readers became a metonym through which the Forverts and its rivals debated the political and commercial priorities of the radical Yiddish press as a whole and the Forverts in particular. Originally published in 1879, Bebel’s book explored the development of capitalism and its relationship to the oppression of women, arguing that any radical revolution must drastically alter women’s roles in society in order to be fully realized.101 Forverts staff member Benjamin Feygenboym first announced plans to translate Bebel’s book into Yiddish in December 1909. At that time, Feygenboym argued that the book constituted one of the most cogent explanations of socialist thought, not just on the Woman Question but in general. He also described the influence that Bebel’s work had exerted on his own political development, noting that it was “the first work about socialism” that he had read in his life and that he had long harbored a desire to translate the work into Yiddish so that others could benefit from its wisdom.102 Two years later, in January 1912, the Forverts began running advertisements for Feygenboym’s completed translation. The Forverts Association published it as a book, available for purchase at the paper’s office. Yiddish dailies like the Forverts were crucial to the development of a Yiddish book market in the United States, and over time, the Forverts began publishing books written or translated by Cahan and other staff members. In 1912, for example, the Forverts also published Cahan’s history of the United States and his translation of Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata. These publications allowed the Forverts further to direct the reading habits of its audience, but they also helped raise revenue for the paper. The Forverts particularly needed the extra revenue in 1912, as it moved into a newly renovated office at 173–­175 East Broadway.103 At first, the Forverts advertised Bebel’s book, translated into Yiddish as Di froy un der sotsialismus (The woman and socialism), by emphasizing the broad political import of Bebel’s work: “Every man and every woman should read and study Bebel’s famous book,” these advertisements advised. They also promised that the book would provide evidence to counter arguments against women’s rights and insight into other important issues facing society.104 Within a week, however, the advertising campaign had taken on a more sensational tone: “What is

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better, love without money? Or money without love? Is it better to be set up through a matchmaker, or through love? How are matches handled for emperors, dukes, princes and great millionaires? Who have happier and cleaner family lives, the rich or the poor? A clear answer to all of these questions, with a mass of facts and science, can be found Bebel’s famous book: ‘Di froy.’ ”105 Other advertisements connected Bebel’s work to Theodore Roosevelt’s fears about race suicide or to a prayer in the Orthodox Jewish liturgy in which men thank God for not having been born women.106 Some ads reframed Bebel’s work as full of human interest, noting that it would provide answers to questions like “Why are women so chatty?” or “Why were long-­ago women prettier than today’s?”107 Others took advantage of Orientalist, exoticizing interest in other cultures, claiming that the book offered insight on why “a Muslim woman is not even allowed to see a doctor” or why the Persian parliament “decided that women have no souls.”108 Still others took on an alarmist tone, offering Bebel’s book as a remedy to rampant divorce rates, cases of insanity among young women, or high rates of death in childbirth around the world.109 Immediately, critics of the Forverts seized on these advertisements as examples of Cahan’s penchant for prioritizing popularization and circulation over fidelity to socialist principles. In the February 1912 issue of the Tsukunft, a socialist monthly focused on literature and education, the editors criticized Cahan for advertising Bebel’s book in a way that, in their minds, included “not one word, not one syllable about its socialist content.” Instead of focusing on information actually contained in the book, they argued that Cahan tricked readers into thinking they would find answers to questions like “how people got married in the past”—­ topics that they asserted never actually appeared in Bebel’s work. They also took issue with Cahan’s decision to advertise the book as “Di froy,” omitting “socialism” from the title within these advertisements. In their view, this constituted an attempt to market the book to a female and mass audience, who might not otherwise be interested: “If one printed the full name, girls and women might be afraid that it was a socialist book and it would not be interesting to them. ‘Di froy,’ however, without socialism, will surely draw in an audience, girls will come, women, boys and even old Jews, who would such an appealing name as ‘Di froy’ not attract?”110

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In these polemics, the Tsukunft accused the Forverts of cheapening Bebel’s text by emphasizing the “woman” in the title at the expense of the “socialism.” The critique rested on a similar assumption that only by reframing content as “risqué” or “feminine” could Cahan attract a mass readership, including women. The Tsukunft’s editors also connected these advertisements to the Forverts’s other attempts to pander to an unenlightened or feminine audience: “Don’t think that only Ab. Cahan knows the secret of ‘circulation.’ If we began to print . . . a truly risqué shund-­roman [popular fiction], a ‘Bintel-­brief ’ and popular articles about feminine things, we would also increase in ‘circulation.’ ”111 Unlike the Forverts, they vowed, the Tsukunft would never stoop so low. While the Tsukunft’s critiques did reflect the strategies underlying the Forverts’s advertising campaign, they also need to be understood in light of ongoing disputes between the two publications. Though Cahan had served as one of the Tsukunft’s editors in the 1890s, and there was significant overlap between the staffs of these publications, by the early 1910s, relations had soured.112 In 1912, the Tsukunft published dozens of articles critiquing the Forverts’s financial success, its sensational journalism, and Cahan’s megalomaniacal control over the supposedly cooperative Forverts Association. At the same time, Cahan and his staff characterized the Tsukunft as too highbrow to be understood by most readers. The critiques of the “Di froy” advertisements represented part of a larger battle between the Tsukunft and the Forverts over how to speak to and build a socialist reading public. These debates lasted until 1913, when the Forverts Association bought the Tsukunft, allowing it to continue publishing independently, under the condition that its staff stop criticizing the Forverts.113 After a month, the Forverts ceased publishing these sensational advertisements for Bebel’s book—­possibly at Bebel’s own behest.114 In subsequent months, the Forverts continued to advertise Feygenboym’s translation. However, in contrast to its earlier strategy, these ads highlighted the book’s ability to turn any reader into “a scholar of political economy.”115 Nevertheless, while the Forverts’s more sensational advertising campaign was short-­lived, this moment became crucial to shaping the historical memory of the Forverts, becoming a prime example of the newspaper’s relationship to sensationalism. In 1951, Paul Novick, editor

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of the communist Morgn frayhayt, used these ads, and the Tsukunft’s reaction to them, as a centerpiece for a series of articles he wrote after ­Cahan’s death. Like the Tsukunft forty years prior, Novick connected these advertisements with the infusion of “shund,” “ ‘men-­women’ sensations,” and “letters from the ‘Bintel’ ” that Cahan championed. According to Novick, sensationalism seeped into every aspect of Cahan’s journalism, from advertisements to coverage of world events like the Russian Revolution of 1905.116 Similarly, Louis Harap, a critic and editor of publications like Jewish Currents, used the Forverts’s advertisements of Bebel’s book as evidence of Cahan’s desire to shift the Forverts “from popular journalism to vulgarized journalism” and his general propensity for “stressing a vulgarized lower-­middle-­class view of women and marriage that verged on sensationalism.”117 None of these critiques accused Cahan or his staff of changing the text of the book itself. Instead, the disagreement centered on the way that the book was advertised. But, in many ways, the fact that the dispute centered around advertisements, as opposed to the contents of the book, distilled the general debate surrounding the Forverts: the Forverts’s staff and its detractors constantly debated whether repackaging socialist ideology in sensational or popularized formats invalidated the newspaper’s political potency. Within these debates, detractors and supporters of the Forverts alike invoked the needs and interests of women readers, but in ways that were not necessarily remotely tied to the experiences of actual women. Instead, women became pawns and symbols for the ideological struggles within the Yiddish socialist sphere.

Conclusion In the first decade and a half of the twentieth century, American Yiddish dailies experimented with a variety of content explicitly or implicitly addressing female readers—­including women’s columns, fiction, advertisements, and other related features. On the surface, these experiments sometimes seemed to set themselves apart from the rest of the publications in which they ran by segmenting a portion of the paper’s readership. But in reality, regardless of the Yiddish daily in which they appeared, these features were popular with male and female readers alike. Moreover, this content was also deeply intertwined with the rest

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of these publications. Whether redirecting readers toward other articles, offering criticisms of rival writers or publications, or balancing a newspaper’s ideological and commercial aims, women’s content became a space where newspapers debated the roles that Jewish men and women should play in society, as well as the ways that Yiddish newspapers should engage with their readership. This dynamic made women’s content not only deeply conversational spaces but spaces that were rife with tension—­between the divergent, often discordant, representations of women included in these publications as well as between the diverse priorities undergirding Yiddish newspaper publishing. At times, writers, editors, and publishers were able to use these spaces to successfully negotiate these different priorities. But at others, the tensions, contradictions, and stresses inherent in this content became a topic of fierce debate. When read in this way, women’s content becomes not peripheral to the Yiddish press but key to understanding how the Yiddish press functioned at the turn of the twentieth century, offering crucial insights into the power, priorities, and complications inherent in the American Yiddish publishing sphere. While these dynamics took shape in the first decade and a half of the twentieth century, they increased dramatically during World War I and its aftermath. In this period, many Yiddish dailies began including discrete women’s pages for the first time, which included a mix of older features and new content. Chapter 4 explores when and why the most successful Yiddish dailies began including women’s pages and the relationship of these new pages to transformations in the Yiddish newspaper market as a whole.

4

The Advent of Women’s Pages in the American Yiddish Press What a crazy potpourri, what a mix of all sorts of useful and spicy offerings make up these [women’s] pages! —­Anna Weiss (aka Rosa Lebensboym)

On February 20, 1917, a writer identified as Anna Weiss published a column in the Tog describing the types of content that generally ran on women’s pages. In Weiss’s assessment, these sections provided readers with a variety of useful and entertaining content, but they placed a particular emphasis on issues related to beauty and housekeeping—­“without a doubt, important and interesting questions,” Weiss quipped, “no less important than questions for men about how to shave, which cigarettes to buy[,] and how to flirt with a girl.” Many publishers and editors viewed the kaleidoscopic nature of women’s pages as a strength, as it allowed these sections to simultaneously meet the needs of a broad range of audiences. Weiss, in contrast, was ambivalent at best about this approach, highlighting the “confusion” it probably sparked in readers. While certain subjects were treated in great detail, she argued, these pages usually offered significantly less information on topics related to women’s roles in society. Nor did they expose readers to pressing current events, with the result that “it has the private, once-­intimate parts of [women’s] lives elevated to a topic of social meaning, and it has totally silenced their social interests, as if those were not a thing that existed in the world.”1 Anna Weiss’s byline was a frequent feature of the Tog’s women’s page, though it did not correspond to the name of this column’s actual author. Instead, it was one of several pseudonyms employed by the women’s page’s editor, Rosa Lebensboym.2 In writing a column critiquing the imbalances generally found on women’s pages, perhaps Lebensboym was attempting to distinguish between her goals in helming the women’s page of the Tog and approaches taken by editors of contemporary 140

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Yiddish-­and English-­language newspapers. Perhaps she was airing her frustrations at the limitations she experiences in writing for the women’s page, even one for which she served as editor. Or perhaps she was offering a hint to readers that the true dynamics of women’s pages might be more complex, especially as much of the content surrounding these arguments, including her own article, belied her critique. By this time, the American Yiddish press had long served as a forum for debates about what types of content best served a female readership. However, February 20, 1917, was a particularly apt moment for Lebensboym to offer an assessment not just of women’s content in general but of women’s pages in specific, as the Tog had introduced its women’s page just two weeks prior. The Tog first hit newsstands in 1914, promising to “raise the tone of Yiddish journalism.”3 The newspaper’s management had chosen to include women’s columns since the paper’s inception, generally on its back page. At times they framed this content as integral to their more “modern” approach and at times described it as balancing out intellectually driven content by infusing the paper with mass appeal—­underlying the contradictory impulses that lay at the heart of gendered expression within the Yiddish press. But only in 1917 did the Tog attach a formal title to its women’s page. Moreover, officially naming the women’s page reflected broader transformations taking shape in the American Yiddish newspaper market. Beginning in 1914 and over the course of the following decade, Yiddish dailies espousing everything from Orthodoxy to various radical agendas began incorporating daily or weekly women’s pages or half-­ page women’s sections. Even periodicals that did not initially introduce women’s pages were not immune to these changes, as holdouts like the politically conservative Morgn-­zhurnal and later the communist Frayhayt incorporated their first women’s columns in response to transformations in rival publications. By 1926, both of these publications had introduced women’s sections as well. The titles of these pages—­and the pages themselves—­sometimes disappeared for weeks at a time, and their content varied within and across different publications. But the introduction of women’s sections reflected a new level of sustained and overt engagement between the American Yiddish press and female readers. What prompted this expansion and aggregation of women’s content in the American Yiddish press? By this time, women’s pages had been

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regular features of many mainstream Anglophone papers for decades, as well as many non-­Anglophone dailies, including several German-­ language newspapers in the United States.4 But the Yiddish press, usually so eager to incorporate inspiration from other linguistic spheres, was less quick to introduce women’s pages, even as it incorporated the content usually included on women’s pages into its repertoires. At least one European Yiddish weekly had experimented with a women’s page in this era, though women’s pages did not become a regular feature of European Yiddish dailies until the 1930s.5 The advent of women’s pages in the American Yiddish press provides a key to unlocking the broader transformations happening in Yiddish print culture and the American public sphere in the period surrounding World War I. To date, scholars who have focused serious attention on the women’s content in the Yiddish press have primarily explored the types of messages newspapers imparted to female readers on their women’s pages: how newspapers responded to or attempted to shape various changes in women’s roles in society and how each newspaper’s ideological framework shaped the arguments they put forward on their women’s pages.6 But women’s pages were not a timeless feature of the American Yiddish press. Instead, they were a product of a particular historical moment and were deeply shaped by the opportunities and contingencies of that moment. Only by delving deeply into this context can we fully absorb the complexity of the space that made up the women’s pages of American Yiddish newspapers. The period between 1914 and 1926 was a time of both heightened possibility and increasing anxiety for the American Yiddish press; and these dynamics were crucial to shaping the introduction of women’s pages within these publications. On the one hand, these years witnessed peak circulation figures for Yiddish newspapers, which reached their apex in 1916.7 As more readers moved into the middle class, or at least aspired to do so, Yiddish dailies became even more successful at attracting advertisers. The revenue raised by increased circulation and advertising allowed most dailies to expand their lengths and diversify their content, including introducing women’s pages. Women’s pages proliferated as each daily followed the lead of rival publications, competing for readers’ and advertisers’ support. The development of women’s pages thus highlights the importance of understanding the American Yiddish press

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as an entire publishing sphere, as opposed to separating newspapers by ideology. Newspapers drew inspiration from transformations in periodicals that espoused very different political frameworks. Moreover, writers often wrote for the women’s pages of multiple publications, including those aligned with different ideologies. On the other hand, the Yiddish press also contended with various challenges in this period. Not only did publications in the United States have to compete with a growing Yiddish newspaper industry in Europe—­a publishing field where editors frequently asserted the commercial, lowbrow nature of the American Yiddish press—­but editors and publishers also feared that readers might discard their favorite Yiddish daily once they were more comfortable with English. Introducing women’s pages became a method for dailies to highlight their ability to evolve along with their readers. Moreover, the Yiddish press also had to contend with an American public sphere that was increasingly hostile to foreign-­language culture. By including women’s pages, editors and publishers could make their papers’ layout more closely mimic the popular press in the United States and thus look and feel more “American.” This period thus encompassed immense transformations in the Yiddish newspaper market, where individual publications, and the field as a whole, constantly renegotiated relationships with readers, advertisers, and local and global publishing trends. Introducing women’s pages became a way for Yiddish newspapers to mediate between these various priorities, sometimes successfully and sometimes less so. This meant that, apart from the overt goal of providing women with interesting or useful content, women’s pages took on a variety of symbolic roles that were not necessarily related to their purported audience. Instead, introducing women’s pages became a method for newspaper producers to make various claims to progressiveness, modernity, mass appeal, or Americanness. As was true of women’s columns in earlier decades, this made women’s sections within the Yiddish press spaces that were full of dynamism but also rife with contradictions, as these various priorities did not always work in tandem. In order to unravel the many contexts and materials that women’s pages encompassed, we can take our cue from the space of the women’s page itself, specifically the women’s page of the Tog on February 20, 1917, where Anna Weiss / Rosa Lebensboym’s column appeared (figure 4.1).

Figure 4.1. Women’s page of the Tog, February 20, 1917. (From the Collection of the National Library of Israel and the New York Public Library; Historical Jewish Press website—­www.Jpress.org.il—­founded by the National Library and Tel Aviv University)

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This installment was not especially noteworthy. It was not the first or last iteration of the women’s page, where publishers made their most overt claims about these sections. Nor did it include particularly innovative material. Nevertheless, the content on this page reveals the variety of conflicting contents and motivations that made up women’s pages in every major American Yiddish daily. And when read together, the articles published on this page offer a window into the convergence and divergence between the various roles that women’s sections performed for the readers, writers, editors, and advertisers associated with the American Yiddish press.

“The Woman and the Home”: Competition and Experimentation Lebensboym’s article on February 20 ran in the center of the Tog’s back page, directly under a masthead identifying this space as the paper’s women’s page. The title that the paper’s management chose for this page, “Di froy un di heym” (The woman and the home), seemed to reflect Lebensboym’s description of women’s pages, as it firmly situated women within the domestic sphere. To bolster this association, the title of the page was flanked with two mirrored images of a woman doting over her children, giving the impression of the women’s page itself as a space characterized by comfort, family, and harmony. This masthead and the accompanying image had debuted in the paper two weeks earlier. But other than the masthead itself, the Tog’s publishers and editors chose not to publicize the introduction of this section in any way. Previous issues had not notified readers of its upcoming debut. Nor did the first installment include a note apprising readers of what to expect going forward. Perhaps this lack of preamble reflected editors’ acknowledgment that almost all of the columns on this page were features the paper had previously introduced—­meaning that, other than the title, readers might not have noticed a shift in the paper’s women’s content. Readers also may not have noticed when this page ceased carrying this title four months later, as the content otherwise remained relatively static. The masthead of “Di froy un di heym” and the ways it disappeared and reappeared over time offer a window into the ways in which dynamics

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of competition and experimentation shaped the women’s pages of the Yiddish press. In choosing this title, for instance, the Tog’s management echoed the title of the Tageblat’s women’s page, “Di froy un di familye” (The woman and the family), which had debuted almost three years prior. Moreover, it was likely not a coincidence that the Forverts decided to introduce a formally designated women’s page one week after the Tog had introduced “Di froy un di heym.”8 As we have seen, women’s pages were not a regular feature of the Yiddish press until the end of 1914. However, these new sections did not appear out of the blue. Instead, they reflected a gradual process in which Yiddish dailies across the ideological spectrum began increasing the number of features explicitly addressing a female audience and experimenting with where and how often these features should run. The first Yiddish daily to introduce a women’s section was the Orthodox Tageblat, which debuted “Di froy un di familye” on the bottom half of its back page on November 15, 1914. But in the year preceding the introduction of this section, the Tageblat had already begun incorporating more human-­ interest pieces and women’s columns and hiring young writers to supplement the paper’s longer-­running features such as Getsel Zelikovits’s women’s columns. While the Tageblat did not label its women’s section until November 1914, its editors had already moved this new content from the middle of the newspaper to its back page six months prior.9 This page thus began functioning as a proto–­women’s section even before it ran under that designation. Similarly, while the Forverts first published its long-­running women’s page, “Froyen interesen” (Women’s interests), in February 1917, editor Abraham Cahan and his staff had made a previous attempt at introducing a women’s page one year prior, printing an untitled section on Sundays “devoted to the theme: ‘women and children.’ ”10 Like the Tageblat’s women’s section, the first attempt at a women’s page in the Forverts comprised a mix of long-­running material, including articles by the paper’s previous women’s columnist, Klara Ginzburg, as well as newer features, such as articles about childhood development by Hillel Rogoff.11 What set this period apart was not that it saw the introduction of content explicitly addressing a female audience into the Yiddish press. Instead, this was the first time that much of this material was aggregated into one specific section. In most cases, this also led to an increase in

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the volume of women’s columns, write-­in contests, or human-­interest stories a newspaper included. As was true in the Tageblat, most Yiddish dailies consolidated most or all of their women-­centric content on their back page, though some papers like the Forverts published women’s sections in the middle of the publication instead. In some ways, aggregating and titling this material made it more prominent than it had been in the past. But this decision also separated out women’s content from the rest of the newspaper, suggesting either that it served a different reading audience or that readers could look to this content for something different from what they would find on other pages. In many cases, the boundaries between women’s pages and the rest of the newspapers in which they ran were much blurrier in practice than these titles suggested. Newspapers that published weekly women’s pages continued to print women’s columns on days when their women’s pages did not run. Many publications also vacillated over where to publish their advice columns and serialized fiction—­material that was sometimes marketed specifically toward female readers and sometimes as material with broader appeal. This material often moved back and forth between different sections of the newspaper.12 Moreover, most dailies were not consistent about labeling their women’s pages. Even while the content remained the same, titles disappeared and reappeared over time. By June 1917, the Tog had ceased running its women’s material under the heading “Di froy un di heym.” In staff memos, however, editors continued to refer to the back page as the “women’s page” well into the 1920s, long after the paper had stopped labeling this material.13 In the first month of existence of Di tsayt (The time), a Marxist-­Zionist daily, it cycled through various titles for its women’s page, including “In der froyen-­un kinder-­velt” (In the women’s and children’s world) and “Hoyz-­virtshaft un mode-­nayes” (Housework and fashion news).14 As these varying titles suggest, Di tsayt also experimented widely with the types of content to include in this section. Within each Yiddish daily, editors’ and publishers’ decisions to introduce women’s pages were deeply intertwined with broader changes happening in the Yiddish newspaper sphere. The ability regularly to devote space to a women’s page or half-­page women’s section was spurred by a massive increase in Yiddish newspaper circulation after the outbreak of World War I. The desire of readers to keep abreast of the latest war news

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led to a substantial increase in circulation, as some readers subscribed to Yiddish dailies for the first time and others began supplementing their usual newspaper with other publications to compare their reportage. Overall, New York–­based Yiddish daily circulation jumped from about 375,000 in 1912 to almost 540,000 by 1916. Each paper channeled this income into foreign correspondents and subscriptions to news syndicates. But many also introduced a variety of other features, including women’s pages, humor columns, and theater sections.15 In publicizing women’s sections, Yiddish dailies often drew connections between these sections and other simultaneous transformations. In 1914, for example, the publishers of the Tageblat cited their new women’s section as one of several ways in which the paper was transforming into a “new Tageblat.” By introducing more features meant to satisfy the specific needs and interests of “the Jewish businessman, the Jewish worker, the Jewish woman, [and] the Jewish child,” the paper promised to become “a journal for the whole family,” filled with content that all types of readers “can read, should read, and must read.”16 At other times, dailies used the introduction of women’s sections to attest to the strong bond they had previously cultivated with female readers. In April 1917, the Forverts featured an article called “The ‘Forverts’ and Its Female Readers,” signed by “A Lezerin,” a pseudonym meaning “a female reader.” In it, the author asserted that women had played “perhaps an even greater role than men” in ensuring the paper’s success. In A Lezerin’s view, the relationship between the Forverts and its female audience was symbiotic. The paper had transformed many previously illiterate women into strong readers, allowing them access to entertaining features, comforting counsel, and a radical framework through which to understand their lives. In return, women were crucial to transforming the Forverts into a mass-­consumption publication, both in the sense that women brought the paper to the attention of their family and friends and in the sense that a desire to attract female readers inspired the paper’s journalistic approach: “The ‘Forverts’ conducted itself in a new fashion. . . . This won them masses of readers among the public in general, but especially among women.”17 In equating the paper’s style of journalism with its attempts to speak to female readers, this article implied that introducing a women’s page was the next logical step in the development of the Forverts.

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In many cases, transformations in each newspaper’s women’s content were inspired by simultaneous innovations in rival periodicals. In 1916, for example, the Forverts announced its first attempt at a women’s page as one of several features constituting the paper’s new, expanded Sunday edition.18 Less than a month later, the Morgn-­zhurnal announced its own expanded Sunday edition. In publicizing this edition, the paper’s management emphasized that it would incorporate more articles with “a special importance for the Jewish home and the Jewish family.”19 To this end, while the Morgn-­zhurnal did not introduce a women’s page until six years later, this expanded Sunday edition featured the paper’s first women’s column, “Di heym un di froy” (The home and the woman), penned by the veteran Yiddish journalist Hayim Malits.20 In marketing the new women’s pages and women’s columns, Yiddish dailies often directly contrasted their approaches with those of rival publications. The Morgn-­zhurnal, for example, asserted to readers that “it is superfluous to say that everything that will be published in the expanded Sunday Morgn-­zhurnal will be nice, clean, and decently written, as is fitting for a newspaper that is known to be the greatest and best Yiddish newspaper in the world, and that is read by every Jew that values and looks for clean family literature.” Similarly, when the Tageblat introduced its women’s section in 1914, it had also begun marketing itself as the “cleanest, the best, and the most appropriate family paper.”21 Such statements highlighted the Tageblat’s and Morgn-­zhurnal’s more conservative outlooks, both politically and culturally, and their desire to market themselves as less sensational alternatives to publications like the Forverts—­even while also incorporating sensationalism themselves. However, it also suggested the ways in which these papers’ incorporation of women’s content was as influenced by dynamics of competition as by more narrowly defined ideological goals. At the same time, introducing women’s pages also signaled Yiddish newspapers’ continued efforts to promote themselves as attractive venues for advertisers. This was even true of radical newspapers that ostensibly catered to primarily working-­class audiences or that openly derided capitalism. Soon after the Forverts introduced its women’s page, the journalist and labor leader Baruch Vladeck took over as the publication’s business manager, after previously serving as city editor. In this role, Vladeck instituted various changes to the paper’s business strategy,

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including creating an in-­house advertising agency, as opposed to relying on agencies that served multiple publications. He also aggressively promoted the paper as the ideal venue to market advertisers’ products. This dynamic only increased in the following decades, as the Forverts and other publications all found ways to market themselves as “gateway[s] to the Jewish market.”22 In the media historian Brian Dolber’s study of the Forverts’s advertising strategy, he argues that that the paper’s increase in women’s content went hand in hand with these changes in business structure. As women were seen as “the primary consumers in Jewish working-­class households,” incorporating more content addressing women was crucial to convincing companies to advertise in the Yiddish press.23 To this end, the Forverts Association distributed pamphlets that apprised advertisers of the number of “articles of interest to women” that it published.24 It also asserted that the Forverts surpassed rivals in its volume of “advertising appealing to women” and asserted that that “women constitute a large and intelligent class of readers of The Forward.”25 As we have seen, Yiddish newspapers’ highlighting of their appeal to women readers had been a crucial component of their business strategy since the 1890s. But with more readers rising into the middle class, or aspiring to it, Yiddish dailies renewed their emphasis on connecting female readers with US consumer markets. This desire to use women’s pages to attract advertisers perhaps helps to explain why every major daily placed a particular emphasis on incorporating women’s page features that addressed wives and mothers. While each daily included content meant to speak to a younger female audience—­such as dating columns in the Tageblat or Sadie Winouker’s Forverts column about young female factory workers—­in general, much of the content on women’s pages addressed the perceived reading needs of an older demographic. Newspapers like the Tageblat that only devoted a half page to their women’s section tended to devote the other half to children’s pages or English pages targeting a younger demographic. They also published advertisements telling mothers to direct their children who were more comfortable reading in English to the English Department directly above the women’s page.26 And like the Tog, most Yiddish dailies employed titles for sections or columns that explicitly associated women with the domestic sphere, such as the Tageblat’s “Di froy un di

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familye” (figure 4.2) and the Morgn-­zhurnal’s “Far di heym un familye” (f­igure 4.3). And, as the historian Maxine Seller has argued, the Forverts demonstrated a similar approach by flanking the page’s title with images of women knitting or holding children (figure 4.4).27 Some Yiddish newspapers incorporated advertisements into their women’s pages. For example, the Tog’s women’s page on February 20 included small advertisements for Musterole and Pape’s “Cold” Compound—­both cold medicines. According to Shulamith Z. Berger, Yiddish newspapers and their advertisers also drew more implicit connections between their women’s pages and advertisements that appeared on other pages, as each generally addressed an older, married female demographic.28 The advertisements and women’s page content included in the Yiddish press were mutually reinforcing, with both offering

Figure 4.2. The Tageblat’s women’s section masthead, “Di froy un di familye.” (From the Collection of the National Library of Israel and the New York Public Library; Historical Jewish Press website—­www.Jpress.org.il—­founded by the National ­Library and Tel Aviv University)

Figure 4.3. The Morgn-­zhurnal’s women’s section masthead, “Far di heym un familye.” (From the Collection of the National Library of Israel and the New York Public Library; Historical Jewish Press website—­www.Jpress.org.il—­founded by the National Library and Tel Aviv University)

Figure 4.4. The Forverts’s women’s page masthead, “Froyen interesen.” (From the Collection of the National Library of Israel, The Forward Association, and the New York Public Library; Historical Jewish Press website—­www.Jpress.org.il—­founded by the National Library and Tel Aviv University)

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readers various forms of guidance on how properly to engage with US culture and how properly to care for their families and homes. To be sure, younger women were also a crucial component of family economies and the Jewish consumer market.29 But Yiddish dailies particularly emphasized the role of wives and mothers in buying goods and services for their households. This probably stemmed in part from the fact that the readership of most Yiddish newspapers was aging, as many younger readers shifted to reading English-­language publications or English sections of Yiddish newspapers.30 At the same time, it also reflected the potent roles that advertisers and newspaper producers alike viewed Jewish women as playing in the domestic sphere.31

“In the Women’s World”: Ideology and Balance Rosa Lebensboym’s critique of women’s pages ran as part of “In der froyen velt” (In the women’s world), a column summarizing news stories deemed of particular interest to women. In this installment, Lebensboym commented on general trends in newspaper publishing. Most women’s pages offered little insight into topics of social import, she argued. Furthermore, they lacked specificity, as most “could have been written in any place under the sun—­in Rome, Algiers, in Honolulu, or instead in a far-­flung provincial town, where life passes lazily, and a girl has ample time every day to think about how to be prettier.” As the United States prepared to enter World War I, Lebensboym asserted that these silences had become unacceptable. “True, [there have been] weak signs that something is stirring among women. From time to time a piece of news has slipped through, . . . But these incidental notices, published in miniature, get drowned out by the rest of the material that usually fills the ‘women’ page’ of a newspaper.” Yet even as Lebensboym critiqued women’s pages for lacking social import, she infused her work with precisely the information she felt women’s pages generally lacked. In fact, Lebensboym devoted the second half of her column that day to describing the myriad roles women were playing in the country’s preparations for war, including one suffragist’s attempt to create an all-­female military regiment and the efforts of the National Special Aid Society to encourage women to pursue auxiliary military roles. She even provided the organization’s address,

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perhaps encouraging readers to support this organization in any way they could.32 As the women’s page editor for the Tog, Lebensboym contributed a variety of content to the paper, as well as compiling and editing work by other authors. But “In der froyen velt” was one of Lebensboym’s most regular contributions during her tenure as editor. In some installments, Lebensboym explored topics that she considered replete with social significance, such as how decreased birthrates were affecting women’s lives. Others, in contrast, focused on more sensational or entertainment-­ driven topics, such as the lives of famous dancers.33 Overall, Lebensboym offered readers a wide-­ranging mix of news, fashion tips, and theater reviews, often within the space of a single column. In her first column, for example, Lebensboym discussed the life of the labor organizer Mother Jones, supplemented with brief discussions of fashion and housework, without any attempt to connect these disparate threads into a coherent whole.34 This fusion of entertainment, news, and practical advice provides a window into the inconsistent ways in which the political and ideological project of each Yiddish daily inflected its women’s page. In some ways, reading the women’s page of a radical or religious daily diverged significantly, as these newspapers had very different understandings of the ideal future trajectory of American Jewish life and the roles women should play in shaping this trajectory. During the Russian Revolution and in the early years of the Soviet Union, for instance, the Forverts’s staff frequently translated materials from Russian-­language periodicals for inclusion on their women’s page. They also incorporated articles that approvingly described the daily lives of women in the Soviet Union. This pro-­Soviet material disappeared from the Forverts’s women’s page by 1923, reflecting a broader shift in the paper’s stance on the Soviet Union.35 In contrast, the religious Tageblat infused its women’s page with quotations from the Bible and other religious texts, as well as jokes or stories that could be read aloud at holiday celebrations.36 These articles suggested to readers the ways in which the Tageblat could be seamlessly incorporated into their religious practice. But not every installment of the women’s pages that ran in the Yiddish press incorporated content that was implicitly or explicitly tied to the newspaper’s ideological agendas. Instead, these topics appeared and

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disappeared from the women’s pages of Yiddish dailies, as they contended for space with more entertainment-­driven material or material on housework, fashion, or child care.37 To be sure, some Yiddish dailies incorporated articles on housework or child care that spoke about these topics in overtly political terms. For example, the February 20 issue of the Tog’s women’s page included an article by Miriam Razin that discussed recent price increases that readers had likely noticed when buying groceries. Razin used inflation as evidence of how political realities penetrated the domestic sphere, as well as how news stories that generally ran on the front page of newspapers were still deeply relevant to women’s lives and interests. She invoked the long history of Jewish women militating against food-­related price speculation, including kosher meat strikes. In Razin’s view, what these strikes lacked was a solid ideological framework, as they had been moments of spontaneous uprising rather than fully formed political movements. Going forward, she argued, women must connect these actions to clearly articulated “political demands.”38 But not every author who wrote for the women’s page of a Yiddish newspaper chose to highlight the political ramifications of topics such as housework, beauty, or romance. If a reader were to read the political coverage on the women’s pages of multiple Yiddish dailies in tandem, they might notice that radical, religious, and nonpartisan organs often agreed on their assessments on women’s roles in society, even if they came to these assessments from different angles. A prime example of this phenomenon was the ways in which each Yiddish daily covered the evolving movement for women’s suffrage. The advent of women’s pages in the Yiddish press coincided with profound changes in women’s roles in US politics, as first New York then the United States as a whole granted women the right to vote. In previous decades, both religious and radical dailies had published articles that expressed ambivalence about the suffrage movement. While some writers in the Orthodox Tageblat lauded the suffrage movement, others expressed concerns that voting rights might lead women to abandon their most important duties—­to their homes and families.39 And in the first decade of the twentieth century, some writers associated with the socialist Forverts dismissed the suffrage movement as overly bourgeois and not cognizant enough of issues of class.40 By the time that the women’s pages appeared, however, every major Yiddish daily expressed

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overt support for ratification of women’s suffrage, first in New York in 1917 then in the United States as a whole in 1920. These shifts reflected broader changes in public opinion. For instance, while the Forverts was not an official party organ, the publication’s changing orientation to suffrage was in line with that of the Socialist Party, which adopted support of women’s suffrage into its party platform in 1908.41 In covering the suffrage movement, each Yiddish daily found ways to interpret these events through its particular ideological lens. Socialist-­ oriented dailies like Di tsayt and the Forverts argued for women to channel their newly granted voting power into support for radical candidates or legislation. In contrast, writers contributing to the Orthodox Tageblat argued that women’s “innate” morality would infuse a positive, pacifying ethos into the electorate. As an ostensibly nonpartisan paper, the Tog was never as concerned as its rivals about the consistency of the messaging conveyed in its columns. Instead, the writers featured on the Tog’s women’s pages offered various reasons for their support of women’s suffrage that echoed those found on the women’s pages of both socialist and Orthodox Yiddish dailies.42 Some Yiddish dailies were more consistent than others in the type of materials and messages they provided on their women’s pages. For example, Rokhl Holtman, the editor of the women’s page of the Communist Party–­affiliated Frayhayt, found ways to infuse radical ideology into almost every feature in this section, including columns in which readers described their first moments of political awakening or articles on household chores or motherhood in which Holtman highlighted the particular ways in which capitalism exploited female labor.43 Holtman wrote the majority of the Frayhayt’s women’s page for much of its run, which helps to explain its consistency.44 But providing consistent political messaging to readers was not the goal of every Yiddish daily, especially in relation to the women’s pages. In analyses of the women’s page of the Forverts, the historians Maxine Seller and Rachel Rojanski have both highlighted the often-­contradictory messages the socialist daily purveyed to female audiences. Rojanski, for instance, highlights the dissonance between the paper’s progressive politics and its use of traditional, often religiously oriented rhetoric on its women’s page. In her assessment, this dissonance stemmed from editors’ assumption that this was the best way to convey radical concepts to a

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female audience, which might not have previous relationships to radicalism.45 Seller, in contrast, emphasizes the inherent tensions between the paper’s commitments to socialism, acculturation, and Jewish tradition: “Because these ideological currents could conflict with as well as reinforce one another, the definition of socialist womanhood that they produced was not always consistent.”46 These tensions even infused the columns of individual writers who sought to balance these priorities for themselves and their readers. For example, the Forverts contributor Dr. Esther Luria at times championed public education, holding it up as a paragon of Americanization, and frequently criticized public schools for undermining parents’ rights to instill their own political beliefs in their children.47 In Lebensboym’s critique of women’s pages, she was in some ways reflecting and in some ways obscuring the realities of these spaces within the American Yiddish press. The types of ideological messages that a reader would find varied significantly between publications as well as from day to day within individual publications. On some days, Lebensboym’s critiques would have perfectly reflected the types of content incorporated into the women’s page of the Tog and other Yiddish dailies. On others, they would have elided the social and political import of the content found in this space.

“The Debutante”: Entertainment and Authorship To the left of the masthead, readers of the Tog’s women’s page on February 20 would have found a sketch signed by Rae Malis called “Di debyutantin” (The debutante), focusing on high-­society debutante balls. In it, Malis drew connections between these events and the debuts of actresses on the New York stage. Both spheres employ the term “debut” and prize “the new, the sensational” above all else. Malis frequently covered recent debuts on the Yiddish and English stage as one of the Tog’s theater columnists. In describing debutante balls in this way, she drew connections between her women’s columns and her other reportage.48 In this article, she also offered analogies to Jewish life-­cycle events, so that the rituals of elite circles in the United States felt less foreign to Yiddish newspaper readers: “The word ‘debutante’ announces to society that . . . a young woman is officially ready for love and ripe for marriage.

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From that day on, she is considered an adult, just as is true with Jews for a Bar-­Mitzvah-­boy.”49 As this article reflects, in addition to offering readers practical housekeeping advice or updates on recent current events, women’s pages included content meant primarily to entertain the newspaper’s reading audience. Writers used their articles to discuss the lives and careers of famous actresses or the plots of recent plays on the Yiddish-­and English-­language stage, as well as to offer their readers windows into various strata of US society, both high and low. Others, in contrast, provided exoticized descriptions of women’s lives in foreign countries or at various historical moments. In some cases, authors approached these subjects with empathy and encouraged their readers to do the same. In “Di debyutantin,” for instance, while Malis explored the excitement that accompanies the process of entering society, she also highlighted the anxiety that could arise with this sort of public performance. “You can see how exhausted she is, poor thing, after her first ball. But she feels happy the next morning, if she can manage to get herself out of bed, because she has passed the test, she has endured the exam.”50 In other cases, instead of offering readers windows into different cultural spheres, authors of women’s page content attempted to reframe mundane subjects as ones full of intrigue or human interest. The bottom right corner of the Tog’s women’s page on the day that “Di debyutantin” appeared included an unsigned article offering readers a long, elaborate history of the handkerchief. While most people consider a handkerchief as merely a “useful, practical and prosaic object,” the author opined, its past was actually filled with “poetry, romance and religious mysticism.” The author traced the history of the handkerchief back to ancient Egypt and explored moments when handkerchiefs appeared on Grecian urns, in medieval tales of chivalry, and in historical records related to England’s Queen Elizabeth I. This history, the author argued, was largely forgotten, as handkerchiefs took on more mundane roles. Nevertheless, this article suggested that readers could find human interest even in subjects that seem commonplace.51 Interestingly, handkerchiefs had also been a subject of one of Abraham Cahan’s early articles in the Forverts. Instead of infusing his discussion of handkerchiefs with historical intrigue, Cahan instead used the subject as an avenue to encourage readers’ acculturation processes—­framing handkerchief use as an American

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practice that readers should adopt.52 In different newspapers and in the hands of different authors, the same topic could take on a variety of different resonances. The advent of women’s sections in the Yiddish press opened up significantly more room for women to contribute to the publishing sphere than ever before. Though women’s pages still included many bylines by male journalists, editors often used the introduction of women’s pages to incorporate work by women writers into their publications, as they assumed women might be able to cover topics like child care or fashion from an insider’s perspective. In the years before the advent of women’s pages, women writers occasionally contributed short stories, poetry, and, much more sporadically, editorials, but the number of female bylines increased dramatically with the introduction of women’s pages into the Yiddish press.53 Nevertheless, as had been true of women’s columns in the Yiddish press before the advent of women’s pages, there was also remarkable overlap between the authors writing for women’s pages across the Yiddish publishing sphere. “Di debyutantin,” for instance, was signed by Rae Malis, a pseudonym employed by Rae Raskin. Raskin began writing for the Yiddish press in 1912, seven years after her arrival in the United States. She initially contributed articles and short stories to the nonpartisan weekly Dos naye land and the anarchist weekly Fraye arbeter shtime before becoming a mainstay of the Tog’s back page beginning in 1915. An ardent Marxist and Zionist, Raskin joined the staff of Di tsayt in 1920, which was sponsored by the Marxist-­Zionist organization Poale Tsiyon. In this position, she edited the newspaper’s women’s page under the name Rae Malis while also contributing articles about theater, film, and art under her actual name. After Di tsayt folded in 1922, Raskin returned to the Tog and also began contributing to the women’s magazine Froyen-­zhurnal.54 As this list suggests, like many writers employed by the Yiddish press, Raskin contributed to publications that espoused very different ideological agendas over the course of her career. This was not just true of writers who made their living working for the women’s page. Instead, it was constant feature of the publishing sphere as a whole. In an article in Commentary Magazine from 1945, S. L. Blumenson highlighted this convergence as a crucial component of Yiddish newspapers since

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their inception. In the early days of the Yiddish press, radical activists “felt compelled to accept work with the hated [Tageblat]. They changed jobs quite often, so that they might be writing one week for the Forverts attacking Sarasohn, and the next week for the [Tageblat] attacking Cahan.”55 Even as the publishing field expanded, writers continued to shift over time between publications that espoused different ideological frameworks. In some cases, authors like Rae Raskin changed the arguments they conveyed in their columns in order to conform with the editorial line of the publication in which their articles appeared. When writing for Di tsayt, Raskin asserted that articles on housekeeping or cooking were no less integral to the paper’s socialist, Zionist framework than articles on political economy. “All of Jewish life must soon change,” she argued, “and it is the task of our newspaper to prepare the Jewish woman just as much as the Jewish man for the new way of life.” In Raskin’s view, social transformations would redound differently for women than for men, as every woman “will still have her distinct duties—­to protect the health of her family.” With this in mind, Raskin published cooking columns full of recipes that would be particularly useful for women who planned to move to Palestine in the near future, in order to fulfill their Zionist ideals.56 In contrast, two years later, when Raskin began writing for the nonpartisan Froyen-­zhurnal, she promised to steer clear of partisanship, even when writing articles providing civic education to readers. In December 1922, for instance, Raskin described the importance of understanding the rules and processes surrounding local, state, and national governments. However, she also asserted that “the ‘Froyen-­zhurnal’ as an apolitical publication, will not endorse any specific political party, leaving the judgment and choice to the independent viewpoint of the reader.”57 Not every author used their column to champion their publication venue’s ideological agenda. Some writers infused their writing with their own political subjectivities, regardless of where they published. In 1918, for example, a new author began appearing alongside Rae Raskin and Rosa Lebensboym on the Tog’s women’s page: Adella Kean Zametkin. A prominent radical activist since the 1890s, Kean Zametkin had previously contributed to socialist publications like the Abend blat and Der

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fraynd, a monthly published by the Arbeter ring. At Der fraynd, Kean Zametkin had written a column explicating news stories and historical events from a feminist, socialist perspective. Kean Zametkin emphasized the gendered oppression underlying capitalism but also took fellow socialist leaders to task for their lack of attention to women’s lives.58 When she joined that staff of the Tog, Kean Zametkin took over the women’s page’s pre-­existing news column, “In the Women’s World.” She then transformed it so that hewed closely to the parameters of the column she had published in Der fraynd, speaking from an overtly socialist perspective on issues related to birth control and women’s rights.59 Kean Zametkin also introduced another column to the Tog, called “Fun a froy tsu froyen” (From a woman to women), in which she offered readers advice on housework, nutrition, and child care. The Tog was a nonpartisan publication, which marketed itself as speaking to a more refined readership than other Yiddish dailies. Yet Kean Zametkin was explicit about her desire to direct her advice to working-­class women and to employ an overtly radical framework in her columns. A topic of particular concern for Kean Zametkin was food safety. She counseled readers to steer clear of processed foods like ketchup or refined foods like white rice, which she argued served as tools through which capitalism destroyed workers’ bodies. “It is a shame in our capitalist society,” she lamented, “that her most useful children, the workers, must hunger and have the greatest percentage of tuberculosis and other diseases. The cause is clear: workers are not getting the right food.”60 Whether writing for a socialist monthly or a nonpartisan daily, Kean Zametkin highlighted the inherent injustices of capitalism, especially the constraints it placed on wives and mothers. The fact that Kean Zametkin infused her columns in a nonpartisan daily with an overtly radical perspective in part reflected the open-­ minded editorial policies of the Tog. At the helm of the Forverts, Abraham Cahan projected an image of total control over the paper’s style and messaging, even if this was not always true in practice.61 In contrast, the editors of the Tog often prioritized authorial independence over ideological coherence. When the journalist B. Z. Goldberg began working for the paper, he complained to then-­editor William Edlin that four articles on the same subject had appeared side by side in a recent issue. Edlin countered that the paper’s readers wanted to hear the opinions of

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prominent writers, regardless of what subject they explored. Moreover, he would not presume to tell these figures what they should write about. In Goldberg’s assessment, this policy rendered the newspaper an “open, freewheeling democracy, with a senate too divergent in views to achieve unity.”62 In this light, Kean Zametkin’s decision to write a socialist-­ leaning women’s column seems less like an aberration and more of a reflection of the diversity within this publication as a whole. At the same time, the relative freedom that Kean Zametkin enjoyed in writing women’s columns reflected another important dynamic throughout the history of the Yiddish press: lack of consistent editorial attention to women’s columns. While editors in chief, publishers, and business managers wanted to ensure that their newspapers included women’s features, and some even tried their hands at writing these features themselves, they did not seem to have always paid close attention to what women wrote within their women’s columns. This same dynamic was apparently common in the American popular press of this time as well. As a result, to borrow the language of the historian Alice Fahs, “editorial inattention allowed these women a limited freedom. They often ‘flew ­beneath the radar’ in writing for the woman’s page precisely because in editorial terms it was the least important section of the newspaper.”63 This transformed women’s columns into a space that allowed writers a certain freedom to infuse their own opinions into their writing. In the process, they also transformed women’s pages into spaces that did not always reflect the editorial perspective of the newspaper in which they ran.

“Scenes from the Courts”: Sensationalism and Americanization Directly to the right of “Di debyutantin,” the Tog’s readers would have found Sarah B. Smith’s popular series “Bilder fun di korts” (Scenes from the courts). In each installment, Smith brought readers inside a New York courtroom and detailed a particularly sensational or melodramatic trial. Her descriptions were thick with adjectives, delving deeply into the look and feel of the courtroom and its inhabitants: “With the appearance of a dog who is prepared to be whipped, she stood before the judge. Every bit of hope had been extinguished from her eyes. The hand with which she grasped the railing that separated the defendant from

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the judge was red, burned. From under thin new skin protruded thick blue veins.” It soon became clear to Smith’s readers that these burns were evidence of the crime this woman had committed. After being spurned by her lover, she had thrown acid at him, burning him on his face and hands. Overwhelmed by her rage, she had been careless with her aim, accidentally spilling acid on herself as well. After ascertaining that the defendant was remorseful for her actions, the judge decided to sentence her to probation rather than jail time, hoping that the scars that her actions had left on her body would serve as deterrents against future crimes of passion.64 This article was characteristic of Smith’s contributions to the Tog’s women’s page throughout her career. In addition to court reporting, she also contributed theater coverage and works of fiction to the newspaper. Smith’s penchant for melodrama made her a subject of derision for cultural commentators, who viewed her reportage as exemplifying the infiltration of sensationalism into the Yiddish press. When describing the history of Yiddish journalism in America, Irving Howe reserved particular disdain for Smith, calling her “tone-­deaf to Yiddish, wonderfully humorless, yet with an eye that quickly got to the heat of the lurid.”65 Nevertheless, her engrossing fiction and vivid reportage won her a devoted audience of readers and allowed her to forge a more stable career than many other female journalists of this era. At the same time, Smith’s article also serves as a window into the ways in which the introduction of women’s pages reflected a new stage in the Yiddish press’s evolving relationship with other streams of American culture. In writing melodramatic court reporting, Smith drew on the tradition of “sob sister” journalism in the American popular press. At the turn of the twentieth century, many newspapers in the United States began assigning female journalists to report on dramatic court proceedings, hoping that a female perspective might infuse court reporting with pathos and drama. Male journalists and cultural commentators often dismissed the work of court reporters like Dorothy Dix or Nixola Greeley-­Smith as sentimental or hackneyed, and Smith encountered similar critiques. However, sensationalized court reporting allowed these women an entryway into long careers in journalism, a sphere to which women writers still had limited access.66

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Smith’s column was not the only article on the Tog’s women’s page that day to take its cue from court reporting penned by women in the American popular press. Below Smith’s column was an editorial by David Hermalin. As described in chapter 3, Hermalin was a veteran Yiddish journalist who gained a particular reputation for writing engrossing women’s columns, first in the socialist Varhayt then in the Tog, until his death in 1921. In his columns in the Tog, Hermalin offered a conservative, tradition-­oriented assessment of women’s roles in society, questioning whether women should enter the workforce and celebrating women’s “innate” docility.67 These messages often stood in stark contrast to those found in other columns on the Tog’s women’s page by authors like Adella Kean Zametkin, who used her columns to militate for class-­ based revolution. In this installment, titled “Di froy vos iz arunter fun glaykhen veg” (The woman who strays from the straight path), Hermalin focused on a recent case adjudicated in Chicago’s Morals Court, where a man had successfully sued his brother for running off with his wife. Hermalin was unsympathetic to the newfound love between brother-­and sister-­in-­law and admonished the wife for neglecting her children. At twenty-­one, this woman was only three years older than her brother-­in-­law. But the age gap, and the woman’s responsibilities as a mother, signaled to Hermalin that she should have known better than to lead a younger man astray. He argued that the brother-­in-­law assumed less responsibility, as he had probably been bewitched by the older woman. “Young and inexperienced, he fell into her web.” At the outset of this article, Hermalin offered readers a window into the processes through which he selected topics for his daily column. In this case, a reader had sent Hermalin a clipping from the Chicago Examiner, asking him “to read it over and, if it is sufficiently interesting, to say something about it.”68 Intrigued by the clipping, Hermalin devoted this column to describing it in detail. The original Examiner article on which his column was based was written by Leola Allard, a society and crime reporter for Chicago-­based publications who eventually became the women’s page editor of the Chicago Daily News. Within his article, Hermalin translated liberally from Allard’s reportage.69 For Tog readers who had yet to become literate in English, Hermalin’s column allowed

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them access to a publishing sphere that was not otherwise available to them. For readers who were beginning to supplement Yiddish dailies with publications in English, this column became a way to demonstrate the deep engagement of the Yiddish press with American popular culture. Together, Hermalin’s and Smith’s articles reflect the diversity of ways in which women’s pages became loci of engagement between Yiddish newspapers and American popular culture more broadly. In some cases, as in Hermalin’s article, Yiddish journalists summarized or directly translated content from Anglophone papers. This also extended to the images incorporated into women’s sections, which were often borrowed from Anglophone newspapers, along with translations of their accompanying captions.70 In other cases, as in Smith’s article, the mainstream American press served more as a source of inspiration than of actual content. In filling women’s pages with a variety of content meant to entertain as well as to inform, the Yiddish press also took its cues from the format that had come to dominate Anglophone women’s pages. The historian Alice Fahs has noted that women’s pages in the English-­language press exhibited similar contradictions: “Domestic hints were placed next to pieces on new occupations for women; a ‘squib’ on lace might be next to an article on suffrage. . . . Such miscellany produced an abundance of meanings beyond the complete control of newspaper editors.”71 Moreover, the very introduction of women’s pages constituted an integral component of Yiddish newspapers’ attempts to model themselves on trends in mainstream journalism in the United States. In most cases, the introduction of women’s pages in Yiddish dailies coincided with the inception of expanded Sunday editions—­a format meant to mimic successful Anglophone newspapers. The Forverts was the most overt in drawing these connections, asserting that its Sunday edition proved that the Forverts stood on equal footing with other daily publications in the United States: “English[-­language] newspapers have a 5-­cent paper every Sunday. It is about time that the ‘Forverts’ should have an extra Sunday-­paper with much to read.”72 In the Anglophone press, the advent of Sunday editions had also gone hand in hand with the introduction of women’s pages.73 It is no surprise, then, that the Forverts seized the opportunity in creating an expanded Sunday edition to introduce a women’s page as well.

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Other Yiddish dailies, in contrast, drew connections between their increase in women-­centric material and their desire to mimic a different sphere of US journalism: magazines. Monthly women’s magazines like the Ladies’ Home Journal were a product of the 1880s and 1890s. Unlike mass-­consumption dailies, these publications targeted a mainly middle-­class audience. But like newspapers, magazines relied heavily on advertisements that appeared abundantly in their pages. In fact, the competition posed by women’s magazines was a major reason that Anglophone dailies first introduced women’s pages.74 In a nod to this sphere of journalism, Yiddish dailies like the Varyhayt, Tageblat, and Morgn-­zhurnal began titling their back page the “Magazine Page” beginning in 1916, 1918, and 1922, respectively.75 In some cases, this new masthead coincided with the introduction of a women’s section on the bottom half of this page, while in others, the title “Magazine Page” took the place of a formally titled women’s page. In referring to these back pages as “magazine pages,” Yiddish dailies signaled to readers and advertisers alike that this page had content that was fitting for a female and/or family audience while also drawing connections between Yiddish-­and English-­language publishing spheres. Yiddish dailies also had to respond to the advent of magazines meant to cater to specifically female or family audiences. Di froyen-­velt, for example, ran first monthly and then weekly between April 1913 and March 1914. A decade later, there was another short-­lived attempt to publish a women’s magazine, Der yidisher froyen-­zhurnal, which ran monthly from 1922 until 1923.76 Publishers of these women’s magazines asserted a sense of affinity with the mainstream press in the United States by giving their publications subtitles that mimicked those of major Anglophone magazines. Di froyen-­velt’s publishers did not literally translate the title of their publication, which would have been “The Women’s World.” Instead, they chose the subtitle “The Jewish Ladies’ Home Journal.” Similarly, Der yidisher froyen-­zhurnal’s subtitle was not “The Jewish Women’s Journal” but “The Jewish Women’s Home Companion.” Unlike Yiddish dailies, which often published translations of recent articles in major Anglophone publications, these magazines did not incorporate direct translations of Anglophone magazine articles. But these subtitles emphasized the extent to which publishers drew on the model of magazines like the Ladies’ Home Journal and Women’s Home Companion in crafting

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their own publications, offering readers a mix of fashion and housekeeping tips, advice columns, fiction, and editorials.77 To be sure, introducing women’s material was only one of several ways in which Yiddish newspapers highlighted their attempts to keep abreast of the latest trends in American journalism. While Yiddish dailies had always been deeply in conversation with various streams of culture in the United States, publishers, editors, and writers made a particular effort to emphasize this engagement in this period. In 1914, for example, the Tageblat proudly announced to readers that it got its news from “the same [sources] from which the large English newspapers get their information.”78 By buying this paper, the Tageblat asserted, readers would have access to the same content as that found in the leading Anglophone dailies. Similarly, the founders of the Tog also marketed their paper as a more “American” daily, pointing to their subscriptions to news syndicates and their adoption of a layout meant to mimic leading Anglophone publications.79 Perhaps paradoxically, this decision to highlight the “American” essence of American Yiddish dailies was, in part, an attempt to recenter the United States at the forefront of Yiddish publishing after the recent proliferation of European Yiddish newspapers. The advent of the Yiddish daily press was an American phenomenon, as censorship laws severely curtailed Yiddish newspaper production in the Russian Empire before 1903. But by 1914, eastern Europe hosted a thriving Yiddish publishing sphere as well. While the Yiddish newspaper market in Europe spanned a range of highbrow and mass-­consumption publications, European Yiddish newspapers quickly gained a reputation for being more culturally rich and less sensational than their US counterparts.80 According to Joseph Chaikin, a longtime writer for the Tog, this assumption—­ whether accurate or not—­led to a sense of anxiety that pervaded the offices of American Yiddish dailies: “You began to hear in America voices of revolt against the cultural hegemony of Warsaw, Vilna, and Odessa.”81 In Chaikin’s assessment, this fear of the growing cultural dominance of European Yiddish dailies was one major motivation behind the founding of the Tog in 1914. However, instead of the paper’s founders framing their intellectual approach to Yiddish journalism as a more European approach than rival publications, they instead asserted that their journalistic approach made the Tog the first truly American

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Yiddish newspaper. They acknowledged that other Yiddish dailies also took their cues from various streams of American journalism, though generally, they argued, solely from sensational publications. Instead, the Tog’s founders argued that their publication was more “American” in the sense that it was the first Yiddish daily that could favorably compare with newspapers of record in the United States.82 Incorporating women’s pages represented another method for United States–­based dailies to set themselves apart from the European Yiddish press. In fact, according to the literary scholar Nurit Orchan, the relationship of women writers and readers to the development of the European Yiddish press diverged significantly from that in the United States. While there were women who contributed letters to the editor to European Yiddish journals since the mid-­nineteenth century, women were rarely featured as journalists or authors of literature before the advent of daily newspapers in 1903. At first, the introduction of daily publications led to a small but significant increase in the number of professional female Yiddish writers. In fact, some future mainstays of the American Yiddish press, such as the future Forverts contributor Yente Serdatsky, made their debuts in European publications before migrating to the United States.83 However, as the Yiddish newspaper market in Europe evolved, the number of women who contributed to these publications decreased. In Orchan’s assessment, most of the first women to write for European Yiddish newspapers benefited from close ties to the prominent maskilic families that published these periodicals. As European dailies transitioned over their first decade of existence into increasingly commercial endeavors, women writers could no longer rely on the same networks to gain footholds into the press. Furthermore, this commercialization also made publishers more reticent to publish writing by women, which they viewed as less appealing.84 This stands in stark contrast to the American Yiddish press, where editors asserted their desire to feature female writers in order to increase the marketability of their publications.85 Incorporating women’s sections, and featuring women writers, thus became a method for US-­based dailies to set a different course than the pre–­World War I European Yiddish press. At the same time, highlighting the Americanness of the Yiddish press also became a method for dailies to make a bid for their continued relevance as readers became more engaged with American culture in

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English. Across the board, the producers of Yiddish newspapers feared that readers would become less reliant on their favorite Yiddish daily over time. This fear was enhanced by the decrease in new immigration from eastern Europe during World War I and again in 1924 with the passage of the Johnson-­Reed Act, which curtailed new immigration from eastern Europe—­both of which stemmed the flow of new potential Yiddish newspaper readers to the United States. In reality, while the circulation for most Yiddish dailies began to decrease steadily in the 1920s, it was not necessarily true that readers stopped subscribing to Yiddish newspapers once they began reading in English. In a survey from 1924, Mordecai Soltes found that many readers continued to subscribe to the Yiddish press, especially as these publications contained Jewish news that they could not find in many English-­language venues.86 Even so, the fear of readership loss shaped the development of the Yiddish press in the second two decades of the twentieth century, as newspapers attempted to prove their continued value to readers. Papers such as the Tog, Tageblat, and Forverts began to incorporate English pages, hoping to cultivate a connection with more acculturated readers. Several of these pages also included English lessons or articles with glossaries, projecting the utility of the Yiddish press in teaching English to its readership.87 Yiddish newspapers also used women’s columns and advice columns to highlight the ways in which they could grow and change along with their audience. In Hayim Malits’s women’s columns for the Morgn-­ zhurnal, for example, he traced many immigrant and second-­generation readers’ rise into the middle class and attempted to recalibrate his advice accordingly. Over time, he followed female readers’ transition from factory work to stenography or bookkeeping.88 In order to prepare for these pursuits, Malits championed comprehensive educations for young Jewish women and framed the Morgn-­zhurnal as the ideal supplement to the education that readers received in school. Reading the newspaper would allow women access to “all the important news of the day.” Moreover, it would help turn them into valuable employees: “It can happen sometimes that you can point out to your boss news that can save him from losses or bring him great profit.”89 While Yiddish dailies had long marketed themselves as guides and advisers, Malits’s columns reflect

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how this guidance changed over time, as writers attempted to demonstrate newspapers’ continued utility as readers’ lives evolved. At the same time, Yiddish newspapers’ overt highlighting of their engagement with US culture also became a way for them to confront increasing anti-­immigrant sentiment in the American public sphere, including growing suspicion of foreign-­language institutions. After the outbreak of World War I and especially in the lead-­up to the US’s entry into the war, the Yiddish press and other non-­English newspapers faced suspicion for allegedly inciting antiwar hysteria or fomenting radicalism. These suspicions culminated in a series of laws that provided the Postmaster General with broad powers to surveil and censor foreign-­ language newspapers.90 In practice, this legislation primarily affected radical publications. As many prominent Yiddish newspapers espoused various radical political agendas, government officials saw the Yiddish press as a particular cause for concern. However, even nonradical Yiddish newspapers faced scrutiny. While newspaper producers emphasized the diversity within the Yiddish publishing field, government officials did not necessarily recognize these distinctions. Instead, most assumed that all Yiddish newspapers were “of a Socialistic pro-­German type,” with one Justice Department report referring to the conservative Morgn-­zhurnal as “very Socialistic.”91 Moreover, before the United States’ entry into the war, almost every Yiddish daily had either championed neutrality or supported the Central Powers, making their back issues a liability once the United States joined the Allied Powers. The vast majority of Yiddish newspaper readers were immigrants or descendants of immigrants from the Russian Empire, most of whom were unwilling to support a side that included the tsarist regime. It was only after the outbreak of the Russian Revolution that most Yiddish newspapers began supporting the Allied cause. The only major exception was Louis Miller’s Varhayt. However, its support for the Allied Powers was so unpopular with readers that it caused the paper’s wartime circulation to plummet, ultimately leading to Miller’s resignation.92 In response to mounting suspicion of foreign-­language newspapers in the United States, each Yiddish daily found ways to signal, in Yiddish and in English, that it was a thoroughly American institution. These

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efforts began immediately after the outbreak of World War I, several years before the US’s entry into the war. On July 29, 1914, one day after the official outbreak of the war, the Tageblat debuted a new English-­ language masthead proclaiming that it was “The American Newspaper Printed in Yiddish.”93 Similarly, the founders of the Tog sent promotional material to major US newspapers emphasizing their desire to “strive to become a constructive force in American Jewry” and to teach their readers English.94 In the New York Times’ coverage of the Tog’s founding, it asserted that this ethos set the Tog apart from other non-­English papers that fostered “segregation and aloofness which the continued use of an alien tongue invariably tends to produce. On the contrary [the Tog] will earnestly advise its readers to learn the language of their new neighbors as soon as possible.”95 These efforts only increased in the next few years, as radical, nonpartisan, and religious newspapers highlighted their patriotism in order to stay afloat in a particularly charged political moment. This desire for Yiddish newspapers to prove their American bona fides was crucial to shaping every aspect of Yiddish newspaper publishing in this period, including newspapers’ advertising strategies and incorporation of women’s pages. According to the media historian Brian Dolber, the Forverts’s business manager, Baruch Vladeck, relied “on advertising not only as a way to generate revenue for the newspaper but to demonstrate its loyalty to American values.”96 In turn, this prompted newspapers to incorporate more women’s material, in order to “accommodate the demands of advertisers.”97 Appealing to advertisers and to female consumers became methods to fund Yiddish newspapers while also asserting their patriotism, in that doing so made Yiddish newspapers’ layout and business strategies more closely mimic trends in US popular culture more broadly. Moreover, the Yiddish press was not the only foreign-­language newspaper industry to use its advertising and women’s content to project an “American” identity. For example, the Staats-­Zeitung, a leading German-­language newspaper, also transformed its layout and content in this period, including incorporating a women’s page. According to the historian Peter Conolly-­Smith, these changes reflected a desire by publishers to prove their publications’ engagement with cultural trends in the United States in the wake of increasing suspicion of German culture.98

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Like other major foreign-­language dailies, Yiddish dailies found various ways to assert that they offered readers a more “American” reading experience than rival publications, and including women’s content and women’s pages was integral to this process. Yiddish newspaper editors, publishers, and writers did not necessarily hold complementary or consistent visions about what made a newspaper “American,” even within individual publications. But Yiddish dailies across the ideological spectrum all strove to conform to the standards set by American journalism and to market themselves as more “American” than rival publications.99

“What Interests Women?”: Debates about Readers and Content When a reader turned to the women’s page of the Tog on February 20, 1917, they encountered a space that was shaped by a variety of motivations. In addition to the paper’s political framework, whether radicalism or religious orthodoxy, each Yiddish daily was also guided by other influences, including maintaining commercial viability, catering to diverse readers’ wants and needs, and demonstrating the Yiddish press’s engagement with various streams of culture in the United States. Each of these priorities was crucial to shaping the women’s pages of the Yiddish press. This often meant that, when read as a whole, women’s pages within the Yiddish press contained myriad contradictions and divergent interpretations of women’s roles in society. Moreover, publishers, writers, and editors associated with these periodicals frequently displayed little concern with printing mixed messages. Different Yiddish-­language dailies, and different authors and editors working for the same publications, sometimes held conflicting assumptions about who was reading women’s pages, as well as how readers did or should interact with them. These dynamics led to fierce, long-­running debates surrounding women’s pages and their readers. In 1924, Mordecai Soltes conducted a survey of Yiddish newspaper subscribers. Of the almost four hundred readers who responded, 35 percent were women. Soltes asserted that this figure reflected a higher percentage of female readers of Yiddish newspapers than had been the case in previous decades, though he did not provide data to support this claim. According to Soltes, unlike the male survey respondents, who were equally likely to read every section of a newspaper, female survey

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respondents “look with greater regularity for the short stories and for the material included in the special family magazine page than they do for any other feature.”100 Since Soltes’s sample size was quite small, it is difficult to discern how representative it was of the reading public as a whole or whether these findings can tell us anything about previous generations of readers. However, even with these limitations, Soltes’s survey suggests that newspaper producers were successful at using women’s pages to attract female readers. At the same time, sources from various newspapers reveal that most editors and writers actually hoped to market this material to men and women alike.101 In 1916, Hayim Malits began his first women’s column in the Morgn-­zhurnal with a preamble addressing male readers, asking them to bring his column “to the attention of [their] wives and daughters.”102 In doing so, Malits highlighted the novelty of a column addressing female readers in the publication. But by publishing this preamble within the column itself, Malits suggested that he assumed that men would be reading his columns as well—­an impression he later reinforced by incorporating letters from male readers into his columns.103 In 1918, Malits combined his columns into a self-­published volume, also called Di heym un di froy. In it, he restated his desire for an expansive audience. While the book “was written for women and dedicated to women,” Malits asserted his “sincerest wish is that every man should read this book” as well. For female readers, his columns provided guidance that they could apply to their daily routines. For male readers, they encouraged a greater appreciation of the women in their lives.104 Similarly, in 1922, B. Z. Goldberg wrote an article in the Tog discussing the reasons why a newspaper might decide to include women’s columns or women’s pages—­many of which, in his view, had very little to do with meeting the needs or interests of female readers. “When you write an article and give it the title ‘only for women,’ ” he asserted, “you can be sure that your article will be read by all . . . men.” Like Malits, Goldberg suggested that some men read this content because they were looking for a deeper understanding of female relatives or friends. In contrast to Malits, however, Goldberg mocked men who turned to newspapers for this information instead of engaging directly with their wives, sisters, or mothers. In fact, he argued that women’s pages often did not reflect the realities of women’s lives. This material might therefore

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mislead men who turned to it for informative purposes. In response, he implored readers to always have the following questions in mind when they opened the women’s section of a newspaper: “Is the woman of the ‘Women’s World’ a true picture of women today? Are our women really like that?”105 Within the Yiddish press, discussions of whether men or women were more likely to read women’s pages were often connected to another set of questions: How do readers read women’s pages, and how should this shape the content included in these sections? Should the content of the women’s section reflect the paper’s ideological agenda? Or should it offer readers more entertaining, lighter material than what they might find in other sections of the newspaper? In Mordecai Soltes’s analysis of his survey data about readers of the Yiddish press, he assumed a lack of intellectual and political rigor in the women’s sections of Yiddish dailies. He raised concerns about his findings that women were more likely to read women’s pages or fiction than other content. He was adamant, for instance, that “the failure of the vast majority of women readers to turn to the editorials is to be deplored.” In Soltes’s view, the extension of voting rights to women had transformed this divergence between women’s pages and the rest of Yiddish newspapers into a cause for concern. In joining the electorate, “the rank and file of women have assumed grave civic responsibilities, which they will hardly be prepared to shoulder properly unless they extend their reading interests to more serious phases of political discussion.”106 In making these assertions, Soltes critiqued women for perusing only the sections of the paper that were ostensibly designed for them. Moreover, Soltes argued, this meant that women who read Yiddish papers lagged behind their male counterparts as well as female readers of the American mainstream press. To make this argument, Soltes cited a study of Radcliffe College undergraduates, which found that over 60 percent of the women surveyed “read editorials regularly.”107 Soltes published these findings as part of a study of the Yiddish press’s role in “Americanizing” readers. In highlighting the divergence between women readers of Yiddish-­and English-­language papers, he implied that this process of acculturation extended both to what publications women read and to which sections of newspapers they absorbed.

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Soltes was not necessarily a reliable source about the content of women’s pages in the Yiddish press. In reality, as has been explored in this chapter, these sections varied considerably within and across publications—­usually comprising an inconsistent mixture of light content meant to entertain, “serious” content that more closely related to the explicit ideological priorities of an author or publication, and content that fused these impulses. However, Soltes was not alone in assuming that women’s pages offered readers lighter, less politically or intellectually engaged material. B. Z. Goldberg, for instance, argued that many male readers assumed that women’s pages contained more “mysterious and spicy content than the rest of the newspaper.” In his view, this practice extended even to men who publicly attested that they only read more highbrow publications or more “serious” newspaper sections: “Even an ‘intellectual’ who turns up his nose and discards the [women’s] page, I am sure that a few hours later, after supper, he’ll think better of it. He’ll re-­take up the newspaper and devour the article[s] word for word.” In fact, according to Goldberg, calling these sections “women’s pages” was a misnomer. Most newspapers viewed this material not as key to drawing in a female audience but as key to attracting “the masses, the folk, the rabble.” Goldberg argued that the divergence between the narrower explicit (i.e., female) audience and broader implicit (i.e., mass) audience helped to explain why newspapers were so hungry to incorporate women’s sections and also why their contents did not accurately reflect women’s lives. “Our press struggles with the ‘Women’s World’ with its full might. You can see the sweat. You can hear the labored breathing. The ‘Women’s World’ is the God to which the whole press worships, each according to their judgment and their talent.”108 Tensions over what types of materials should run on women’s pages pervaded every Yiddish daily, even those that marketed themselves as providing more intellectual or politically engaged approaches to Yiddish journalism. Goldberg had previously contributed women’s columns to the conservative, religious Tageblat. By this time in his career, he was instead working for the nonpartisan, intellectually driven Tog. In many cases, instead of the Tog’s editors and publishers framing the women’s page as integral to their cultural project, they framed it as a way to boost the paper’s mass appeal. In Goldberg’s 1922 article, he did not invoke the example of his own employer. But in later accounts, he discussed the

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Tog’s penchant for viewing material for and by women as a way to inject “popular stuff ” into the paper.109 During staff meetings throughout the 1920s, the paper’s publisher, David Shapiro, argued that the women’s page “should be just as important to [the paper] as the editorial page,” not because it was equally rigorous but because the inclusion of a women’s page increased the paper’s circulation.110 Some writers employed by the Tog attempted to counteract these assumptions by highlighting the value that women’s columns contributed to readers’ lives. In 1922, for example, Adella Kean Zametkin responded to criticism from readers that she focused too frequently on supposedly frivolous topics like housework or nutrition and not enough on “more important things” like political philosophy. Kean Zametkin countered that these arguments trivialized labor that occurred in the home, which often fell on women’s shoulders. As a radical activist, Kean Zametkin framed women’s columns as a form of political organizing. While labor unions devoted themselves to reforming conditions in factories, she argued, “No one has noticed the camp of domestic housewives, who remain day to day locked amidst the four walls of the domestic shop, which is a worse jail than the industrial shop, mill, or factory.” In her view, a column focusing on theory as opposed to lived reality would be “futile and also cruel,” as it would not properly address the conditions of many women’s lives. Instead, her columns offered advice that was not meant to free women from domestic labor but to make that labor less grueling.111 The same year that Goldberg and Kean Zametkin published their divergent assessments of women’s content in the Tog also saw the advent of the first communist American Yiddish daily: the Frayhayt, later renamed the Morgn-­frayhayt. The paper was founded by former socialists, including several disaffected Forverts staff members, who shifted allegiance to the Communist Party. Over the course of the 1920s, the Forverts and Frayhayt battled for control over the radical Yiddish reading public. As was true of the Tog’s founding a decade prior, the battles between the Forverts and Frayhayt comprised a fusion of political, cultural, and commercial debates, as the communist paper attempted to distance itself from the popularization it asserted characterized the Forverts. The Frayhayt also promised to raise the tone of Yiddish journalism by publishing higher-­ quality literature and less sensational news coverage.112

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Nevertheless, like other American Yiddish dailies, the Frayhayt also attempted to attract a broad audience and to pull advertisers from rival publications.113 This meant that editors had to weigh their desires for literary sophistication, political rigor, and broad appeal. The Frayhayt did not always succeed in balancing these priorities and often struggled to maintain an avid readership. Eventually, the paper relied on the Communist Party for financial support when subscriptions and advertising revenue did not prove sufficient, a decision that made the paper less editorially independent. Nevertheless, the Frayhayt ran until the 1980s and became known for promoting the Communist Party agenda and for cultivating Yiddish literary talent.114 The Frayhayt did not introduce a women’s page until 1926, four years after its inception. However, from the outset, the paper’s editors highlighted their interest in including women in their reading audience. The paper’s first issue featured a statement requesting of male readers, “tell your wife and children, that the ‘Frayhayt’ brings them something important and useful every day.”115 Similar to Malits’s preamble in the Morgn-­zhurnal almost a decade prior, this statement suggested that while the implied reader of the Frayhayt was male, editors hoped that women and children would read the paper as well. This statement appeared on the back page of the paper, where much of its lighter, more entertaining material ran, including a children’s column and occasional women’s columns. By publishing this notice on the back page, editors hoped to entice a broader reading public. From the outset, Frayhayt’s editors found ways to signal an interest in attracting female readers. Like other Yiddish dailies, they also demonstrated a level of uncertainty as to how their attempts to engage female readers connected with the broader project of the newspaper. These debates continued after the Frayhayt introduced its weekly women’s section in 1926. As was true a decade prior in the Forverts, the introduction of the Frayhayt’s women’s section coincided with a broader expansion of the newspaper. The women’s section, titled “Far der arbeter-­un hoyz-­froy” (For the working [woman] and housewife), initially ran as part of the paper’s newly expanded Sunday edition. The Frayhayt managers turned to Rokhl Holtman to run the women’s section. Holtman was then the wife of editor Moyshe Holtman and had contributed women’s columns to the paper since its inception.116 When

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she became section editor, Holtman wrote a series of articles exploring the complicated relationship between this section and the rest of the paper. She recounted fierce debates that had preceded the advent of the women’s section. Some staff members had initially opposed the creation of a women’s section. They argued that providing women with separate content contradicted the paper’s political mission to promote equality between the sexes. Furthermore, they thought it might discourage women from reading other sections of the paper or from reading it on days when the women’s section did not run. According to Holtman, these dissenting voices were the primary reason why the Frayhayt did not incorporate a women’s section in its first years of publication. Proponents of a women’s section, in contrast, pointed to the specific challenges faced by communist women as wives, mothers, and workers and argued that a women’s section would allow the paper to address these concerns more fully.117 Once the Frayhayt introduced its women’s section, editors and writers continued to debate the paper’s relationship to its female audience. According to Holtman, the staff once again split into two camps, offering her conflicting advice. The first camp suggested that she fill the section with more enjoyable and accessible material than the paper’s usual content. They asserted that most women would be turned off by the paper’s dry style or would find much of its contents too complex to understand. With this in mind, they suggested that Holtman “should not tax female readers with more serious reading material” that they might not be able to absorb or enjoy.118 The second camp, in contrast, viewed the Frayhayt’s female readers as a discerning, ideologically driven audience even if they were not always well educated. They argued that offering female readers light, entertaining reading material was condescending, as well as a fundamental misreading of readers’ desires. Articulating these arguments about female readers also became a method for this camp to contrast the newspaper’s approach to journalism with that of rival publications: “The female reader of the ‘Frayhayt’ is not the reader of the capitalist or yellow-­socialist newspapers [i.e., the Forverts]. . . . She, the reader of the ‘Frayhayt,’ is the New Woman who wants to overthrow the rot and filth that has so accumulated in our world.” This camp encouraged Holtman to approach the women’s section in a more “serious” manner: “What a

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woman looks for from the women’s section is to broaden her worldview, to enrich herself with knowledge in order to fight hand in hand with men in the shop and out of the shop.”119 Though Holtman certainly implied that her sympathies fell with the second camp, she did not express her own perspective. Instead, she encouraged readers to contribute their own opinions, suggesting that she would leave it up to readers to decide which approach she would take. “The argument has yet to be resolved, because each [camp] believes that [they are] correct. Who is correct remains with the reader to decide.”120 This call for readers to contribute their opinions served to publicize the newly introduced women’s section. It also allowed readers to feel a sense of ownership over its production. In letters published in the paper, readers responded with strong vitriol against the first camp and dismay that editors could hold such a low opinion of their female readers. One reader, Comrade Veyder of Baltimore, said that she was “distressed” when she heard that members of the staff had such a low opinion of female readers: “Can such thoughts really be said about the woman who reads the ‘Frayhayt’?” Summing up the tenor of the responses, Holtman concluded that if the paper truly wanted to appeal to women, “the women’s section must not and cannot be similar to what one finds daily in the bourgeois and yellow-­socialist newspapers.” Instead, the women’s page had to be handled with the same political and intellectual rigor as the rest of the Frayhayt.121 Discussions about women’s pages and women’s columns in the Yiddish press thus reflected various understandings of the content and audience associated with this material. In some cases, editors and writers debated whether women readers were better served by more entertainment-­driven, easily accessible material or by more serious, ideologically motivated material. In other cases, writers focused instead on the divergent lenses with which men and women approached women’s pages, suggesting that men read women’s pages for escapism or titillation while women read the same material for information or guidance. In contrast, other writers discussed the relationship of women’s pages to the content of newspapers as a whole—­framing women’s pages as a method to inject more entertainment value or to balance out a newspaper’s more serious, polemic sections. Taken as a whole, these debates reflected the fact that women’s pages in the Yiddish press incorporated a

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variety of perspectives on how best to address a female audience, as well as content driven by motivations that only had tangential connections with the perceived or real interests of female readers.

Conclusion In 1945, thirty-­one years after the Tog’s first issue hit newsstands, its longtime editor William Edlin looked back on the innovations the newspaper had introduced to the American Yiddish publishing sphere. In Edlin’s assessment, the Tog “brought a new tone” to Yiddish journalism, outpacing established Yiddish periodicals by hiring a better class of writers, offering readers more intellectually stimulating content, and not relying on the sensationalism or partisan infighting that often characterized rival publications. According to Edlin, one aspect that “above all” set the Tog apart from competitors was the way the paper related to its female writers and readers. Unlike other dailies that gradually introduced material for and by women over time, he asserted, the Tog incorporated work by and for women from the outset, before eventually introducing a formal women’s page. The Tog was also the first major Yiddish daily to include women as members of its editorial staff. For Edlin, these gendered innovations exemplified the ways in which the Tog was a more progressive, modern publication than its rivals. Moreover, he asserted, they also made it the first truly American Yiddish newspaper: “It is not an exaggeration to say that for the first time a Yiddish daily newspaper seemed so respectable and could be seen as an equal to a good English newspaper, in content and in appearance.”122 In using his paper’s women’s page or women writers to set the Tog apart from its rivals, Edlin was in many ways exaggerating how innovative this newspaper truly was. The Tog was founded between one and three decades after publications like the Forverts, Morgn-­zhurnal, Varhayt, or Tageblat, and its approach actually signaled a broader sea change in the gender politics of the American Yiddish press. In this period, every major New York–­based Yiddish daily experimented with new ways to attract female readers. These experiments culminated in the introduction of women’s pages, or half-­page women’s sections, in Yiddish dailies espousing everything from religious orthodoxy to alignment with the Communist Party between 1914 and 1926.

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By introducing a variety of content for and by women, the Tog was responding to broader trends in Yiddish journalism, as incorporating women’s content became crucial to all Yiddish dailies’ efforts to compete with rival publications for readers’ attention and advertisers’ dollars. Moreover, Edlin was not unique in using his paper’s women’s content to make broader claims about his publication—­as Yiddish dailies espousing various ideological frameworks all used their introduction of women’s pages to make broader, often-­contradictory claims about their newspapers’ modernity, popularity, Americanness, or progressiveness. In reality, Edlin’s assertions provide less information about the actual gender politics of the Yiddish press during World War I and more information about how questions of gender became crucial to the marketing strategies of major Yiddish dailies.123 In many ways, Edlin’s retrospective account exemplifies the complexities of excavating the history of gender and the American Yiddish press. World War I and the early interwar period did indeed see an increase in the amount and diversity of women’s content in the American Yiddish press—­and, as will be explored in chapter 5, a marked increase in the female bylines in the Yiddish press as well. But in introducing women’s pages, newspapers of various stripes were guided by a variety of motivations that were not always directly related to the perceived or real interests of women readers or writers. Instead, newspaper producers viewed this content as a method to inject entertainment value, commercial appeal, or a more “American” aesthetic into their publications. For the producers of Yiddish newspapers, therefore, discussions of women’s pages and the readers who read them became avenues to make arguments about the present and future of Yiddish newspaper publishing. Exploring the introduction of women’s pages into the American Yiddish press thus reveals the opportunities and challenges that shaped the development of Yiddish journalism in this period, as well as the roles that women’s pages played not just for readers but for producers of Yiddish newspapers.

5

“Women and Men Who Are Like Women” Pseudonyms and the Interwar American Yiddish Press

In January 1921, Reuben Iceland, a poet and staff writer for the Tog, was sitting in a café on the Lower East Side when he overheard patrons discussing poems that had recently appeared in the anarchist Yiddish weekly the Fraye arbeter shtime. In addition to its radical political agenda, the paper was known since its founding in 1890 as a prime venue for Yiddish literature, and many readers looked with keen interest for the debuts of new poets on its pages.1 Conversations in the café that day mainly centered on who might have authored these bold, modernist poems. Their byline read “Anna Margolin,” but patrons generally agreed that this must be a pseudonym. Pseudonym use was quite common in the Yiddish literary sphere, with many writers signing their work under multiple names, sometimes within a single periodical. With this in mind, bylines in the Yiddish press were often taken with a grain of salt. Although the café patrons could not agree on who “Anna Margolin” might be, the consensus was that these poems were likely written by a man. In Iceland’s assessment, this assumption derived in part from the perceived quality of the poems: “Why people want A.M. to be a man is beyond me. The general opinion, however, is that these poems are written by an experienced hand. And a woman can’t write like that.”2 Doubts about the poems’ authorship also stemmed from a curious phenomenon taking shape in the American Yiddish press. Rumors abounded that “countless” male authors were submitting manuscripts to Yiddish newspapers under female pseudonyms in order to enhance their chances of publication.3 These rumors began to spread in Yiddish literary circles in the first decade of the twentieth century, but they increased with the introduction of women’s pages in major Yiddish newspapers, which opened up more space for writing for and by women—­or, at the very least, purported to do so. In reality, these rumors were greatly 181

182 | “Women and Men Who Are Like Women”

exaggerated. There were still relatively few female bylines in these periodicals, and many of these bylines can be traced to actual female authors. But several men who would eventually become renowned writers did get their start contributing to the Yiddish press under female pseudonyms, including poets like Moyshe Nadir and Jacob Glatstein, journalists like B. Z. Goldberg and Elyahu Sheps, and even the linguist Max Weinreich. As this collective mythology began to take on a life of its own, it no doubt added to the café patrons’ uncertainty about whether to take the byline “Anna Margolin” at its word. Iceland discussed these overheard conversations about the true identity of Anna Margolin in letters to his lover and sometimes-­coworker, Rosa Lebensboym. Throughout their relationship, Iceland and Lebensboym’s correspondence featured lengthy discussions of New York’s Yiddish literary scene and evaluations of each other’s work or pieces by friends or rivals. But Iceland assumed that Lebensboym would take a particular interest in these conversations about Anna Margolin’s identity because the creative force behind the poems of Anna Margolin was not, in fact, a man. Instead, it was Lebensboym herself. While the café’s patrons had been incorrect about Anna Margolin’s true identity, the fact that they assumed that this poet must be a man, and the reasons they gave for this assumption, reflected the complex, often contradictory gender politics of the American Yiddish press in 1910s and 1920s. Throughout this period, editors and publishers asserted that the American Yiddish press had become a particularly hospitable publishing venue for women. William Edlin, the longtime editor of the Tog, noted with pride that the publication was “the first Yiddish newspaper to include women as members of the editorial staff.”4 The literary critic Kalman Marmor highlighted his concerted efforts to “develop” a generation of women writers through the publications he helmed, even while also asserting that women’s writing often fell short of his expectations.5 For some editors, including articles by women became a method to signal their paper’s more modern, progressive approach than rival publications. For others, it constituted an attempt to boost circulation by attracting readers who assumed that writing for or by women was inherently more “popular,” “juicy,” or full of “human interest.”6 But sources that privilege the experiences of female writers offer a very different assessment of this period in the history of the Yiddish

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press. Women writers suggested in letters, memoirs, fictionalized accounts, and sometimes even within their columns that editors offered far less support in practice than these public statements implied. While the advent of women’s pages opened up more opportunities for more female writers to contribute to Yiddish newspapers, many women still felt deeply constrained by the limits that editors imposed on women writers and readers alike. When they did submit their work to Yiddish newspapers, women faced harsh, gendered critiques of their writing. Moreover, behind the scenes, women continued to perform a variety of roles in the production of Yiddish newspapers that editors rarely acknowledged publicly—­suggesting that editors’ support of women’s careers was conditional at best. Together, the experiences of female writers and men ­writing under female pseudonyms bring to bear a striking contradiction: while women’s “voices” were seen as particularly marketable in the interwar American Yiddish press, women writers often encountered myriad obstacles in forging successful careers working for these publications. Indeed, at this moment in the Yiddish publishing sphere, appealing to women, or writing as a woman, was crucial to the career development of writers. But it was most advantageous for writers who were men. The early careers of three prominent writers, Jacob Glatstein, B. Z. Goldberg, and Rosa Lebensboym, offer key insights into the debates about gender and authorship happening in the early interwar American Yiddish press. Each of these writers had made initial forays into writing in Yiddish in earlier decades but, for various reasons, stepped away from the Yiddish newspaper sphere to pursue other ventures—­whether college educations or sojourns abroad. In different ways, each author’s reentry into Yiddish journalism was deeply shaped by the complex gender politics of this moment. According to later accounts by Glatstein and Goldberg, submitting writing under female pseudonyms served as the key through which they gained reentry into the world of the Yiddish press. In contrast, Lebensboym was not shy about voicing her disdain for the newspapers for which she worked, especially their treatment of female writers and readers. Lebensboym’s life and career thus offers a window into the experiences of women who worked for Yiddish newspapers as well as an avenue through which to interrogate the narratives that male writers and editors crafted about women’s roles in the interwar American Yiddish press.

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In approaching gendered narratives in and around the American Yiddish press, I am guided by the work of literary scholars such as Irena Klepfisz, Dan Miron, Naomi Seidman, and Naomi Brenner, who have explored the role of pseudonyms in the development of modern Yiddish literature. Because many male authors in Europe felt a sense of shame about writing in Yiddish, they used pseudonyms to distance themselves from their literary output and frequently discussed their reasons for doing so. Moreover, crafting narratives about pseudonym use became an avenue to assert that their writing was fundamentally different from Yiddish writing in the past—­more modern, more complex, or less didactic—­even when there was often more continuity with previous literary traditions than these narratives suggested. This is not to say that the ambivalence that Yiddish writers expressed was not genuine. Instead, this approach suggests that we can mine these narratives not just for historical veracity but for how they allowed authors to assert a particular literary identity for themselves, their cohort, or their publishing field.7 I take a similar approach here to narratives by or about Glatstein, Goldberg, and Lebensboym. By placing each figure and the stories surrounding them within their historical context, and by comparing and contrasting these narratives with those by other writers, I argue that these narratives took on such power in the interwar period because they allowed male writers and editors to craft an image of the American Yiddish press as having reached a new, more modern stage in its development—­one characterized by openness to new voices and to engagement with broader cultural spheres in the United States and Europe. But these narratives also created an image of the press’s progressive gender politics that belied the more nuanced reality of the ways in which gender functioned within these publications.

From Shulamis to Esther Zeydler: Female Pseudonyms and Yiddish Culture The use of female pseudonyms by male authors has a long, storied history within Yiddish culture. However, the meanings that authors infused into this practice changed significantly over time. Since the early

“Women and Men Who Are Like Women” | 185

modern period, male authors who wrote a form of devotional poetry called tkhines had often signed their work with female names. In the nineteenth century, certain male authors published their earliest Yiddish literary works under female names as well. For instance, B. Z. Goldberg’s father-­in-­law, Shalom Rabinovich (better known by his most-­famous pseudonym, Sholem Aleichem), published early articles under names like Shulamis and Esther. Rabinovich chose not to provide these personas with full names, perhaps in an effort to indicate that these were fictitious bylines. In contrast, male authors of tkhines often chose to publish under the name Sore bas Tovim, which had been the name of a prolific female writer of tkhines in the eighteenth century. In fact, by the nineteenth century, so many male authors had published under this name that many in the Yiddish literary sphere began to assume that there had never been a female writer bearing that name.8 These assumptions suggest the ways in which narratives told by male authors have long obscured our understanding of the roles that women have played in the development of Yiddish culture. When describing their decisions to write under a female pseudonym, these earlier generations of writers asserted that, in choosing to write in Yiddish, they assumed that they were speaking to a female or feminized mass audience. In nineteenth century eastern Europe, intellectuals and writers frequently described Yiddish as a language best suited to address women and uneducated men. By writing under female names in this context, some authors attempted to attract this audience by speaking to them as one of their own. Others were driven by a sense of shame and used pseudonyms to distance themselves, their public personas, and their writing in more intellectually coded languages from their output in Yiddish.9 As we have seen, newspaper editors also employed female pseudonyms throughout the early history of the American Yiddish press. Whereas the largely female audience of Yiddish literature had been a source of stigma for earlier Yiddish authors in Europe, in contrast, editors of American Yiddish periodicals described their concerted efforts to increase their publications’ female readership, which they viewed as key to enticing advertisers to sell their wares in the Yiddish press and to building a mass audience for their publications.

186 | “Women and Men Who Are Like Women”

Moreover, while there were ample precedents for male authors employing female pseudonyms within Yiddish culture, some figures chose instead to use this trend to situate the American Yiddish press within the history of American journalism. When recounting the history of the Yiddish press, the journalist Joseph Chaikin chose to begin not with the first American Yiddish periodicals in the 1870s or with earlier European precedents like journals or chapbooks. Instead, he began with Benjamin Franklin. In Chaikin’s assessment, Franklin spearheaded several innovations that would eventually “suppl[y] the example for the local Yiddish newspapers,” including fusing information with entertainment and cultivating a broad audience. Chaikin devoted particular attention to Franklin’s experiences penning columns under the pseudonym Silence Do-­Good. For Chaikin, writing as a woman allowed Franklin his initial entry into journalism and afforded him the opportunity to experiment with writing that was equally entertaining and pointed in its social commentary.10 Franklin thus set the stage for an American Yiddish publishing sphere that also fused entertainment with ideology. When interwar writers like Glatstein and Goldberg chose to submit their work under female pseudonyms, they built on a long history of this practice both in eastern Europe and in the United States. However, in explaining their decision to do so, they did not invoke this history, choosing instead to describe it in relation to their specific career trajectories. Both Glatstein and Goldberg employed various pseudonyms throughout their career. Glatstein, aside from writing under his own name and Klara Blum, employed names such as Y. Yungmen, Itskus, and Yakobus.11 In addition to publishing as Ben-­Zion Goldberg, which was at different points in his life a pseudonym and his legal name, Goldberg signed work with names like Ben Zakai, William Cody, and B. Margolis.12 But when these writers recounted their life stories, they placed particular emphasis on their experiences writing under female pseudonyms, framing them as crucial junctures in their early careers. For these authors, describing these experiences became a method to make particular claims about themselves, the publications they wrote for, and the American Yiddish press in the interwar period. In each case, the narratives they produced both built on and subverted the gender politics of the publishing field at this moment.

“Women and Men Who Are Like Women” | 187

Jacob Glatstein / Klara Blum Thirty years into Jacob Glatstein’s writing career, he sat down for an interview with the writer Jacob Pat in which he described his long, somewhat circuitous route to becoming a Yiddish writer. Born in 1896 in Lublin, Poland, Glatstein began writing at an early age. Soon after immigrating to the United States in 1914, Glatstein decided to forgo a Yiddish literary career. Though he published one short story in the Fraye arbeter shtime shortly after his arrival, he eventually matriculated at New York University Law School. In order to focus on his studies and to further his acculturation process, Glatstein eschewed connections to Yiddish-­ speaking circles, gravitating toward “American or Jewish-­Americanized” environments. At this time, it seemed to Glatstein as if he “had abandoned [his] literary inheritance on the other side of the ocean.”13 Soon, however, Glatstein found himself drawn back into the Yiddish literary sphere. Through his course work, he met Nahum Minkoff and Elias Liberman, both of whom supported their legal studies by writing for Yiddish publications. Inspired by his new acquaintances, Glatstein began writing in Yiddish again and soon submitted poems to the Fraye arbeter shtime. Unlike his earlier short story, Glatstein’s poetry garnered no enthusiasm from the paper’s editor, Saul Yanovsky. Undeterred, Glatstein decided to begin submitting poetry under the name Klara Blum instead. With the new byline, Yanovsky eagerly accepted his work. Glatstein published a dozen pieces before Yanovsky caught wind of their true authorship, after which he refused to publish work by either “Klara Blum” or “Jacob Glatstein.” Though Glatstein’s tenure writing as Klara Blum only lasted for five months, he used this experience as a springboard into a Yiddish literary career. He dropped out of law school and devoted himself to writing. Along with Minkoff and the poet and literary critic Aaron Glantz-­Leyeles, Glatstein founded a new school of poetry known as the Inzikhistn, or Introspectivists. Like Glatstein, several other members of this group had attended US universities and engaged broadly with US popular and intellectual spheres. Through their poetry, Glatstein and his compatriots attempted to bring to Yiddish culture the spirit of modernity and individuality that they saw developing in non-­Yiddish culture.

188 | “Women and Men Who Are Like Women”

Glatstein went on to publish nine volumes of poetry, as well as numerous pieces for newspapers like the Morgn-­zhurnal and Tog.14 *** This is the narrative that Glatstein chose to tell about his early experiences with the American Yiddish press. In it, he emphasized several features of his career trajectory: Though he had begun writing at a young age, his literary career truly began only after a period of separation from Yiddish culture. Moreover, it was only through this engagement with broader cultural influences that Glatstein came to write the avant-­garde poetry for which he eventually became known. Within this narrative, Glatstein’s poems under a female pseudonym became his mode of reentry into Yiddish culture. Only after gaining this foothold in the Yiddish press could he eventually bridge the divides between English-­and Yiddish-­language cultural spheres. Glatstein recounted this narrative on various occasions over the course of his career, changing details with each retelling. In different accounts, for instance, Glatstein shifted the relationship between his poems as Klara Blum and his poems under his own name. In some cases, he described his poems as Klara Blum as “feminine” and highlighted their divergence from the poetry he signed with his own name. But in other cases, he suggested that at least some poems he published as Klara Blum were the same as those he had previously submitted under his own name—­implying that the difference lay not in the poems themselves but in the different standards that the Fraye arbeter shtime applied to male and female poets.15 Neither Yanovsky’s or Glatstein’s extant archives include Glatstein’s original submissions, so we cannot say for certain which is true. But a close reading of Glatstein’s work as Klara Blum suggests that the truth might lie somewhere in between. On the one hand, the style of these poems diverges greatly from his later work. His poems as Klara Blum rhyme, have regular meters, and deal with topics such as love and nature—­all of which conform to the strictures that editors often imposed on female poets within the Yiddish literary sphere. At the same time, there is also significant thematic overlap between his poems as Klara Blum and those under his own name, as both contend with alienation from tradition and from the contemporary Yiddish literary

“Women and Men Who Are Like Women” | 189

scene—­suggesting an overlap between the psychologically driven project of the Introspectivists and the personal poetry that literary critics expected from women writers. Glatstein’s poetry as Klara Blum provides a window into both the expectations that women writers faced when attempting to publish poetry in Yiddish and the ways in which one author played with and subverted these expectations within his work—­whether consciously or subconsciously.

Glatstein’s Poetry as Klara Blum On January 11, 1919, the Fraye arbeter shtime published the first piece by “Klara Blum”—­a poem called “A gezang” (A song): ‫ ס׳איז אומעטיג אזױ‬,‫אױ‬ ,‫קאפע צו זיצען‬ ַ ‫אין‬ ,‫הערען ַאלטע חכמות‬ .‫אױסגעדראשטע װיצען‬ ָ ,‫און דער רױך מיט טעמּפקײט‬ ;‫פילט אונז ָאן די מחות‬ ‫צװישען גרױסע מענשען‬ .‫געהען אױס די כחות‬ .‫ ס׳איז אומעטיג ַאזױ‬,‫אױ‬ .‫ ס׳איז אומעטיג ַאזױ‬,‫אױ‬ ,‫קאמין צו װעבען‬ ַ ‫בײ׳ם‬ ‫טרױמען שעהנע פלעכטען‬ .‫גראהען לעבען‬ ָ ‫פון מײן‬ ;‫און דער זײגער טיקעט‬ .‫װעסט ַאזױ פערפױלען‬ ‫קאמין דעם רױטען‬ ַ ‫אין‬ .‫לעשען זיך די קױלען‬ .‫ ס׳איז אומעטיג ַאזױ‬,‫אױ‬ Oy it is so sad To sit in the café To hear old witticisms, Hackneyed jokes.

190 | “Women and Men Who Are Like Women”

And the smoke fills up our brains. With dullness. Among great men, one’s strength expires. Oy it is so sad. Oy it is so sad To weave by the fireplace Dreaming pretty braids Out of my gray life. And the clock ticks: Thus you will decay. In the fireplace the red Coals extinguish themselves. Oy, it is so sad.16

Like Iceland in this chapter’s opening anecdote, the speaker in this poem’s first stanza sits in a café, listening to surrounding conversations. Cafés were crucial sites of Yiddish cultural production. Though many poets made their living writing for newspapers, these men (and a very small number of women) spent much of their time in cafés, discussing the state of Yiddish literature.17 By situating the first stanza in this setting, Glatstein created an implicit comparison with celebrated poets of his day, while also calling attention to the speaker’s isolation. In her biography of Glatstein, the literary scholar Janet Hadda refers to this stanza as “a clear attack on the literary ‘establishment’ of this time.” However, she also highlights how the poem’s style was “quite unlike his own adventurous one,” in that the poem rhymes in Yiddish—­which Glatstein’s later poetry generally did not—­and is devoid of wordplay. Hadda also describes the contrast between this poem’s first stanza and Glatstein’s later poetry as evidence that “he wanted to carry his joke as far as possible”—­suggesting that Glatstein took on a feminine style in these poems.18 At the turn of the twentieth century, Yiddish literary critics often based their assessments of poetry by female writers on harsh, gendered, and often contradictory standards. Many viewed women’s writing as inherently more confessional or emotion driven. This made poetry a more suitable genre for women than literary criticism or editorials, which

“Women and Men Who Are Like Women” | 191

relied on erudition over sentiment. However, critics also assumed that women were only capable of producing formulaic, emotional poetry, as opposed to poetry by men, which could be more formally and thematically rich.19 It is possible, therefore, to read this poem as an attempt by Glatstein to conform to his byline’s gender. This reading is bolstered by the second stanza, which shifts locations from the café to the home. Placing the speaker within a domestic sphere, and invoking traditionally feminine tasks like braiding and weaving, implies a feminine space and voice in a way that the first stanza does not. In fact, when read as a unit, the second stanza raises questions as to why the speaker in the first stanza situates themselves on the periphery of Yiddish culture: Is it because the speaker is a novice or experimental poet? Is it because the speaker is female and thus inherently peripheral to the power structures of Yiddish culture? Or does the speaker shift between the first and second verse, highlighting the shared isolation of women in the domestic sphere and men on the margins of Yiddish literature? Or alternatively, perhaps it reflects the shared central place of women in the domestic sphere and of poetry within Yiddish cultural production? Not all of the work Glatstein published as Klara Blum explicitly evoked a feminine speaker. However, other poems also tended to rhyme and employ regular meters. Thematically, they explored subjects like the death of children or the loneliness of nightfall, conforming to the themes that editors expected from female poets.20 These themes also infused the one short story that Glatstein published as Blum, called “Benkshaft” (Longing). In it, the protagonist thinks back on the natural beauty surrounding her childhood home: “silky clouds would swim on the quiet sky and a quiet breeze would rock the sheaves of grain to sleep in the evening.” Evoking the “fairy tale” nature of this environment, the speaker reminisces about its ability to “stir [her] blood and wake a quiet passion in [her].” However, in the last sentence, the tone shifts, and the speaker reveals that this landscape had been destroyed “with fire and sword,” alluding to World War I or perhaps earlier antisemitic violence in eastern Europe.21 In some ways, these pieces diverged significantly from the poems Glatstein published under his own name. At the same time, some shared themes emerged in the works signed by Klara Blum and Jacob Glatstein. In “1919,” the first poem that Glatstein published under his own name,

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‫‪he also evoked a sense of alienation, using it to explore the disorienta‬‬‫‪tion of urban space:‬‬ ‫צײט איז קײן שּפור ניט מער געבליבן‬ ‫די לעצטע ַ‬ ‫ֿפון ַיאנקל ברב יצחק‪,‬‬ ‫קײלעכדיקס‪,‬‬ ‫נאר ַא קלײנטשיק ּפינטעלע ַא ַ‬ ‫ָ‬ ‫גאסן‬ ‫קײקלט זיך צעדולטערהײט איבער ַ‬ ‫װאס ַ‬ ‫ָ‬ ‫מיט ַארױֿפגעטשעּפעטע‪ ,‬אומגעלומּפערטע גלידער‪.‬‬ ‫האט מיט דעם הימלבלױ‬ ‫אױבערהאר ָ‬ ‫ַ‬ ‫דער‬ ‫גאנצע ערד ַארומגערינגלט‬ ‫די ַ‬ ‫ניטא קײן רעטונג‪.‬‬ ‫און ָ‬ ‫׳עקסטראס׳ ֿפון אױבן‬ ‫ַ‬ ‫ֿפאלן‬ ‫אומעטום ַ‬ ‫קאּפ‪.‬‬ ‫װאסערדיקן ָ‬ ‫מײן ַ‬ ‫און צעּפלעטשן ַ‬ ‫לאנגער צונג‬ ‫און אײנער מיט ַא ַ‬ ‫באֿפלעקט‬ ‫האט מיט ַא שטיק רױט מייַ נע ברילן אױף אײביק ַ‬ ‫ָ‬ ‫און רױט‪ ,‬רױט‪ ,‬רױט‪.‬‬ ‫איר הערט‪:‬‬ ‫ּפלאצן‬ ‫קאּפ ַ‬ ‫מײן ָ‬ ‫ָאט די טעג װעט עּפעס ַאזױנס אין ַ‬ ‫דארט‬ ‫קראך זיך ָאנצינדן ָ‬ ‫און מיט ַא טעמּפן ַ‬ ‫איבערלאזן אי קוּפקע שמוציקלעכן ַאש‪.‬‬ ‫ָ‬ ‫און‬ ‫און איך‪,‬‬ ‫דאס קייַ לעכדיקע ּפינטעלע‬ ‫ָ‬ ‫װעל זיך דרײען אין עטער אױף אײביקײטן‬ ‫װּואלן ַארומגעהילט‪.‬‬ ‫מיט רױטע ַ‬ ‫‪Lately, there’s no trace left‬‬ ‫‪Of Yankl, son of Yitskhok,‬‬ ‫‪But for a tiny round dot‬‬ ‫‪That rolls crazily through the streets‬‬ ‫‪With hooked-­on, clumsy limbs.‬‬ ‫‪The lord-­above surrounded‬‬ ‫‪The whole world with heaven-­blue‬‬ ‫‪And there is no escape.‬‬ ‫‪Everywhere “Extras!” fall from above‬‬ ‫‪And squash my watery head.‬‬ ‫‪And someone’s long tongue‬‬ ‫‪Has stained my glasses for good with a smear of red,‬‬

“Women and Men Who Are Like Women” | 193

And red, red, red. You see: One of these days something will explode in my head, Ignite there with a dull crash And leave behind a heap of dirty ashes. And I, The tiny dot, Will spin in ether for eternities, Wrapped in red veils.22

The subject of this poem is identified as Yankl, son of Yitskhok, which is both a Yiddishized version of the name of the biblical patriarch Jacob and Glatstein’s own name. The speaker’s alienation from religion and from his pre-­immigration identity seems to reflect the personal turmoil of the poet himself. Glatstein also evokes the crowdedness of city life, as well as the trauma of learning about violent current events through reading newspapers.23 Though the style of this poem is indeed a dramatic shift from his poetry as Klara Blum, nostalgia and disillusionment form a through line between these poems. When read together, they reflect just as much about the different lenses with which literary critics read poetry by men and women as about transformations in Glatstein’s poetic style over time.

The Fraye arbeter shtime as a Literary Venue Glatstein represented only one of several men who professed to submitting poetry to the Fraye arbeter shtime under female pseudonyms. The journalist Joseph Chaikin went so far as to suggest that “dozens” of men confessed to doing so in the first decades of the twentieth century. Moreover, according to Chaikin, this practice allowed authors to take advantage of the divergent standards to which editors like Yanovsky held male and female writers: “a few weeks later if he should receive the same [previously rejected] poems signed with a female name, he would not only receive them as eagerly as a precious gem, but also reprimand other writers [by saying]: ‘you should learn to write poetry from her!’ ”24 In some cases, critics asserted that this hunger for female voices encouraged male authors to write according to the standards to which

194 | “Women and Men Who Are Like Women”

editors held female poets. In other cases, critics argued that this practice was particularly useful for poets who wanted to stretch the boundaries of Yiddish poetry, as editors were so eager to publish work by women that they were more open to experimental work that was signed with a female name.25 The poetry published in the Fraye arbeter shtime during this period tells a much more nuanced story than these narratives allow. In the months when Glatstein wrote as Klara Blum, each issue included at least two poems—­and usually significantly more—­by a variety of authors. Like other Yiddish newspapers of this time, Yanovsky occasionally published work by female writers, including poetry, short stories, and news articles. However, women’s names were in no way as overrepresented as retrospective accounts suggest. In 1918, the year that Glatstein first submitted poems under his own name, I found only eight female bylines that together contributed twenty-­three short stories, poems, and articles. Most of these bylines can be traced to verifiable female authors, such as Miriam Karpilove and Emma Goldman, who both contributed prose, and Ida Glazer-­Andrews, who contributed poetry, prose, and translations. There are several female bylines in this period about whom I could find no biographical information. This could suggest that these were pseudonyms employed by male authors (or female authors). It is also possible that they were aspiring female writers whose careers never blossomed.26 Even if every one of these untraceable names is a pseudonym, they in no way add up to the numbers of men that Chaikin claims were publishing under female pseudonyms at this time—­suggesting the ways in which this collective mythology did not reflect the realities of the Fraye arbeter shtime.27 Most of the poets published in the Fraye arbeter shtime in this period were men. Moreover, as a whole, they reflected Yanovsky’s catholic approach to poetry. The paper frequently featured poems by young poets who, like Glatstein, eventually became members of the Inzikhistn, such as Glantz-­Leyeles. But it also included many poems translated from English, French, or Chinese, as well as works by poets associated with Di yunge, a school of poetry that slightly predated the Inzikhistn but also tried to bring a new, modern ethos to Yiddish literature.28 Narratives that use Glatstein’s decision to write as Klara Blum as evidence that he or other authors seized on an editorial desire for female voices to introduce

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non-­Yiddish literary influences or more modernist poetry thus occlude the fact that publications like the Fraye arbeter shtime already included such elements by the time Glatstein began contributing. Another source that we have to explore Yanovsky’s editorial priorities is the Fraye arbeter shtime’s “Briefkasten” (Letterbox) column, where Yanovsky frequently corresponded with the newspaper’s contributors. Most installments also included a list of poems that Yanovsky had rejected within the past week. In some cases, he also offered feedback to aspiring contributors. Because many writers submitted work under initials or pseudonyms, it is difficult to perform a gendered analysis on these exchanges. However, this column does reveal Yanovsky’s desire to project his role as a prime gatekeeper within Yiddish culture. Moreover, in at least one case, it reveals the ways in which his criticism of female poets conformed to common tropes within the Yiddish literary sphere. On December 14, 1918, Yanovsky published the following note about a poet whose work he had rejected: “Yes, she will surely eventually write nice poetry, but the current [ones] are still unripe. They are still too naïve.”29 Since the Fraye arbeter shtime did not publish the poems that this critique refers to, however, we have no way of knowing whether Yanovsky provided an accurate assessment of the author’s talent. In an article commemorating the seventieth anniversary of the Fraye arbeter shtime, Glatstein attested that it was through the “Briefkasten” that Yanovsky had initially rejected his poems before eventually accepting them “two weeks later” when submitted under a female byline.30 He appears to have been mistaken, as I could not find any such note in the time period Glatstein specified. Perhaps he had remembered a private correspondence between himself and Yanovsky or simply recalled incorrectly the timing of the exchange.31 However, Yanovsky did use the “Briefkasten” column to correspond with “Klara Blum.” Most of his notes to Blum were short—­notifying “her” when a poem would be published or that he had particularly enjoyed a certain submission.32 Given that these exchanges happened within a public forum, it is possible that they were for show and that Yanovsky was actually in on the ruse the whole time. But it seems more likely that he remained unaware of Klara Blum’s true identity for at least some of the time that he was publishing “her” poems.33

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By May 10, 1919, Yanovsky had certainly discovered the truth about Klara Blum. In response, he published a long, vitriolic note attesting that he would no longer be accepting submissions from Klara Blum: “We can say to you that we have long known your brash secret, we have pretended to unwittingly publish what we liked. . . . As quickly as you chose to cast aside your veil and come out to the world with your own, true name, your writing was already not what it once was. The few things that you sent us, combined with the discovery of your ‘secret,’ do not please us and we cannot put them to any use.”34 In this note, Yanovsky at least claimed to have figured out Klara Blum’s identity before the author revealed himself. Yanovsky also suggested that he far preferred the first poems that Glatstein had submitted as Klara Blum to later submissions—­whether because they reflected Glatstein’s later, more experimental style or whether they no longer comported with their feminine byline, we have no way of knowing. According to Glatstein, Yanovsky repeated a similar assessment to him years later, after the two men had reconciled. He recalled that Yanovsky chastised him for straying too far from the style of these early, pseudonymous poems, which the editor has much preferred: “Klara Blum wrote with rhymes and intelligibly—­he teased me, but as Glatstein you write ‘nasal’ [gefonfete] poems. Tell me the truth: Do you really enjoy your own poems?”35 In Glatstein’s recollection, Yanovsky identified fundamental differences between poetry produced by women and men or, at least, between Glatstein’s poetry as Klara Blum and the more avant-­garde poetry for which Glatstein would soon become known. Perhaps, the editor had initially rejected Glatstein’s poems not because they were bad in some objective sense but because he viewed them as the type of poetry that men should not write. Though the various origin narratives told by and about Glatstein differ in important ways, they all rely on the assumption that women and men write poetry that fundamentally differed in style, voice, and content. In addition, they repeat the claim that women had a much easier time getting work published in the Fraye arbeter shtime than men did. These stories did not necessarily accurately reflect the type of poetry Glatstein wrote under a female pseudonym or the gendered realities of the Fraye arbeter shtime. However, by repeating these stories and embellishing them over time, writers and editors were able to fashion an image of the interwar American

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Yiddish press as more modern and more open to new voices than it had been in the past. While these narratives profess to offer evidence about the changing gender and cultural politics of the Yiddish press, in reality they conceal the long history of the fluid boundaries between Yiddish and non-­Yiddish culture in the US and abroad and the long history of using the status of women readers and writers as a marker of these boundaries. When scholars discuss the phenomenon of men writing under female pseudonyms in the 1910s and 1920s, they tend to focus on poets like Glatstein. However, male writers of prose—­including journalism and short stories—­also wrote under female pseudonyms in this period. In fact, other men told stories remarkably similar to Glatstein’s about their reasons for doing so. The next section explores the decision of one prose writer, B. Z. Goldberg, to write under a female pseudonym, as well as what he wrote and the accounts he and others have written about him in retrospect. As with Glatstein, the narratives about this early phase of Goldberg’s career obscure the full significance of the writing that Goldberg published under a female pseudonym.

B. Z. Goldberg / Ida Brener Two years after Glatstein ceased publishing as Klara Blum in the Fraye arbeter shtime, a writer who identified herself as Ida Brener introduced a series of articles, “The Truth about Married Life,” to the readers of the Tog. In her introduction, Brener promised to “express the truth about married life here for the reader: not in a cynical tone, only in an intelligent manner.”36 Brener described myriad issues that married couples might face—­from gambling to infertility to disappointment with one’s choice of spouse. These articles proved so popular that they secured their author a job on the newspaper’s staff and eventually a position on its editorial team. What readers did not know was that the author of these articles was not a woman named Ida Brener. Instead, it was Ben-­Zion Goldberg, a writer would eventually become a central figure in Yiddish journalism as the managing editor of the Tog.37 Like Glatstein, Goldberg told slightly different versions of his origin story over time. But, when read together, a general picture emerges as to how he came to write as Ida Brener. In 1920, while working toward a master’s degree at Columbia University,

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Goldberg published a series of articles in the Tog about philosophy and religion. After the series ended, Goldberg wished to transition into a full-­time career in Yiddish journalism. Although the Tog prided itself on carrying a more intellectual tone than rival publications, its editor told Goldberg that his writing was too highbrow for the paper’s audience. Goldberg decided to take on a female pseudonym and switch from writing about metaphysics to writing about love. These changes allowed Goldberg to produce the more human-­interest-­driven journalism that the newspaper’s editor hoped to bring to the publication. But Goldberg’s framing of his time writing as Ida Brener as a short, purely instrumental stepping-­stone belies the connections between these articles and earlier and later phases of his career. Moreover, in describing these articles as “popular” features, this retrospective account obscures the fact that Goldberg’s decision to cross gender boundaries was intrinsically tied to his desire to collapse intellectual and cultural boundaries by incorporating psychological discourse into the Yiddish press.38 Goldberg’s early career highlights important questions about the boundaries of interwar Yiddish journalism.

The Life and Education of B. Z. Goldberg Ben-­Zion Goldberg was born Ben-­Zion Waife near Vilna on June 9, 1895. He came to the United States with his family in 1907, settling briefly in New York before moving to Michigan and later Iowa. From an early age, Goldberg demonstrated an avid interest in writing—­publishing a poem in the Varhayt in 1912 and editing the youth section of a local English-­language paper in Michigan. A penchant for bilingual writing resurfaced throughout his life, as he continued to publish in both Yiddish and English.39 After his father’s death, Goldberg and his family returned to New York, where he began studying at Columbia University, first as an undergraduate from 1913 to 1917 and then as a graduate student. In his undergraduate and graduate work, he studied in a department that combined the faculties of the Philosophy, Psychology, and Anthropology Departments. Some professors, like William Adams Brown, advocated older theories linking psychology to metaphysics and religion. Other professors, such as John Dewey and Henry Hollingworth, emphasized

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scientific empiricism or using psychology to address contemporary social issues.40 These various approaches to psychology all influenced Goldberg’s understanding of the discipline and, consequently, the type of writing he published in the Tog. Throughout his life, Goldberg showed a particular interest in the relationship between psychology, love, and sexuality. In pursuing this interest, in some ways Goldberg stepped outside the boundaries of his education at Columbia. As he later noted, access to materials on the psychology of sex was “kept under lock and key” at Columbia.41 Nevertheless, the university’s interdisciplinary curriculum influenced his approach to these subjects as well. During his years at Columbia, Goldberg was also involved with the Jewish Teacher’s Seminary and Folks Universitet (People’s university). These institutions provided advanced Yiddish-­language courses on Jewish and non-­Jewish topics as well as training for Yiddish teachers. Goldberg served as the head of both institutions at various times and taught courses in developmental, social, and experimental psychology. These undertakings reveal his interest in bringing what he learned at Columbia to a Yiddish-­speaking audience. Moreover, some of the lectures Goldberg drafted for these courses would serve as the basis for his first series of articles in the Tog, “What Is the Soul.”42 At the same time, Goldberg also found ways to bring his passion for Yiddish culture to Columbia’s campus. It was through these efforts that Goldberg eventually joined one of Yiddish literature’s most prominent families. In 1914, Goldberg asked the author Shalom Rabinovich (aka Sholem Aleichem) to give a lecture to Yiddish-­speaking students at Columbia. Rabinovich had recently immigrated to the US, and Goldberg offered to help him and his family find housing and began tutoring one of Rabinovich’s daughters, Marie. Marie Rabinovich married B. Z. Goldberg in 1917, one year after her father’s death.43 While Goldberg’s marriage connected him to literary prestige, it did not smooth his career path, as he initially struggled to forge a permanent position in Yiddish journalism.

From B. Z. Goldberg to Ida Brener: Transition and Adaptation While Goldberg spent the majority of his life writing for the Tog, he made his Yiddish newspaper debut elsewhere. Aside from early poems

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in the Varhayt, Goldberg had become a frequent contributor to the Tageblat by 1913. Goldberg was one of several young writers hired by the paper in an attempt to diversify its content, especially its women’s features, in the lead-­up to the introduction of its women’s section in 1914. In this vein, Goldberg regularly contributed articles about sex education and women’s rights.44 Unlike the small cohort of women who wrote for the Tageblat, Goldberg also published outside of the women’s section, on topics related to religion and psychology.45 In a later autobiographical sketch, Goldberg downplayed his connection to the Tageblat, saying that he “occasionally wrote for” the publication.46 But these early articles foreshadowed Goldberg’s writing as Ida Brener, which also fused discussions of psychology, sexuality, and women’s roles in society. Goldberg’s first series of articles in the Tog, “What Is the Soul,” debuted in October 1920 and ran for three months. This series provided readers with an expansive intellectual history of religious, philosophical, and scientific concepts about the soul. As Goldberg stated at the beginning of the first article, “The idea of a soul is prevalent in all peoples at all times. Even today there is no people in the world that has no belief in a soul, in one or another form.”47 Goldberg attempted to review as many of these concepts as possible, highlighting similarities and variations across time through explorations of Plato, early Christian philosophers, Jewish sources from the Bible to contemporary thought, spiritualists such as Annie Besant, and scientific authorities like Cesare Lombroso. By introducing readers to such a diversity of discourses and connecting ancient and modern customs, Goldberg’s articles echoed the work of anthropologists like Franz Boas and Elsie Crews Parson, who also discussed the primitive roots of modern philosophy.48 Both of these scholars were at one time associated with Columbia, with Boas still teaching there when Goldberg was a student, and their focus on the ancient roots of modern cultural trends may well have impacted Goldberg’s approach to the subject. As noted earlier, these articles were adaptations of the materials Goldberg wrote for his courses at the People’s University, and they reflected this origin. His prose in this series was dry and didactic, full of long quotations and rambling definitions of esoteric terminology.49 Goldberg later asserted that it was this academic style that led the Tog’s editor, William Edlin, to deem Goldberg to be a “highbrow writer [who] could

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not do the popular stuff the [Tog] needed.”50 The Tog had been founded four years prior in an attempt to offer a more cultured alternative to other Yiddish dailies. However, in the eyes of the Tog’s editor, Goldberg’s treatises conveyed an intellectualism that was too esoteric to appeal widely. The reception of Goldberg’s early articles also highlights the complications inherent in the Tog’s intellectual project: while the Tog’s staff wanted to market their newspaper as more highbrow or middlebrow, they also wanted to compete with rivals for readers and aimed to balance intellectual rigor with popular appeal.

Ida Brener’s Debut Two months later, Goldberg began writing as Ida Brener, taking on a female persona and shifting to writing about relationships. As Ida Brener, Goldberg mainly published a column called “The Truth about Married Life.” Many articles within this series discussed the disappointment that couples experienced after marriage and encouraged couples to address these feelings head-­on. Brener asserted that couples who repressed feelings of disappointment might be more likely to stay together but less likely to enjoy happy relationships long term.51 This series also frequently addressed problems with contemporary gender roles, focusing specifically on their ill effects on marriages. Brener also asserted that the separate spheres that men and women still frequently inhabited in the 1920s left married couples without common experiences or interests. This turned men and women into “strangers” and filled married life with “boredom.” Brener warned that lack of communication and common ground might lead husbands and wives to stray or to turn to drugs, alcohol, or gambling in order to fill the void.52 These articles represented a dramatic shift from Goldberg’s previous articles in the Tog. Now writing as Brener, Goldberg switched from an impersonal, lecturing narration to a first-­person voice that directly engaged readers. In an article called “Soul Loneliness,” for instance, Brener did not cite psychological authorities in order to make her case. Instead, she appealed to readers’ emotions: “You don’t know why. You don’t understand why. But when the husband leaves in the morning, you breathe a little freer. Your heart becomes easier. . . . Your lips hum a tune, you feel like a bird, that has been freed from its cage.”53

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By exploring the psychological stressors in modern relationships, Goldberg’s articles as Brener echoed contemporary debates about companionate marriage. In the book Making Marriage Modern, Christina Simmons traces how “a range of activists, writers, and thinkers reconceived women’s sexuality and the marriage relationship in response to major social shifts” between 1910 and World War II. These conversations predominated in a range of spheres—­from bohemian newspapers to university campuses—­and were influenced by the increase in the number of women working outside the home and by the rise of modern psychology and sexology. Like Brener, other reformers also rejected what they saw as the “double standard of moral judgment” that influenced women’s sexual decisions.54 Many reformers also attempted to popularize psychological theories in popular venues and, like Brener, use them to forge a new definition of marriage based on “modernized but distinct gender roles.”55 Goldberg did not save most of his papers from this period in his career, making it difficult to determine exactly what influenced his articles as Ida Brener. However, scholars at Columbia like Leta Stetter Hollingworth were also trying to address these same issues in their research; thus, these concepts would have been part of the intellectual ferment surrounding Goldberg while he was a student. In Goldberg’s articles as Brener, he promoted a specifically eastern European Jewish vision of modern, companionate marriage. In one article, for example, Brener contrasted the domestic boredom faced by middle-­class or aspiring middle-­class American Jews with an overly idealized understanding of the Ashkenazi Jewish past, wherein “the wife was an equal partner in running the business” and couples “had something in common; besides a wife, she was a partner in business, a bookkeeper, a secretary.” By replacing marital business partnerships with separate spheres, Brener argued, American Jews had damaged the foundations of their marriages. In this discussion, Brener referred to ideal gender norms in eastern European Jewish life that were only realized by a small minority: as male religious education was prized above all else, women were expected to be full partners in business ventures. In reality, in eastern Europe, those who were able to achieve these gendered norms did not necessarily enjoy happy, companionate marriages.56 But for Goldberg, the fact that there was precedent in the Jewish past for different understandings of gender and marriage allowed him to translate

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psychological discourses from the US public sphere in ways he hoped would speak to his audience. At the same time, Goldberg’s articles as Brener offer a window into the curious blend of constraint and freedom that characterized women’s pages. His shift to writing more accessible articles, and addressing subjects like relationships, reflected the topics and styles that women writers were encouraged to contribute to the Tog. But within these constraints, the Tog’s writers presented diverse approaches to this content, ranging from melodrama to political commentary to progressive domestic-­ science-­driven advice. Writing under a female byline, in a popular tone, and about supposedly feminine topics, probably allowed Goldberg more freedom to infuse his articles with the psychological discourse that most interested him. Moreover, Goldberg also experimented with a variety of voices or personas within his writing as Brener. The majority of his articles used one consistent authorial voice—­a mature, self-­assured woman imparting authoritative guidance on marriage and psychology. However, Goldberg also published another series under the same name called “Letters of a Young Woman,” narrated from the perspective of a woman experiencing love for the first time, and his writing style shifted accordingly. In one installment, for instance, the narrator ruminates over whether her beau is truly interested in her, and Goldberg luxuriated in descriptive sentences: “Long did he look upon me and survey me with his gaze. Blue eyes he had, with brown eyelashes. Were he to close his eyes, one would think he had brown or dark brown eyes. But when he opened them, they would be light, blue, like a sun that suddenly rises.”57 Given the immense difference between the two series that Goldberg penned as Ida Brener, perhaps he hoped audiences would read the latter articles as fiction or as a counterpoint to Goldberg’s other columns, encouraging them to instead consider more companionate approaches to love. Thus, writing as Ida Brener allowed Goldberg to diversify his writing style and content while still infusing the Yiddish press with a broad range of discourses.

The Afterlife of Ida Brener During the period in which Goldberg wrote as Ida Brener, the Tog’s management seems to have been unaware of Brener’s true identity.

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Payrolls from this period include entries for Ida Brener, not B. Z. Goldberg. To bolster the ruse, Goldberg later recounted, he asked a female acquaintance to submit his articles in person and to identify herself as Ida Brener when doing so. Eventually, the Tog’s managing editor, William Edlin, discovered the hoax. Unlike Glatstein’s editor at the Fraye arbeter shtime, Edlin was so taken by Goldberg’s writing as Brener that he immediately offered him a job on the Tog’s staff.58 Goldberg soon began contributing regularly to the Tog under his own name. Unlike his articles as Brener, his own bylines did not always reflect his interest in psychology or sexuality. However, they did reflect the popular style that he had cultivated while writing as Brener. Goldberg’s features covered a range of subjects, including career advice for high school graduates, analyses of the tenets of Mormonism, and reviews of English-­language plays.59 Eventually, he became the paper’s managing editor and wrote a regular column, “In gang fun tog” (In the course of the day), with commentary on current events. In a 1933 profile of Goldberg, the writer Jacob Botoshansky summed up what he saw as Goldberg’s ability to bring a “new tone [to Yiddish journalism], which is a synthesis of Yiddish and American.”60 Writing as Ida Brener allowed Goldberg to begin the process of transforming his journalistic pursuits in ways that would ultimately lead to his success. Goldberg’s trajectory from a graduate student to a writer and editor at the Tog seems at first glance to be a straightforward story of transition, whereby Goldberg briefly took on a female pseudonym but quickly left this period of his career behind. However, several developments in Goldberg’s earlier and later career challenge this interpretation. First, while the tone of his early series about metaphysics and his articles as Ida Brener varied significantly, both represented attempts to translate psychological discourse for a new journalistic sphere. Goldberg continued to explore these topics throughout his career, writing articles and giving lectures that bore striking resemblance to his articles as Ida Brener.61 In addition, in May 1922, the Tog began running a new series under the byline I. Brener, called “Each with His Burden,” wherein a female psychologist offered readers advice drawn from her patients’ experiences. In Goldberg’s retrospective accounts, he makes no mention of continuing writing under a female pseudonym after his secret was found out. But the similarities between the articles by I. Brener and Ida Brener

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suggest that they were written by the same person. Because Goldberg situated his decision to write as Brener as a transitional phase, it perhaps makes sense that he omitted this later series when describing his career in retrospect. If Goldberg did indeed continue to write under a female pseudonym, however, not only did he embrace the practice as a way to continue writing about psychology and relationships, but he also used this alternate persona as a means to award himself the doctorate that he failed to complete at Columbia. By making Brener a professional psychologist with an advanced degree, Goldberg imagined his female persona as having successfully achieved and combined his own academic and journalistic aspirations.62 *** The narratives told by Glatstein and Goldberg, as well as their friends, colleagues, and biographers, share several common characteristics. In both cases, these men connected their use of female pseudonyms to crucial turning points in their careers. After spending time away from deep engagement with Yiddish cultural production, where they attended universities in the United States and immersed themselves in an Anglophone culture, they then eased their transition back into Yiddish culture by submitting work under a female pseudonym. New encounters enabled them to blur the boundaries between the Yiddish literary sphere and broader conversations. Other male writers who assumed female pseudonyms told quite different origin stories. For some authors, employing female pseudonyms became a strategy for distinguishing their writing in various genres, making the staffs of their publications appear more robust than they actually were, or appealing to female readers by writing as if they were women themselves. The collective narratives of these male authors reflect the fact that some men genuinely believed that writing as a woman afforded them various distinct advantages within the Yiddish press. In the Forverts, some male authors chose to employ female pseudonyms when writing serialized fiction. As was explored in chapter 1, this was one of several genres that newspapers incorporated to increase their female readership. In the Forverts’s first two decades, much of its fiction was written and signed by male writers. But by the 1930s, certain writers began signing their fiction with female names. According to the literary

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historian Ellen Kellman, the shift reflected a desire by male writers “to take full advantage of the fashion for female novelists” in the Yiddish literary sphere, both because women’s bylines added a modern feel to newspapers and because editors associated female writers with melodramatic or entertaining fiction. In reality, however, the number of women fiction writers that the Forverts employed remained quite low.63 In contrast, the linguist Max Weinreich’s decision to publish foreign correspondence as “Sore Brener” in the Forverts in 1920 seemed to reflect a desire to separate his journalistic and scholarly personas. Weinreich later became known as one of the founders of YIVO, a transnational institution devoted to scholarship on the Yiddish language and the history of Jews in eastern Europe. At this point in his life, Weinreich was a graduate student in Berlin, sending dispatches to the Forverts to supplement his income. Letters between Abraham Cahan and Weinreich reveal that Weinreich was the one who suggested the pseudonym Sore Brener, which he identified as a name he also used in Russian-­language venues.64 He did not explain why he wanted these pieces published under a pseudonym. However, it seems likely that this was an attempt to create distance between his lighter journalistic output and his more academic writing. The humorist and poet Elyahu Sheps wrote under female pseudonyms in both European and American venues—­a trajectory that highlights the overlaps between European and American Yiddish publishing ventures that developed over the first two decades of the twentieth century. While Sheps wrote for multiple publications, his longest-­term position was as a staff member of the Tageblat, where he employed many pseudonyms, including A. Almi and Elyash.65 But in his memoir, Sheps devoted a chapter specifically to his experiences writing under female pseudonyms, asserting that he employed this strategy so often that he “could write a book [called] ‘Memoirs of a One-­Time Woman.’ ” According to Sheps, the initial impetus for employing pseudonyms did not come, like Glatstein’s or Goldberg’s, from an attempt to fool an unsuspecting editor but was instead a decision made in consultation with his editor. In 1909, while Sheps was living in Warsaw, the writer I. L. Peretz asked Sheps to submit poems to an edited volume, an invitation to which Sheps responded enthusiastically. While Peretz appreciated Sheps’s many submissions, he worried that including too much work

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by one author would throw off the balance of the volume. So Peretz and Sheps decided to publish some pieces under the name Esther Zeydler—­a composite derived from the names of two of Sheps’s friends. Sheps continued to publish poetry under this name in the Warsaw-­based Moment until he immigrated to the United States in 1912. Two years later, he began contributing women’s columns to the Tageblat under the pseudonym Dvoyre Feygen.66 While Sheps’s editors and coworkers knew the true identities of Dvoyre Feygen and Esther Zeydler, Sheps boasted of his ability to fool readers with the authenticity of his female voices. Sheps recounted that a distraught father once came to the offices of Moment, declaring that Esther Zeydler was his long-­lost daughter. Taking pity on this man, Sheps decided to identify himself as the writer of Esther Zeydler’s columns. Years later, while working for the Tageblat, he asserted that he had to turn away countless suitors who wanted to marry Dvoyre Feygen. One particularly avid swain came to the paper’s office, hoping to meet the writer whose work had so enchanted him. In an effort to deter him, the paper’s staff told him that Dvoyre Feygen was married and had recently died in childbirth. This, of course, meant that Sheps had to stop writing as Feygen, so he began publishing under the name Esther Mirkin instead.67 While Sheps devoted ample space in his memoir to the readers he had deceived, he believed his greatest coup was convincing the anthologist Ezra Korman of the authenticity of one female persona. In 1928, Korman published a volume called Yidishe dikhterins: Antologye (Yiddish women poets: anthology), in an effort to reinscribe contemporary and historical female poets into the Yiddish canon.68 In compiling this volume, Korman corresponded with noted poets of his era, asking if they would be willing to contribute and for suggestions of other authors to include. He also combed through publications in hopes of discovering lesser-­known poets. In one journal, Korman came across a poem called “Vi a foygele” (Like a bird), signed by Esther Zeydler, which he included in the anthology. In Sheps’s memoir, this anecdote serves as the apotheosis of his experiences writing under female pseudonyms, as it demonstrated his ability to shape perceptions of women’s writing for generations to come.69 Each of these men described their experiences writing under female pseudonyms in different ways. Nevertheless, all of these narratives

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reinforced and reflected stigmas surrounding women’s writing at this time. While Sheps described his decision to publish poems as Esther Zeydler as a way to diversify the bylines within a publication, he also identified these poems as “maidenly verses,” suggesting that either at the time or in retrospect, he or Peretz viewed them as particularly fitting to run under a female name. Conversely, when he described love letters by Dvoyre Feygen’s suitors, he noted that these men often expressed surprise that a woman could write prose so well.70 Similarly, while the majority of Weinreich’s columns as Sore Brener comprised foreign correspondence or court reporting, the style he took on as Brener was often chatty and sensational, reminiscent of sob-­sister journalism in the American popular press.71 When these columns are read in tandem with their byline, they suggest Weinreich’s efforts to conform to the style readers might expect from a female writer. The narratives crafted by men who wrote under female pseudonyms point to the ways in which women’s writing was both valued and constrained within the Yiddish publishing sphere in the first decades of the twentieth century. A similar dynamic pervades narratives told by literary critics and editors who described themselves as champions of women writers within the Yiddish literary sphere. In his memoir, Kalman Marmor decried the dearth of female contributors to Yiddish publications in generations past. However, he attributed that deficiency to the poor quality of the work that women submitted for publication, rather than looking to the gatekeepers barring women’s entry into the literary field. He described, for example, feeling compelled to “rewrite” articles by a writer named Bela Pevzner “line by line” because “she could not distinguish between an argument and a curse, between debates and insults.” Marmor extended similar criticisms to other genres, describing how he would “improve” or “stylize” poems by Rosa Kirshenboym and Toybe Pres in order to make them fit for print.72 Even when describing his desire to privilege female voices, Marmor found ways to denigrate women writers. Marmor did cite several writers whom he felt exceeded his expectations of what women were capable of writing. In particular, he lamented that he could not claim credit for shaping the career of the “talented” author Rosa Lebensboym, an achievement that would have bolstered his reputation as a champion of female writers. Yet even as he praised Lebensboym’s talent, Marmor could not help critiquing her career trajectory,

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especially the way “she unfortunately wasted much of her time and talent on the routine of journalism,” as opposed to devoting more time to poetry.73 Had Lebensboym been under his tutelage, Marmor implied, she might have more fully realized her potential. Lebensboym achieved her most long-­lasting legacy as the author of poems signed “Anna Margolin.” However, for the majority of her life, she made her living by contributing women’s columns and translations to Yiddish newspapers. As the next section explores, Marmor’s dismissal of Lebensboym’s journalistic output reflected the cultural hierarchies at play in this era, as women’s columns and translations were seen by many people in the Yiddish literary sphere, including Lebensboym herself, as less prestigious than poetry. However, if we ignore these aspects of Lebensboym’s oeuvre, we miss the ways that she infused her writing with pointed critiques of the gendered norms governing the Yiddish press. Including female writers like Lebensboym in the history of the Yiddish press also reveals the myriad crucial yet undervalued and unacknowledged contributions of women to Yiddish cultural production.

Rosa Lebensboym / Khave Gross / Anna Weiss / Klara Levin / Anna Margolin January 1921 was not the first time that Rosa Lebensboym faced assumptions that her writing was so good that it must have been written by a man. In fact, similar assessments had plagued Lebensboym since the beginning of her literary career. In 1909, Lebensboym submitted short stories to the Fraye arbeter shtime under the name Khave Gross. According to Reuben Iceland, Yanovsky was so taken with these stories that he invited their author to the meet with him. This invitation was in part an attempt to encourage further submissions by a new talent. However, Yanovsky was also suspicious that Khave Gross might be a man masquerading as a woman. Even a decade before Glatstein’s debut as Klara Blum, Yanovsky already “had some experience with [male] beginners who sent him things under women’s names.”74 Unlike Glatstein or Goldberg, who wrote multiple, sometimes contradictory, autobiographical accounts, it is often much more difficult to obtain unmediated access to the experiences of women who contributed to the American Yiddish press. Their names are not always included in

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the lexicons of Yiddish writers, making it difficult to determine whether a byline corresponds with the real name of an female writer. Moreover, our access to women writers is often filtered through the reminiscences of their husbands, coworkers, or children, who did not always provide accurate descriptions of these women’s lives.75 Because Rosa Lebensboym achieved great acclaim for her poetry, there are more archival and print sources related to Lebensboym’s life than for many female writers of her era. Still, much of what we know about her life comes from the memoirs of Reuben Iceland, who openly admitted his untrustworthiness as a narrator of Lebensboym’s life, saying, “[She] was too close to me and our lives were too intimate and too tragically intertwined for me to write about her properly.”76 Indeed, in his memoir, Iceland focused mainly on Lebensboym’s love affairs and poetry because these spheres reflected his closest connections with her. He therefore devoted significantly less attention to her other pursuits. Nevertheless, by reading Iceland’s memoir in conjunction with Lebensboym’s journalism, as well as sources from various archival collections, we can begin to piece together Lebensboym’s long, complicated relationship with the Yiddish press.

“In the Women’s World” Lebensboym’s most sustained engagement with the Yiddish press began in 1915. She first arrived in New York in 1907 and had worked as a secretary and occasional writer for the Fraye arbeter shtime during that time. However, she decided to return to Europe in 1910, only to return to the United States again at the end of 1914, after sojourns in Warsaw, Brest, and Palestine. Several months after her return to the US, Lebensboym joined the staff of the newly founded Tog. Her association with the paper lasted for over thirty-­five years, during which she worked as a writer and editor for the paper’s women’s content and then later as a freelance contributor, until her death in 1952.77 Throughout her career, Lebensboym often voiced her disdain for Yiddish journalism and particularly the roles that women were allowed to perform in its production and reception. As was the case for most female writers associated with the Tog and other Yiddish dailies, most of the articles Lebensboym published under her own name appeared on the women’s page. While many Yiddish literary figures read her women’s

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columns with keen interest, she never held her own journalistic work in high regard. In fact, according to Iceland, Lebensboym “used to become enraged when someone praised her articles,” because she viewed her work as a means to make a living instead of a worthy literary pursuit in and of itself.78 This perspective was not necessarily unique to Lebensboym or even to writers of women’s columns and other related articles. According to the literary scholar Ruth Wisse, many Yiddish poets and novelists who made their living by writing articles for newspapers felt equally dismissive of their journalistic output.79 But Lebensboym seems to have felt particularly constrained in her role as a women’s columnist. At times, Lebensboym’s critiques of the press seeped into her journalistic work. In 1915, for instance, she devoted a column to criticizing gender imbalances that she saw as endemic in English-­language newspapers: “a strange thing about the local press . . . [is that] it seems to be open to women, and that they occupy an important niche.” But in reality, she asserted, women “are able to write frankly and freely about only two things: clothing and love.” Moreover, “there are no women in American newspapers who are city editors, managers, or editorial writers.” In Lebensboym’s view, editors also limited the style that writers could employ in their women’s columns, as “they must write banally, because originality is the quickest way to the waste-­basket.”80 Although she did not explicitly address gender dynamics within the Yiddish press, it is likely that Lebensboym indirectly intended this critique of the Anglophone press to highlight similar problems in the Tog and other Yiddish newspapers. At other times, Lebensboym’s critiques of contemporary news­ paper culture hit closer to home. Later that same year, she devoted an installment of “In der froyen velt” to disparaging then-­President Woodrow Wilson’s decade-­old book, A History of the American People, and its male-­centric approach to history: “if a resident of the planet Mars should read this book, he would surely think that on earth women, God forbid, do not exist.” She argued that Wilson’s chronicle represented a broader problem, as most works of history written by men relegated women to serving as “the silent partner[s] of progress.” As an antidote, she suggested reading scholarship by female historians like Mary Ritter Beard, work that offered a counterweight to historical accounts written and dominated by men.81 Lebensboym’s critique of Wilson’s work would no doubt have piqued the interest of her readers, as A History of the

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American People was at that very moment being serialized in translation in the Tog.82 By arguing that excluding women from history writ large provided a skewed sense of the historical past, Lebensboym slyly suggested gender imbalances that existed within the newspaper in which her articles appeared. Lebensboym’s frustrations only increased after 1920, when she quit her editorial position at the Tog to devote more time to poetry. To supplement her income, she continued to work as a freelancer for various newspapers. Her experiences shed light on the immense differences between freelance writers and regular staff members with regard to influence and financial security. Throughout her tenure as a women’s page editor, Lebensboym wrote long, detailed letters to two of her coworkers and lovers, Hirsh-­Leyb Gordon and Reuben Iceland. Many of her letters to Gordon contained career advice, critiques of articles he had submitted to the Tog or various other publications, or offers to work as a “press agent” on his behalf.83 She also discussed bringing his articles to fellow editors at the Tog or walking them over to other offices on Yiddish Newspaper Row in hopes that the papers would publish them.84 These letters suggest that Lebensboym’s editorial position afforded her some amount of sway in the Yiddish publishing world. Her efforts did not always succeed, as many of Gordon’s articles were never published. But these letters paint a picture of Lebensboym as a meticulous editor who was able to use her influence to advance others’ careers. By contrast, after she resigned her position, Lebensboym now had to turn to Gordon, Iceland, and other acquaintances to intercede with editors on her behalf. Several letters described translations, feuilletons, or reviews that never came to fruition, suggesting the tenuous position of working freelance.85 As female journalists were more likely to work freelance than have regular staff positions, Lebensboym’s letters exemplify the experiences of a broader range of female journalists.86 Moreover, Lebensboym’s letters also reveal the limited opportunities that she, as a woman, was offered as a freelance writer. In 1922, for instance, Gordon commented that “both the ‘Tageblat’ and the ‘Morgn-­ zhurnal’ do not have women on their staff. Perhaps you can have a chat with them?”—­suggesting that these publications would view Lebensboym’s gender rather than her talent as her greatest asset.87 Similarly, in a letter from 1925, Reuben Iceland recounted a conversation with the

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staff of the Forverts, who wanted to know whether Lebensboym might be willing to contribute occasional “light, feminine articles” to the publication.88 Similarly, Lebensboym complained about the frequent offers she fielded to write women’s content, noting, for example, that the Forverts had recently asked her to write an article about “women who love surgery”—­an offer she declined.89 It is unclear from these letters whether the assumption that Lebensboym was most fit to write women’s material stemmed from her partners’ or editors’ assessment of her career or from broader conceptions about what women writers were expected to contribute to the Yiddish press. In her own letters, Lebensboym sometimes expressed doubts about her capabilities in other genres of journalism, fearing, for example, that if she tried to write feuilletons, they might come out “dry as a bone—­an article instead of a feuilleton.” But she also expressed a yearning to branch out: “I so want to write. I will probably write badly and uninterestingly, but I have something to say.”90 Lebensboym was hardly the only female journalist who voiced her frustrations with the Yiddish press. Moreover, she was also not alone in using her columns to critique contemporary newspaper culture. In an article in the Tog, for instance, Lebensboym’s coworker Adella Kean Zametkin took radical Yiddish newspapers to task for “exploiting” women’s lives for sensational stories without offering female readers practical advice or support. In contrast, Kean Zametkin asserted that her columns would provide “useful discussions about the difficulties she faces daily, advice on how to fulfill her various duties, which life imposes on her as a wife, as a mother, as a member of society.”91 Similarly, Rokhl Holtman of the Frayhayt took issue with the “yellow-­socialist” approach to journalism exemplified by the Forverts as well as the condescension with which more “capitalist” Yiddish papers approached female readers.92 In other cases, women writers critiqued the publications that employed them. A month after the communist Frayhayt introduced its women’s section, Holtman wrote an article criticizing the paper’s management for devoting only half a page each week to this section. In her assessment, these spatial limitations severely curtailed the material she was able to offer readers, meaning “the women’s section is at this time not yet what it should be.” In order for this section to truly live up to the paper’s ideological commitments, she argued, it needed to devote more space to politically engaged features like biographical sketches of

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historical figures, which could offer readers models to follow in their own lives, as well as columns that focused on international news, “so that more female comrades would be informed about what is happening with their sisters on the other side of the ocean.”93 By not allowing her sufficient space to conduct her section, she argued, the paper was doing its female readers a disservice and was undermining the political project of this section. Holtman’s complaints seem to have spurred the paper’s management into action, as the women’s section soon expanded to a full page. Similar critiques also found their way into works of fiction written by writers with long associations with the Yiddish press. In 1926, Miriam Karpilove published a roman à clef based on her experiencing writing and editing materials for the women’s page of a Yiddish daily in Boston. Having made a name for herself writing fiction and women’s columns in New York dailies like the Varhayt and Tog, Karpilove viewed the newspaper scene in Boston as “provincial” and underdeveloped in comparison, infusing her novella with this assessment. In Karpilove’s portrayal, the newspaper’s editor hired her to compile the material for the paper’s women’s page, including writing original content as well as translating or adapting material from other venues. While this editor enjoyed the circulation boost that her renown added to the paper, he continually encouraged Karpilove’s protagonist to water down her writing and to make it “cheap, sensational, something that will attract the attention of popular audiences.”94 In the assessment of Jessica Kirzane, a literary scholar who has translated several of Karpilove’s novels and short stories, while we cannot determine how much of the plot of “A Provincial Newspaper” is based on actual events, Karpilove chose to highlight her character’s “confidence in her own abilities as a journalist and her anger at being undervalued and exploited.”95 Like many women journalists at this time, most of the articles that Lebensboym published under her own name were women’s columns. However, she used this genre to question gendered stereotypes and editorial practices. Although Lebensboym viewed her journalistic output as less meaningful than her poetry, a close reading of her articles reveals the innovative ways in which she was able to work within the confines of the form while also questioning its boundaries.

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Beyond the Women’s World While Rosa Lebensboym contributed a rich, varied corpus of women’s columns to the Yiddish press over the course of her career, focusing only on moments when her byline appeared would obscure the full significance of Lebensboym’s place in Yiddish newspaper culture. Like many other female writers, Lebensboym contributed to the production of these publications both in print and behind the scenes in ways that did not carry attributions. While readers of the Tog, Forverts, or Morgn-­zhurnal looked forward to writing that carried the bylines of their favorite authors, much of the material in the Yiddish press ran anonymously or under pseudonyms. This meant that readers did not always know who had written the news articles, advice columns, or other features that they read. Nor were they able to ascertain whether a given unsigned or pseudonymous articles was written by a male or female author. In addition to articles that Lebensboym signed under her own name, she contributed articles anonymously or under pseudonyms to multiple publications throughout her career. In some cases, this allowed her to move beyond women’s columns and women’s sections. When Lebensboym resigned from her position at the Fraye arbeter shtime and returned to Europe in 1910, she traveled to London and Paris before reuniting with her father in Brest. Iceland revealed in his memoir that Lebensboym funded her sojourns in London and Paris by sending dispatches to the Forverts describing the Russian émigré culture abroad.96 In later decades, writers like Jean Jaffee would publish foreign correspondence in the Yiddish press under their own names. But in 1910, Lebensboym’s contributions instead ran anonymously.97 Moreover, these anonymous articles are indicative of a broader range of articles outside of traditionally female topics written by women before the advent of women’s pages, some signed and some unsigned. This occurred across the ideological spectrum, as Adella Kean Zametkin wrote articles about electoral corruption for the radical Arbeter tsaytung in the 1890s and several women wrote editorials for the Orthodox Tageblat’s English page beginning in 1900.98 As some of this content ran anonymously, it is only through memoirs, payrolls, and letters that we can begin to grasp the full extent of women’s contributions to the Yiddish press.

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In other cases, writing anonymous women’s articles became a method for Lebensboym and other female writers to create the impression that the contributors to the women’s page were more varied that they actually were. After Lebensboym joined the editorial staff the Tog, for instance, she supplemented the articles that she wrote under her own name with articles under bylines like Sofia Brandt, Anna Weiss, and Klara Levin. Most of these articles hewed closely to the themes that editors and publishers tended to impose on women’s writing, and were often quite similar to the women’s columns that Lebensboym signed with her own name.99 Lebensboym also worked as a translator for the Tog at various stages in her career. In letters from 1923, for example, she described translating short stories by Osip Dymov. Though Dymov wrote in Russian and Yiddish, in this case editors did not view Dymov’s Yiddish writing as fit to print. Instead, they tasked Lebensboym with translating Russian versions of his stories into Yiddish, though these stories ran in the news­ paper without identifying their translator.100 The Tog’s payrolls throughout the 1920s also list Lebensboym as among the paper’s translators, though they do not specify what content she was translating, so it may have been either literature or reportage.101 Iceland praised Lebensboym’s work as a translator in his memoir, deeming her “one of the finest translators that we had.” He lamented that these translations were published anonymously, as this meant that she did not achieve renown for this skill.102 In a letter from 1923, in contrast, Lebensboym suggested that the Tog’s editor, William Edlin, often criticized the lack of fluidity in her translations.103 Nevertheless, he continued to hire her as a translator, suggesting that her skills remained in demand. In fact, translation is an arena where we find a significant cohort of women working behind the scenes throughout the history of the Yiddish press. Translation was an integral component in the composition of Yiddish newspapers, as these publications included literature and articles that had originally been published in English, Hebrew, Russian, German, and several other languages. Women were never the only ones performing this task, but most newspapers did employ female translators, such as Adella Kean Zametkin and Paulina Segal Kobrin at the Abend blat and Arbeter tsaytung, Bertha Wiernik at the Tageblat, Rokhl Holtman at Der kamf and the Frayhayt, and Anna Cahan at the Forverts.104

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The fact that women worked as translators throughout the history of the Yiddish press reflects several themes about the role of female labor in the development of the Yiddish press. First, it highlights the ways in which educational practices in many Ashkenazi Jewish communities in eastern Europe, where many of these women had been born and raised, varied significantly by gender. In middle-­class, maskilic households (households where the Jewish enlightenment had taken hold), it was much more common for young women to learn languages like Russian, French, or German than for their brothers, who devoted more of their time to religious study and learning Hebrew. The literary scholar Iris Parush has noted that this allowed women more access to secular, non-­Jewish literature than their male counterparts had. In the context of the American Yiddish press, it also helps to explain why women were hired as translators, as many of these women came from middle-­class backgrounds.105 At the same time, the challenges of freelancing and translation also highlight the difficulties that many women faced in finding a place within Yiddish journalism. Women often relied on some sort of connection to a prominent male editor, writer, or publisher in order to forge secure or even somewhat-­stable careers in the Yiddish press. For example, many of the translators working behind the scenes for Yiddish newspapers were the wives, sisters, or daughters of prominent male writers and editors. Adella Kean Zametkin was the wife of Mikhail Zametkin, who was at one time the editor of the Forverts. Bertha Wiernik was the sister of Peter Wiernik, who worked at the Tageblat and Morgn-­zhurnal. Rokhl Holtman was the wife of the writer and editor Moyshe Holtman. And Anna Cahan was the wife of the Forverts’s editor, Abraham Cahan. In the case of Lebensboym, biographical accounts often highlight her romantic relationships with famous writers and suggest that she was able to obtain staff positions, first at the Fraye arbeter shtime and then at the Tog, because of the intercession of male lovers.106 We have no way of ascertaining whether these connections or Lebensboym’s talent were decisive in her career trajectory. However, the world of the Yiddish press was often closed off to women without some sort of personal connection. These patterns applied more broadly in a range of professions, including Jewish and non-­Jewish journalism in a host of languages. Being the child or romantic partner of a prominent man often allowed women

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easier access to publication. I say this not to call these women’s talent into question but instead to raise questions about whether there were other women who possessed the skill and desire to pursue journalism but lacked access. Uncovering women’s behind-­the-­scenes roles as translators also gives us a sense of the hierarchy of work that was performed in the composition of Yiddish newspapers, as women were often tasked with less prestigious types of work. Translation was always a critical component of the Yiddish press and required significant linguistic and literary skills. Moreover, many prominent male writers and editors also translated material for newspapers. But in many cases, writers and editors tended to consider translation as a notch below other components of Yiddish newspaper production.107 This meant that there was more space for women to fill these roles than there might have been if translation were given its proper due. One particularly illuminating example of the potent meanings of women’s translation work emerges in the story of the husband-­and-­wife translation team of Leon Kobrin and Paulina Segal Kobrin. Today, Leon Kobrin’s name and contributions to Yiddish culture are well-­known, and his wife’s work remains relatively obscure by comparison. But two retrospective accounts—­one penned by Leon Kobrin and the other by the couple’s son, Nathan—­refer repeatedly to the couple’s collaborative work, especially on translation projects, which provided them with a steady stream of income throughout their marriage. In the early years of their relationship, Leon remained more comfortable writing in Russian than in Yiddish. Paulina, in contrast, had fluid command of Yiddish and was also fluent in languages like French and German. In his memoir, Leon Kobrin described collaborating with his wife early in their careers as an enjoyable experience as well as a linguistic necessity.108 Over time, Leon Kobrin’s Yiddish-­language skills improved, and he made a name for himself as a playwright and a writer of fiction. The couple’s son later recounted that as Leon’s professional commitments expanded, the Kobrins reached an “unwritten understanding that mother would help with the translations so that father would have more time to create dramatic works for the Yiddish stage.” This was an open secret in Yiddish literary circles in the first half of the twentieth century and was noted in obituaries written after Paulina Segal Kobrin’s death in 1961.

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Nathan Kobrin’s memories about his parents’ partnership evoke a hierarchy of literary work within the family, wherein Leon’s “creative” dramatic output took precedence over translation projects. But at the same time, these recollections also convey a sense of partnership, with both Kobrins viewing their creative enterprises as shared labor—­whether through moments of actual collaboration or through finding ways to facilitate or supplement each other’s work. According to Nathan, the times when both of his parents were working on literary endeavors were “probably the happiest time” in their marriage, as this partnership allowed them financial stability and a sense of shared intellectual fulfillment.109 But a different portrait of the Kobrins’ collaboration emerges in Zalman Reyzen’s biographical essay on Paulina Segal Kobrin. Reyzen claimed that the decision to excise Paulina’s name from translations performed in conjunction with her husband, or on his behalf, lay not with the Kobrins themselves but with the editors of Yiddish newspapers and books, who “for publishing-­related reasons often published [their translations] only under the name of her husband.”110 Because Leon Kobrin was by this point a prominent figure in Yiddish culture, editors felt that translations that ran under his name would be more marketable. So they took Paulina’s name off these pieces before publishing them. To correct this imbalance, Leon included a list of some of their collaborations in his memoirs.111 Yet the newspaper record itself fails to disclose Paulina’s full contributions to the Yiddish press. Women’s vital, though unrecorded, behind-­the-­scenes labor extended beyond the realm of translation. Like Lebensboym, who was a secretary at the Fraye arbeter shtime, other women also worked as secretaries and cashiers, performing the day-­to-­day tasks that kept these newspapers afloat.112 At the Tog, for example, the editorial secretary, Helen Atkins, was also in charge of corresponding with the paper’s readers in the 1920s and 1930s. When readers wrote to the paper critiquing that day’s stories or asking for general advice and information, they received replies from Atkins.113 At the very moment that editors actively solicited women readers and writers, they also obscured the variety and extent of the work that certain women performed in allowing the Yiddish newspaper market to function. When Rosa Lebensboym accused the American popular press of making it seem as if newspapers welcomed female journalists, when

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in reality constraining how and what women wrote, she may well have been describing her own career as well as the careers of other female journalists who worked for the Yiddish press. Most women contributed women’s columns and other forms of writing that were considered the particular purview of female writers, including short stories, advice columns, or poetry. Many probably felt constrained by having to write this material. But the careers of women in Yiddish journalism also reflect a more complicated dynamic. On the pages of the Yiddish press, it seemed as if women only authored one form of content because this was the material that they published under their own names. In reality, over the course of their careers, many women contributed to the Yiddish press in more varied ways: by working behind the scenes, by writing for multiple publications, and by writing anonymously or under pseudonyms in ways that stretched beyond the boundaries usually imposed on women’s writing. In the retrospective accounts of male editors, who often touted their newspapers as particularly hospitable spaces for female journalists, the full extent of the work performed by women remained largely invisible. Despite the exceptional nature of Lebensboym’s life and archival trail, the careers of women like her reflect a broader pattern of tension between the emancipatory opportunities that careers as writers provided and the ways that male editors, colleagues, and partners hindered women writers’ development, limited their prospects, and concealed their contributions.

Conclusion The narratives that both Glatstein and Goldberg produced about their early careers and that have been expanded on by scholars and colleagues emphasized a dramatic shift occurring in the Yiddish press in the late 1910s and early 1920s. As newspapers attempted to demonstrate their openness to non-­Yiddish cultural influences and to assert more modern political, ideological, and commercial outlooks for themselves or the publication they worked for, discussions of men writing under female pseudonyms became a method to delineate this moment in the history of the Yiddish press. Both Glatstein and Goldberg were part of a new generation of Yiddish writers who were either born in the United

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States or immigrated at relatively young ages and who received secular educations in the United States. In crafting their origin stories, they highlighted this deep engagement with various streams of American culture and their desire to infuse the Yiddish press with broader cultural viewpoints. In describing their early careers, both writers drew implicit connections between their desires to cross intellectual or linguistic boundaries and their attempts to cross gender boundaries in their writing. For both authors, the experience of writing as women facilitated their reentry into the American Yiddish press and helped them bring elements gleaned from broader American cultural spheres into Yiddish newspapers. In contrast, female journalists often strove to break down the boundaries that newspaper editors imposed on women’s writing—­often with very little success—­or continually contended with assumptions that any “good” writing that bore a female byline must have really been written by a man. Together, these various narratives reveal the complicated place of writing for and by women in the interwar American Yiddish press, a category that was both marginal and crucial to the development of the Yiddish newspaper sphere and simultaneously valued and constrained. As Rosa Lebensboym’s experiences reveal, the stakes of these gender politics often played out very differently for women and for men who wrote as women. Moreover, narratives about female pseudonyms point to a marked divergence between a rhetoric of modernity and change that the Yiddish press invoked in this period and the underlying reality of constraint and anxiety that also affected the Yiddish press and those who wrote for it in this period. This is not the only period in Jewish history when intellectual or religious elites have used discussions of the status of women in order to work through their ambivalent feelings about modernity and change. In fact, scholars such as Paula Hyman, Riv-­Ellen Prell, and Shmuel Feiner have uncovered similar rhetorical strategies in various geographical contexts throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In each case, Jewish communal leaders, intellectuals, or writers discussed the status of women in ways that, on the surface, telegraphed these figures’ embrace of modernization while in reality attempting to curtail this modernization or to assert some sense of control over it. This rhetoric took on different valences in different moments and locations, but in each

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instance, discussions of the status of women became ways to explore the boundaries of Jewish culture and to simultaneously push and reinforce these boundaries.114 In the case of the interwar Yiddish press, this anxiety was linked to several phenomena. After an increase in circulation during World War I, the Yiddish press began to lose readership in the next few years, a phenomenon that only gained momentum over the next few decades.115 Thus, editors and writers probably used these stories to testify to the continued importance, cultural relevance, and innovations in their publications in the face of decreasing circulation figures. At the same time, newer generations of writers, especially those who had received educations in US academic settings, wanted to position themselves and their literature as on par with the types of innovations happening in a variety of other linguistic spheres or perhaps to justify their decisions to remain connected to the Yiddish literary sphere. Narratives about men writing under female pseudonyms allowed editors to assert the “modernity” of the Yiddish publishing world while also allowing younger writers to highlight ways they were incorporating new artistic innovations, and literary and academic influences, through the writing they produced under female pseudonyms. These stories served to bolster the prestige of the Yiddish press in ways that appeared to empower female writers but in reality cemented the hegemony of male writers and editors.116 The contradictions inherent in these narratives also help to shed light on the paradoxical place of women’s writing in the historiography of the Yiddish press. Some scholars, following the lead of narratives by men like Goldberg or Glatstein, have portrayed interwar Yiddish newspapers as being especially hospitable spaces for women readers and writers.117 In contrast, other scholars, discussing the very same papers, have asserted with equal certainty that “editors had no intention of nurturing or even emphasizing women’s writing.”118 Examining the decisions made by men writing under female pseudonyms and the complexities of the narratives created in retrospect about these decisions sheds light on these contradictions, as this historiography relies simultaneously on the rhetoric and realities of women’s writing in the interwar Yiddish press, which did not always line up. In addition, it reveals the ways in which the shifting gender dynamics in the American Jewish immigrant community in this period, discussed at length by scholars, were intrinsically

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connected to the shifts in other cultural boundaries happening contemporaneously. The pages of Yiddish newspapers like the Fraye arbeter shtime, the Tog, the Tageblat, and the Forverts became spaces in which the boundaries of American Jewish culture were actively contested and stretched—­with regard to gender roles, languages of communication, and the level of interaction between “Jewish” and “American” literature and popular discourse. And as had been true since the advent of the Yiddish daily press, gender remained a method through which to debate these boundaries.

Epilogue Gender and the Historical Memory of the Yiddish Press

In 1964, the author Laura Z. Hobson published a novel called First Papers centered on the Ivarins, a family of Jewish socialists living in New York in the early twentieth century. Stefan and Alexandra Ivarin had immigrated to the United States from tsarist Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, eventually moving from the radical ferment of the Lower East Side to suburban Long Island. As their three children grow into young adults, Stefan and Alexandra struggle to balance their commitment to parenting in line with their political ideology with their children’s desires to fit in with their neighbors and friends. These tensions ultimately reach a boiling point in the lead-­up to World War I, as American society becomes increasingly hostile to both immigrant culture and radical activism. At the start of the novel, Stefan is the long-­standing editor of a socialist Yiddish daily, and he views his journalism as an extension of his decades of experience as an activist and labor organizer. However, changing trends in Yiddish journalism, as well as his own failing health, lead Stefan to feel as if he is losing his influence over his children and his once-­captive reading public. Alexandra, in contrast, begins the novel no less committed to socialism than her husband but content to focus her energies on the domestic sphere. By the end of the novel, Alexandra has discovered a talent for advising fellow immigrants on child care, nutrition, and acclimating to life in the United States. These informal classes eventually serve as a springboard into a successful career as an advice columnist for the Yiddish press.1 First Papers was published almost twenty years after Hobson’s best-­ known work, Gentlemen’s Agreement, which explored contemporary antisemitism in the United States and was adapted into an award-­winning film starring Gregory Peck. As was true with Gentlemen’s Agreement, in 225

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writing First Papers, Hobson hoped to use her fiction to reflect on what she felt were the most pressing issues of her day. The book was written over the course of over a decade, a period that included the height of McCarthyism, and Hobson emphasized the resonance between the anti-­immigrant, antiradical sentiments of the years surrounding World War I and the years after World War II. In both moments, she argued, those who espoused radical politics faced almost insurmountable odds in their efforts to force American society to live up to the nation’s purported promises of freedom and equality. Yet these obstacles made this work all the more vital and patriotic.2 In choosing to set First Papers in the world of early twentieth-­century radical Yiddish culture, Laura Z. Hobson also drew on her own childhood. “The Z [in Laura Z. Hobson] is for Zametkin,” she recounted in her memoirs, “and I have clung to it through all my years because it held my identity intact before that Anglo-­Saxon married name of Hobson.”3 The name Zametkin also revealed Hobson’s deep connections to the heart of Yiddish cultural production at the turn of the twentieth century, as both of her parents had enjoyed long careers as writers and editors for various Yiddish publications. Her father, Mikhail Zametkin, had been a prominent radical activist and journalist and an early editor of the Forverts. Her mother, Adella Kean Zametkin, contributed translations, political commentary, and women’s columns to various Yiddish publications but spent the most extended period of her career writing women’s columns for the intellectual, nonpartisan Tog. In a letter from 1953, Hobson expressed her excitement at being able to infuse the story of the Ivarins in First Papers with details pulled from her parents’ lives, calling their experiences “perfect material” for a novel.4 Readers who had grown up in Yiddish cultural spheres were likely particularly attuned to the autobiographical resonance of First Papers. Several even used the occasion of the book’s publication to write to Hobson. Their letters testified to the convergence between the Zametkins’ roles as teachers, public speakers, and writers for the Yiddish press. A woman named Annie Bell described initially becoming familiar with Adella Kean Zametkin through her columns. She also cited later, in-­ person interactions with Kean Zametkin as the source of her first “contact with socialists and socialist ideas.”5 As Kean Zametkin was an early advocate for whole grains and unprocessed foods, others described the

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influence of Kean Zametkin on their dietary habits as well as their ideological commitments: “I presume that it was through her influence that we ate whole wheat bread and that my mother took me, when I was ten or eleven, to a Eugene V. Debs meeting.”6 Some letter writers described the reverence with which they or their mothers had viewed Adella Kean Zametkin, comparing her to a “god” or to the “Jewish Joan of Arc.”7 Others framed their connection in more familiar terms. Alexander Holzberg introduced himself as a cousin of Adella Kean Zametkin’s as well as a former student. He offered to send Hobson a published edition of one of Mikhail Zametkin’s plays, hoping that this small kindness might “in some small way” repay the debt he owed to Adella: “[She] gave me free English lessons and meals ­besides, . . . [which as] a newly arrived citizen, I needed badly.”8 Holzberg was not the only letter writer who identified themselves as a cousin of Adella Kean Zametkin. In fact, these attestations were so frequent that Hobson began to wonder whether she truly had so many long-­lost relatives or whether her mother had in some way encouraged people to view her as a relative, either through in-­person interactions or through the authority and personal connections she cultivated through her writing. “It is so mysterious,” she wrote in one reply; “my only guess is that in her warmth and out of her love for people, she may have called them ‘cousin,’ but maybe that’s wrong.”9 While these letters attest to the deep resonance between First Papers and Hobson’s family history, Hobson’s plot diverged from her family’s story in ways both great and small. While in reality, Hobson had a twin sister and two older half brothers from her father’s first marriage, in the novel, the family consists of two daughters who are several years apart in age and one son. While the novel attests that Stefan Ivarin had immigrated to the United States in 1879, the actual Mikhail Zametkin had arrived in the United States in 1882. Some differences between the lives of the actual Zametkins and the fictional Ivarins were probably the result of artistic license. In Hobson’s process of transforming her childhood into a work of fiction, she no doubt chose to streamline or alter facts to make the story clearer or more compelling or to better emphasize the messages she wanted to infuse into her narrative. However, other shifts reflect important aspects of the ways in which the history of the American Yiddish press has been

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recounted over time. In particular, exploring the connections and divergences between the fictional Stefan and Alexandra Ivarin and the historical Mikhail and Adella Kean Zametkin offers crucial insights into how gender has become, paradoxically, both central and marginal to the way that journalists and scholars alike have recounted the history of the Yiddish press.

“Stuff for the Lovelorn”: Gender, Content, and Audience Questions of gender lay at the heart of how Hobson narrated Stefan Ivarin’s growing disenchantment with Yiddish newspaper culture over the course of First Papers. She centered several chapters around editorial deliberations at the Jewish News, a composite Yiddish daily meant to evoke the various publications her father contributed to over the course of his career.10 One of the threads running through the novel is Stefan’s unhappiness with the editorial direction of the Jewish News and his fears that the publication is too slavishly following the American popular press in its quest for modernization and increased circulation. In contrast, his coworkers worry that they are not doing enough to emulate mainstream American newspapers. Halfway through the novel, the newspaper’s business manager decides to appoint a staff member to conduct a systematic survey of local English-­language publications, so that the Jewish News’s staff can more fully adapt to trends taking shape in the American popular press. Initially, Stefan is not alarmed, as this is no different than the way the paper’s staff usually operates. In fact, he doubts that publishers like “Hearst or Pulitzer or Adolph S. Ochs [have] ever slipped an innovation past the gang of us, what with the stack of papers we each devour every day.”11 Once the survey is completed, however, Stefan is disheartened by the results. The staff member who conducts the survey returns with binders full of articles, divided into five thematic sections: “one for funnies and cartoons, another for exposés and running stories, another for scientific articles, another for women’s specials and one marked, ‘Human Interest.’ ”12 Stefan flips through the binders, expressing particular dismay that anyone would even consider introducing the “stuff for the lovelorn” that characterized the Anglophone press into the Jewish News. “Not if Dorothy Dix and Winifred Black and Beatrice Fairfax melted into one

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and gave their outpourings to us for free,” he exclaims, invoking the names of prominent Anglophone journalists, “never in any paper I am the editor of.”13 Stefan’s opinion is overruled, and the Jewish News uses these models to guide changes in formatting and content, which quickly and drastically increases the paper’s circulation. In response, Stefan ruminates over whether he should quit in protest of these changes or whether he should stay on as an editor in order to salvage “what still was a great paper underneath its whore’s paint and powder.”14 In recounting these behind-­the-­scenes deliberations at the Jewish News, Hobson revealed common editorial practices that pervaded the Yiddish newspaper market in New York at the turn of the twentieth century. Yiddish dailies each had staff members who devoted their time and attention to poring over the pages of the Anglophone press, translating this material into Yiddish or using it as inspiration for original content. This, in part, reflected the fact that the producers of Yiddish newspapers relied on translated material from various languages in order to fill their publications with content. However, it also testified to a particular desire to infuse Yiddish dailies with the features, layout styles, and advertising strategies that made major organs of the American popular press so successful. Moreover, the producers of each of these newspapers frequently conflated their desire to make their newspapers more “American” with their desire to include more content explicitly aimed at attracting female readers.15 In depicting “stuff to the lovelorn” as solely entertainment-­driven innovations that Yiddish newspapers absorbed from the American Anglophone press, however, Hobson flattened the complex, multivalent influence that questions of gender played in the development of the American Yiddish daily press. Within the timeline of the novel, these innovations began to appear in the Jewish News in the 1910s. As this book has demonstrated, questions of how to speak to a female audience had shaped the development of the Yiddish press since the advent of Yiddish daily newspapers in the 1880s. Moreover, commercial viability, entertainment value, and a desire to mimic the latest trends in mainstream American journalism were never the sole reason that Yiddish dailies decided to incorporate content explicitly or implicitly addressing a female audience. Instead, Yiddish dailies—­whether they espoused religious traditionalism or radical politics—­also viewed women as playing

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specific, crucial, and highly complex roles in their family’s and community’s political economy and acculturation processes. Because of the various ­motivations that prompted Yiddish newspapers to incorporate content for women, issues of gender became central to polemics within the Y ­ iddish press. Writers, editors, and publishers invoked gender when they debated how best to engage with both American newspaper ­culture and global trends in Jewish publishing, as well as how to balance their various, often conflicting commercial, ideological, and cultural priorities. Mikhail Zametkin’s actual career serves as a prime example of the full complexity of the role of gender in shaping the history of the American Yiddish press. Like his fictional counterpart, Stefan Ivarin, Mikhail Zametkin was a vocal critic of the commercialization of radical Yiddish newspapers, especially the popularizing, mass-­culture-­focused innovations that Abraham Cahan brought to the Forverts.16 However, unlike Stefan Ivarin in First Papers, Mikhail Zametkin also championed the inclusion of women’s content into the radical Yiddish press, as he served as the first regular women’s columnist for the Forverts. In 1898, Zametkin began penning a series of articles called “Fun a froy tsu froyen” (From a woman to women), which he signed with the pseudonym “Sofia Housewife.”17 The topics of Zametkin’s women’s columns hewed relatively closely to those of women’s columns in other contemporary newspapers in the Yiddish press and beyond, offering readers advice on housekeeping, child rearing, cooking, and romance. But Zametkin also found ways to reformulate the genre of women’s column as a socialist intervention, making up for the inattention that male activists and journalists paid to the labor performed by housewives. While unions and labor organizers rallied for better conditions in sweatshops, Zametkin argued, no one had turned similar attention to work in the home. “When people write in newspapers, journals, and books about how to improve the work in factories and in mines, why do they not write at all about how to better and lighten the work in the house?”18 Writing as Sofia Housewife, Zametkin offered his column as the beginning of a solution to these imbalances. Hobson’s novel did not provide its readers with a full accounting of the complex roles that women’s content played in the development of the Yiddish press or the ways her father engaged with this content in his own career. Instead, she used the inclusion of women’s content

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in the Yiddish press to delineate between hardline socialist journalists like ­Stefan Ivarin / Mikhail Zametkin and those who wanted to infuse socialist publications with mass appeal. These sorts of sentiments were frequently featured in polemics within the Yiddish press, especially those that conflated Cahan’s approach to the Forverts with his desire to attract female readers. But they did not necessarily accurately represent the content included in women’s columns, and other related features, within the Yiddish press. Nor did they reflect the complex, divergent meanings infused into these columns by readers, writers, editors, and advertisers alike. Hobson seems to have been unaware of her father’s experiences as a women’s columnist, as she did not mention them in her memoir or in her fictionalized recounting of her parents’ lives. Mikhail Zametkin only wrote as Sofia Housewife sporadically between 1898 and 1902, so he may have omitted this portion of his oeuvre when describing his career to his daughter—­choosing to focus instead on other pursuits. These lacunae in her memoir and novel also reflect the broader difficulties Hobson faced in reconstructing her parents’ lives and careers. Although Mikhail and Adella Kean Zametkin worked throughout their lives in Yiddish-­ language media, they were staunch internationalists, interested in class-­ based solidarity as opposed to Jewish particularity. They wrote in Yiddish because they viewed it as the best medium to reach the Jewish proletariat, not out of any devotion to the language itself. Because of their commitments to internationalism and acculturation, the Zametkins decided not to teach their children Yiddish and moved to Long Island in part to make sure their children were raised in an English-­speaking environment. This meant that Hobson was unable to read most of her parents’ writing. Nor did she have unmediated access to Yiddish-­language biographical sources about her parents.19 To redress these obstacles when researching First Papers, Hobson turned to several sources. She corresponded with members of the Forverts staff, asking them for information about her parents’ lives and careers. Forverts staffers also provided Hobson with translations of Yiddish-­language materials on the history of the Yiddish press, entries on her father in biographical dictionaries, and obituaries published in the Yiddish press after his death. Several of these sources included polemics about Cahan, which recounted the history of the Yiddish press

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using gendered critiques of Cahan’s journalism.20 While Cahan himself is not a central figure in First Papers, these polemics inspired the ways in which Hobson characterized the changing content of the Jewish News within her novel. Moreover, none of these translated sources mentioned Zametkin’s early forays into women’s columns. In fact, I only discovered this aspect of Zametkin’s oeuvre after reading Berl Kagan’s Leksikon fun yidish shraybers, which includes a list of almost six thousand pseudonyms employed by Yiddish writers. This resource was published in 1986, over twenty years after the publication of First Papers, and thus would not have been available to Hobson. It is possible that most sources omitted a discussion of Zametkin’s women’s columns because they constituted a relatively short-­lived, sporadic phase in his career. But the omission also reflects the second-­class status afforded to women’s columns and their writers in reminiscences of the Yiddish press. Moreover, insider histories of radical journalism often present Zametkin as a foil for Cahan and as someone who disapproved of Cahan’s attempts to infuse popular appeal into the Forverts.21 Describing Zametkin’s experiences writing women’s columns would certainly complicate this retelling of the early history of the radical Yiddish press. In addition to relying on Forverts staff members, Hobson also turned to the burgeoning professional scholarship in American Jewish history that had begun to emerge in the postwar period. In 1962, Moses Rischin published The Promised City, one of the first scholarly works on American Jewish history, which focused particular attention on the Jewish labor movement and the Yiddish press. When writing First Papers, Hobson took copious notes on The Promised City, using it to contextualize her parents’ careers. Rischin’s scholarship seems to have been particularly impactful in shaping Hobson’s understandings of the links between gender and the Yiddish press. In notes she took when devising the plot of the novel, she copied down a passage from The Promised City in which Rischin argued that the key to the Forverts’s success lay in the fact that it supported “labor, socialism, humanity, and distinguished Yiddish and foreign literature. But it also enticed the women with serialized romances, made prominent places for human interest features, and in the Bintel Brief (bundle of letters) column combined social casework with advice for the lovelorn.”22

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When devising Stefan Ivarin’s confrontations with fellow coworkers in First Papers, Hobson echoed Rischin’s description. In her outline of what would eventually become chapter 22, Hobson described an encounter between Ivarin and the business manager of the Jewish News, who “is positive that the Jewish News has to have such things as a daily column on love, a daily problem page, some [attempts] at women’s tips re cooking etc., a hotter treatment of sex stories, human interest etc.”23 Hobson also corresponded with Rischin while writing First Papers. The historian had initially reached out to Hobson in 1962 to ask whether she had any of her fathers’ correspondence, which he hoped to incorporate into a planned biography of Abraham Cahan. Hobson wrote back to express her admiration for The Promised City, as well as to offer to share with Rischin the resources that the Forverts staff had translated for her.24 On the twentieth anniversary of the publication of The Promised City, Rischin looked back on the historiographical tradition that had shaped his pathbreaking work. As a graduate student, Rischin had studied under Oscar Handlin, who was a pioneer in the scholarship on American immigration history. Like Handlin, Rischin sought to narrate the history of eastern European Jewish immigration as a fundamental part of the history of the United States, demonstrating how the contours of life in turn-­of-­the-­twentieth-­century Manhattan both shaped and were shaped by the mass immigration of Jews from eastern Europe. He also wanted to make available to an English-­speaking readership the rich archive of Yiddish-­language sources on the history of Jewish immigration that had remained largely untapped by labor and immigration historians.25 In correspondence with Hobson, Rischin also pointed to more personal motivations that underlay his interest in American Jewish history in general and the history of the Yiddish press in specific. Growing up in Brooklyn in the 1920s and 1930s, Rischin had frequently come into contact with the cohort of radical intellectuals whose younger years he would go on to recount in The Promised City. Rischin’s father was a physician who counted among his patients former or still-­active Forverts contributors. In Rischin’s letters to Hobson, he attested, “in a profound way my interests were shaped by my experiences as a small boy when I made the rounds with my father on his calls.”26 Like Hobson, Rischin’s interest in exploring the history of radical Yiddish culture at the turn

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of the twentieth century was shaped by personal experience as well as a variety of other motivations. When Laura Z. Hobson sought to lend authenticity to the plot of First Papers and to better appreciate the contours of her parents’ lives and careers, she relied on personal accounts, polemics, and scholarship that provided her with a limited understanding of the role of gender in the development of the American Yiddish press. By describing content explicitly or implicitly addressing women readers, such as advice columns, human-­interest stories, or women’s columns, as trivial content only meant to add commercial appeal, these sources elided the ways in which the commercial, ideological, and cultural priorities of Yiddish newspapers were inherently intertwined. Only by offering a more holistic history of the development of the American Yiddish press can we fully understand the myriad complex, contradictory, and fundamentally gendered roles that Yiddish newspapers played in the lives of their readers.

“The Author in Our Family”: Women’s Labor and the History of the Yiddish Press The divergences between literature and history become even more pointed in the case of Adella Kean Zametkin and the ways in which the experiences of her fictional counterpart, Alexandra Ivarin, do and do not conform to the contours of Kean Zametkin’s actual life and career. Unlike her husband, who begins Hobson’s novel at the center of Yiddish cultural production, Alexandra Ivarin does not begin contributing to the Yiddish press until well into the second half of First Papers, around the outbreak of World War I. The novel first traces her development as an educator, as she begins holding informal talks on nutrition and child care for other immigrant mothers. When one of her pupils suggests that she publish these lectures, so that a wider audience might have access to her advice, Alexandra is reluctant, believing that only her “husband is the author in [the] family.”27 Eventually, she begins to jot down stray ideas for future lessons, viewing this exercise more as a memory aid than an experiment in writing for publication. But when her husband reads her notes, he recognizes their potential as newspaper content and decides to submit them to a nonpartisan Yiddish daily called the

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Abend (a stand-­in for the Tog) without Alexandra’s knowledge. When the paper’s editor replies with a glowing review, Stefan encourages Alexandra to turn her lectures into a regular series of columns. Emboldened by Stefan’s support, Alexandra embarks on a career as a women’s columnist for the Yiddish press.28 The contours of the columns that the fictional Alexandra Ivarin goes on to write for the Abend conform quite closely to the columns that Hobson’s mother, Adella Kean Zametkin, contributed for over a decade to the nonpartisan, intellectually driven Tog. From 1918 until shortly before her death in 1931, Kean Zametkin served as one of the Tog’s most frequent women’s columnists, penning articles on an array of topics, including birth control, cleaning, and nutrition. Kean Zametkin infused her writing with a deep class consciousness, highlighting the ways in which capitalist society exploited and undervalued the labor of women both in the factory and in the household. “It is not news that the worker’s position in our society is hard and bitter,” she wrote, “but the position of his wife is even worse because she is the slave of the slave.”29 Kean Zametkin fused this radical ethos with popular concepts in child care or nutrition from the American public sphere. In columns on child care, Kean Zametkin often cited the work of Maria Montessori, who pioneered an educational system emphasizing children’s innate talents and interests over more formal curricula. She also relied on the work of Dr. Harvey Wiley, who informed US consumers about the dangers of caffeine and other food additives as an architect of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 and a contributor to Good Housekeeping.30 For a staunch internationalist like Kean Zametkin, her desires to acculturate and radicalize her readers were in no way contradictory but instead mutually reinforcing, as both would bring a spirit of “progress” into working-­class immigrant homes. Shortly before Kean Zametkin’s death, she compiled her Tog columns into a volume called Der froy’s handbukh (The woman’s handbook). In the introduction, she framed her book as a remedy to the myriad imbalances in education and opportunity that had thus far impeded the progress of Jewish women, particularly working-­class Jewish women: “The average Jewish woman of the working class today is the daughter of a mother who did not go to school, read no books and journals and knew nothing of new ideas and customs in society or in the home. And

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this mother’s lack of knowledge created many social injustices for her daughter.”31 By translating and adapting the latest theories on scientific household management, nutrition, or education, Kean Zametkin promised to redress these inequities. Upon the book’s release, Kean Zametkin gave a copy of the text to Hobson, who inserted translations of key passages provided by her mother, so that Hobson would have some access to the Yiddish-­language text.32 In Hobson’s memoir and in First Papers, she described her mother’s Tog columns in detail, as well as the book project that grew out of them. However, Hobson seems to have been unaware that her mother’s debut as a writer was not actually in 1918, when she began writing for the Tog, but over twenty years earlier. In fact, Adella Kean Zametkin was one of the only regular female bylines in the Arbeter tsaytung and Abend blat, two radical newspapers that predated the Forverts at the end of the nineteenth century. She and her husband were also both among the founders of the Forverts in 1897, and she served as the publication’s cashier in its early, tumultuous years.33 Like all Yiddish papers in this period, the Arbeter tsaytung did not have a women’s section or a women’s column. Unlike Kean Zametkin’s later columns in the Tog, therefore, which appeared on the paper’s women’s page, her articles appeared on the front page, as editorials, and as letters to the editor. Moreover, in her earlier articles, Kean Zametkin did not limit herself (or, more likely, editors did not limit her) to supposedly “feminine” subjects, such as child care or fashion. Instead, her articles focused on topics such as the inherent corruption of elected officials or the importance of going door to door to canvass for socialist causes. In fact, of the articles Kean Zametkin wrote for the Arbeter tsaytung, only one dealt explicitly with women’s issues: a front-­page article on “The New Woman.” Kean Zametkin took “sensational, capitalist newspapers” to task for their coverage of the New Woman. She asserted that the press depicted New Women as flighty and too busy with bloomers and bicycles to fulfill their natural duties as wives or mothers. Instead, she argued, newspapers should focus on a different kind of New Woman—­ women who have taken their economic future into their own hands: “As long as the economic condition of society is such that the woman has the opportunity to exist on the bill of her father or husband,” Kean Zametkin argued, “she will always remain the obedient un-­protesting slave

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of her protectors.” Only through economic independence could women achieve emancipation.34 While not all of Kean Zametkin’s Arbeter tsaytung articles focused on women’s issues, there was still remarkable overlap linking the issues she discussed in these articles and her later women’s columns in the Tog as well as the Fraynd. In one article, Kean Zametkin highlighted the relationship between working conditions and health, arguing that capitalism was the cause of many illnesses. In another, she began a discussion of political corruption with an overview of childhood development, arguing that both children and society must make mistakes in order to learn.35 These themes—­the relationship of health and human development to capitalism and workers’ lives—­were common subjects for her women’s columns two decades later. While Kean Zametkin’s later columns segmented newspaper readers by gender, the topics she explored also suggested the connections between women’s columns and other spaces within the Yiddish press. Kean Zametkin’s body of work also suggests the ways in which the authority of women’s voices, when not confined to women’s columns, were often undermined by editors. In one early contribution, she explored the frustrations inherent in a political structure underpinned by capitalism. She insisted that workers often assumed that politicians had their best interests at heart, thinking “in their great childlike innocence” that elected officials would support the working class. Kean Zametkin saw this as a miscalculation. No matter whom workers voted for, their interests were thwarted by taking part in a system stacked against them. Only after the working class could muster an independent political party, she argued, could party politics truly work for them.36 Instead of allowing this editorial to stand on its own, the editors appended a lengthy note—­one equal in length to Kean Zametkin’s piece—­ explaining to readers what she meant to say, based on fears that her arguments might be misunderstood. “This article gives us the opportunity to write another article about a very interesting question. The esteemed writeress (who, it should be said, demonstrated with this article that she can be a good writing comrade in our struggle) leaves open the possibility that the reader should be left with a grave mistake, which we believe is useful to prevent. That is to say, they can glean from it that it makes no difference for workers if they choose ‘good’ executive officials

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for their governments, so long as the laws which these officials must follow remain as they are.” The editors worried that readers might get the impression that they should not vote, even for socialist candidates. Instead, they counseled readers to cast their ballots, as “it makes a great difference to workers who the executive officials are even if the current laws persist.”37 While this note praised Kean Zametkin’s abilities as a polemicist, it also undermined her narrative voice. This was not the only occasion in which editors of the Arbeter tsaytung appended explanatory notes to articles. Throughout its run, editors took a paternalistic approach to their audience, assuming that readers were uneducated and needed sophisticated concepts explained to them in simplistic terms.38 This pattern also extended to articles that relied on Jewish religious knowledge. For example, in one article satirizing the Yom Kippur liturgy, editors included a note explaining the prayer that the satire was based on, noting that “many readers do not understand [the prayer]” and therefore would not understand the humor of the article.39 But by writing a note equal in length to Kean Zametkin’s article and highlighting her novice status, the editors particularly emphasized their positions as authorities and called Kean Zametkin’s authority into question in gendered terms. Kean Zametkin’s early experiences as a writer, translator, and cashier for radical Yiddish newspapers all occurred before Hobson’s birth, so it is possible that Kean Zametkin never described this portion of her journalistic career to her daughter—­leading to their omission from her daughter’s retrospective accounts. Moreover, like many female journalists associated with the Yiddish press, Kean Zametkin expressed some ambivalence about her journalistic career, which may also have colored the ways she imparted her life story to her daughter. Looking back, Kean Zametkin described writing as a meaningful career path that allowed her to improve the lives of countless women but also as a direction she chose because her initial aspirations—­including a college education and a career as a dentist—­were too difficult to pursue while raising children. For Kean Zametkin, the emancipation she strove for in her work within the labor movement did not always penetrate her home. Instead, her life reflected a fusion of the upheavals made possible by new, radical outlooks and the ways that the realities of radical women’s roles as wives

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and mothers could often thwart career aspirations outside the home. By shifting to a career as a teacher and writer, especially in her later career as a writer who focused on women’s education and women’s columns, Kean Zametkin hoped to help her students and readers surmount some of the obstacles she had faced in her own life.40 For Kean Zametkin, women’s columns were not simply “stuff for the lovelorn” but crucial, complex interventions. When Hobson adapted her mother’s life story to create the fictional character of Alexandra Ivarin, she repeated a broader pattern in the history of the Yiddish press: she did not fully appreciate or understand the multifaceted roles that women performed in the Yiddish news­paper market. As we have seen, while male editors and writers were quite vocal about their desires to promote the careers of female writers, they also devalued much of the work performed by female writers within the Yiddish press both with and without attribution. The fact that women like Kean Zametkin performed work behind the scenes that went unacknowledged on newspaper pages emphasizes the need to look beyond bylines to gauge the roles women played in Yiddish cultural production throughout the period of peak influence of the American Yiddish press. Even the biographical sources that we have to reconstruct the lives of women writers do not always offer full accountings of their careers. In the case of Adella Kean Zametkin, obituaries published after her death provided various levels of detail about her journalistic career. The New York Times, for instance, highlighted her political work as well as her writing. In addition, the Times mentioned her position as the first cashier of the Forverts.41 In contrast, the Forverts’s own obituary offered no such acknowledgment of her vital role in the development of the newspaper, instead describing only her columns published in the Tog.42 In a follow-­up article, the Forverts included slightly more detail, noting that “together with her husband, Comrade Zametkin, she was among the first group of comrades who founded the ‘Forverts,’ ” though it did not specify precisely the work she had done for the newspaper. Instead, the article emphasized the connections between her roles as a wife and mother and the advice she imparted to working-­class women on and off the page: “She was a mild, good-­natured woman, a devoted and faithful wife and mother in her home, and she brought the same mild maternity and idealistic devotion to her social work.”43

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While the Forverts staff had provided Hobson with translations of lexicon entries about her father, her archives do not include translations of the entries within these same lexicons about her mother. Having access to these sources would have certainly added to Hobson’s insights into Kean Zametkin’s early career, as Zalman Reyzen’s lexicon described her work for the Arbeter tsaytung, Abend blat, and Fraynd as well as her women’s columns in the Tog.44 Had Hobson had access to these materials, she might also have gained a fuller picture of parents’ history of shared intellectual labor. One of the sources that the Forverts staff translated for Hobson was Reyzen’s entry on her father. In addition to highlighting Zametkin’s work in labor organizing and radical journalism, Reyzen also described his translation projects, including the fact that he “translated into Yiddish the famous social novel by Chernyshevsky ‘What Is to Be Done?’ ”45 Hobson incorporated a plotline inspired by this translation into First Papers.46 If the Forverts staff had provided Hobson with a translation of Reyzen’s entry on her mother as well, this plot point might have looked very different, since, unlike Reyzen’s entry on Mikhail Zametkin, this entry revealed that the translation project had actually been a joint venture by the two Zametkins, not labor performed by Mikhail Zametkin in isolation.47 The discrepancy between these two lexicon entries also raises questions about whether there is a broader history of shared labor between the Zametkins to which we may never have full access. For example, Kean Zametkin’s columns in the Tog exhibited profound similarities to the women’s columns her husband published in the Forverts twenty years earlier. Also occasionally called “Fun a froy tsu froyen,” these columns spoke to female readers from a socialist, working-­class perspective and took on similar issues as Kean Zametkin’s columns, including the illnesses caused by poor labor conditions and the similarities between housework and factory work.48 Neither Adella Kean nor Mikhail Zametkin wrote any reminiscences that describe the Sofia Housewife articles, so it is unclear whether to read these early articles attributed to Zametkin as having been written by his wife, as collaborations between the two, or as articles espousing a similar worldview because of the similar outlooks of their authors. Because most of the sources we have on the early history of the Yiddish press rely on firsthand accounts by men who sought to assert their

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central role to the development of the field, while providing significantly less insight into their home lives or wives’ careers, it is impossible to know the exact authorship of these early materials or how common this dynamic of collaboration might have been. But the lives and careers of Adella Kean and Mikhail Zametkin suggest that there is a hidden history of women’s labor underneath the history of the development of the American Yiddish press.

The Later Years of the Yiddish Press This book has explored the history of the American Yiddish press from the founding of the first Yiddish daily newspapers in the 1880s through the mid-­1920s. This period witnessed the transformation of the Yiddish press from a small, nascent publishing field struggling for survival into an immensely successful and broad marketplace comprising vital cultural and political institutions. Throughout these four decades, gender ran as a constant thread in the development of the Yiddish press and to the ways in which Yiddish cultural producers articulated and debated their relationship to American popular culture, changes in international Jewish journalism, and their desires to educate, inform, and entertain a diverse pool of readers. In 1924, the US Senate passed the Johnson-­Reed Act, which greatly curtailed the immigration of new Yiddish speakers to the United States. This decrease in new immigration led to a point of crisis for the Yiddish press. Without influxes of new readers who had not yet begun to read newspapers in English, editors, writers, publishers, and chroniclers of the Yiddish press began to worry that the Yiddish newspapers might cede their vital role in American Jewish life.49 In some ways, the history of the Yiddish press after the mid-­1920s bore these theories out. In the next few years, the Yiddish press saw decreases in circulation, with many publications shutting their doors or joining together with former rivals in order to survive. This process of consolidation actually began slightly earlier, in the 1910s. In 1919, the radical Varhayt, still facing extreme backlash from readers about its prowar stance in the years before the United States’ entry into World War I, joined forces with the nonpartisan Tog. After the merger, the Tog’s editorial team incorporated several of the Varhayt’s prominent writers onto

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its staff, including its longtime editor Louis Miller. While at the helm of the Varhayt, Miller had exerted control over all aspects of the tone and content of the publication. But once he joined the staff of the Tog, his colleagues described him as “suffering exile on the last ‘Ezras-­noshim’ page of the ‘Tog.’ ” For Miller’s new colleagues, his spatial banishment to the back page, where his writing was surrounded by women’s columns and entertainment-­driven features, proved that Miller no longer enjoyed a place of prestige or power in the Yiddish journalistic world.50 In Joseph Chaikin’s chapter on the closure of the Tageblat in 1928, he attested that the newspaper’s closure was sudden and related to various financial and personal issues faced by the Sarasohn family. At the same time, he saw the moment as auguring the future decline of the Yiddish press as a whole.51 Chaikin’s prediction was not entirely accurate. The Tog survived until 1971 after joining together with the conservative Morgn-­zhurnal in 1952. This partnership allowed the newspapers to continue to run but also led to significant editorial discrepancies, as these two publications had previously held very different ideological priorities. In order to appease those who were involved with the nonpartisan and secular Tog as well as the Orthodox Morgn-­zhurnal, the editors and publishers decided to run the consolidated paper with two separate mastheads, one that ran every day of the week except Saturdays that carried the combined title of Tog-­Morgn-­zhurnal and one that ran on Saturdays that ran solely as the Tog. This allowed the Morgn-­zhurnal to maintain its reputation as a religious publication even after the publication ceased to exist as a separate entity.52 But to view the history of the Yiddish press after 1924 as simply a process of decline and consolidation would be to miss the ways in which those who were involved in Yiddish newspaper production continued to reinvent their publications in the face of new challenges. Throughout the next decades, newspapers continued to cultivate the future of Yiddish literature, with prominent writers like Isaac Bashevis Singer, Sholem Asch, and Miriam Karpilove debuting many of their short stories and novels on the pages of Yiddish newspapers.53 These publications also began to include more local and global Jewish news and to view themselves as supplements to readers’ engagement with American Anglophone newspapers, as opposed to replacements for them.54 Publications like the Tog and the Forverts also expanded to new forms of media by sponsoring

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radio stations or programs beginning in the late 1920s.55 In addition, letters from readers to the Tog written in the 1920s and 1930s attest that many still viewed the Yiddish press as performing important functions in their lives, as guides, news sources, entertainment, and intercessors with local and national institutions and government officials.56 As was true in the Yiddish press’s first four decades of existence, these publications continued to transform and adapt to the changing landscape of American journalism and the changing needs of their readers. Of the newspapers studied in this book, only the Forverts continues to exist, and in a very different form than its founding over 120 years ago. Today it endures online as a Yiddish daily newsletter and, until 2019, as an English-­language periodical in print. On January 17, 2019, the Forverts, now generally referred to by its English name, the Forward, announced that it would shift to an entirely digital format.57 In a letter to readers, publisher Rachel Fishman Fedderson noted that the decision reflected the difficult financial situation of the paper and acknowledged that most of the publication’s audience now read the paper online as opposed to in print.58 But in the three years directly before the English-­language Forverts ceased its print run, the newspaper had reached a new stage in its development with regard to gender. For the first time, both the Yiddish and English Forverts were helmed by women, with Jane Eisner serving as the first female editor in chief of the English version and Rukhl Schaechter serving as the first female editor in chief of the Yiddish version.59 In a recent interview with the Yiddish podcast Vaybertaytsh, Schaechter described the innovations she brought to the Yiddish version of the Forverts when she took its helm in 2016. Up until that point, she noted, the Forverts remained very much a boys’ club, with only one female journalist, Miriam Hoffman, on staff by the 1980s.60 In Schaechter’s first years as editor, she set about changing this gender imbalance: When I came to the Forverts one of my major goals was to attract more women writers, because I felt that women could add a new mood and content that had not been there until then. And this was also because I was an American, and I had a certain sense of what I love to read. Until then, the Forverts was more European-­inclined. In fact, I was the first American-­born editor. So it was important to me to attract friends or

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women I was just acquainted with—­more women who I did not even know also began sending material, . . . and thus I accumulated a large group of women.61

This quotation reveals how much the newspaper had changed in the seventy years since Abraham Cahan’s death in 1951. As opposed to a newspaper that compared itself to the American popular press and attempted to mold itself by the American press’s example, by the time Schaechter took control of the publication, in her view, the Yiddish sections of the publication had become increasingly disengaged with contemporary trends in American journalism. However, this quotation also attests to the ongoing importance of gender in the development of the Yiddish press after its period of peak influence from the 1880s through the 1920s. Years later, gender remained a fundamental marker of the boundaries of Yiddish culture, measured its relationship to American and global Jewish cultural trends, and lay at the heart of the development of the Yiddish press.

Acknowledgments

This book has benefited from the support of many institutions, colleagues, and friends. I began the research for the book at the University of Pennsylvania, where I had the privilege of studying with a remarkable group of scholars and teachers. Beth Wenger has been an unparalleled advisor and a constant source of support. Kathy Peiss and Kathryn Hellerstein continue to serve as mentors and inspirations. And Sally Gordon, Peter Holquist, Ben Nathans, and Steve Weitzman have provided invaluable help and guidance as well. The Rabin-­Shvidler Joint Postdoctoral Fellowship at Fordham University and Columbia University allowed me to revise my dissertation and expand my research. I am forever grateful for the mentorship of colleagues at both institutions, including Magda Teter, Sarit Kattan Gribetz, Daniel Soyer, Rebecca Kobrin, and Elisheva Carlebach, who all helped me grow as a teacher and scholar. The Ivan and Nina Ross Family Fellowship at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies and the Scholar in Residence Program at the Hadassah-­Brandeis Institute ensured that I had the time and space to write. More importantly, they provided invaluable senses of community and intellectual engagement that made the process of writing a book amid a global pandemic much richer and infinitely less lonely. Research and copyediting assistance from Max Friedman during and after my year at the Hadassah-­Brandeis Institute greatly enriched several chapters of this book. Recently, joining the faculty at the University of Hartford has made it possible to bring this project to a close. I am grateful for the warm welcome and collegiality of everyone on campus, including Amy Weiss, Susan Gottlieb, Julie Sochacki, Steven Rosenthal, Rachel Walker, and Nathan DuFord. I am grateful to the all of the scholars who have taken the time to engage with my work and who offered helpful comments and advice 245

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throughout the process, including Natalia Aleksiun, Zachary Baker, Elissa Bemporad, Julia Phillips Cohen, Lila Corwin Berman, Jeremy Dauber, Julie Golia, Rachel Gordan, Deborah Dash Moore, Hasia Diner, Gennady Estraikh, Faith Jones, Melissa Klapper, Rebecca Kobrin, Josh Lambert, Eli Lederhendler, Agi Legutko, Pam Nadell, Anita Norich, Annie Polland, Eddy Portnoy, Riv-­Ellen Prell, Gil Ribak, Allison Schachter, Naomi Seidman, Jeffrey Shandler, Miriam Udel, Saul Zaritt, and Sheva Zucker. Sarah Imhoff, my mentor through the AJS Paula Hyman Mentorship Program, guided me through the publication process. Conversations with Tony Michels have enriched my research and writing at each stage of this project’s development. And my work has benefited enormously from discussions with Eric Goldstein, Ellen Kellman, and Daniel Soyer as we have planned the Scholars Working Group on the American Yiddish Press over the past few years. Conversations with friends and colleagues have also been crucial in shaping my work. I am particularly grateful to Laura Almagor, Allan Amanik, Beeta Baghoolizadeh, Max Baumgarten, Nimrod Ben-­Zeev, Matthew Brittingham, Sandy Fox, Barry Goldberg, Sonia Gollance, Geraldine Gudefin, Jessica Kirzane, Yael Levi, Geoff Levin, Matt ­Liberti, Elly Moseson, Ciruce Movahedi-­Lankarani, Josef Nothmann, Avigail Oren, Lana Povitz, Tamar Rabinowitz, Kate Rosenblatt, Sam Stark, Britt Tevis, Anna Elena Torres, Nina Valbousquet, and Ashley Walters. Jordan Katz read draft after draft of this book, for which I cannot thank her enough. I am also deeply thankful for the advice and guidance provided by the staff, librarians, and archivists at various institutions. The archivists, librarians, and reading room staff of the Center for Jewish History, YIVO, and the American Jewish Historical Society have been crucial sources of support and suggestions since the very beginnings of this project. Performing research at Yale University’s Manuscripts and Archives Library, Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Penn’s Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, and the International Institute of Social History was a pleasure and was crucial to the completion of this project. The staff and librarians at the New York Public Library’s Dorot Jewish Division and Microform Reading Room provided help, encouragement, and welcoming environments to perform my research. I am particularly grateful to Amanda (Miryem-­Khaye) Seigel for generously

Acknowledgments | 247

sharing her research, suggestions, and support. Conversations with Chana Pollack and Rukhl Schaechter offered valuable insights into the inner workings of the Forverts. I am also grateful to the staff in charge of the National Library of Israel and Tel Aviv University’s Historical Jewish Press Project and the Yiddish Book Center’s Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library Project. Their digitization efforts have revolutionized the field of Yiddish studies, and without them, this book truly would not have been possible. Wendy Gamber, Ed Linenthal, Deborah Cohen, James Egan, Maud Mandel, and Naoko Shibusawa all provided early and invaluable encouragement as I began to explore a career as a historian. The research and writing of this book were also generously supported by a number of institutions and foundations. At the University of Pennsylvania, I received support from the Department of History, the School of Arts and Sciences, the Jewish Studies Program, and the Middle East Center. Additional funding from the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the Center for Jewish History’s Graduate Research Fellowship, and the Association for Jewish Studies Dissertation Completion Fellowship helped support my research during my graduate work. The preparation and publication of this volume was also made possible by Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the University of Hartford’s Faculty Development Funds, and the Association for Jewish Studies Jordan Schnitzer Book Subvention Grant. Material from this book has been presented at conferences and workshops sponsored by the Center for Jewish History, the Association for Jewish Studies, the New-­York Historical Society Center for Women’s History Early Career Workshop, the American Jewish Historical Society Biennial Scholars Conference, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the American Academy for Jewish Research, the World Congress of Jewish Studies, and Arizona State University’s Salo Wittmayer Baron Dissertation Award in Jewish Studies Community Lecture, among others. In a substantially different form, a portion of chapter 5 appeared in the April/July 2020 issue of American Jewish History. I am so grateful for Jennifer Hammer and everyone at NYU Press for all of their help and guidance throughout the publishing process. Comments from anonymous reviewers greatly enriched my manuscript. Nancy Ball expertly crafted my index.

248 | Acknowledgments

Thanks also goes to friends who have helped me make it through this long process by providing encouragement, housing on research trips, and sympathetic ears, including Anna Arays, Rebecca Belkin, Rachel Bergstein, Laura Landau, Kayla Zalcgendler, Bobby Holt, Monica Huang, Matt Kahn, Lianna Lipton, Daria Marinelli, Jon Spector, Kristina Eldrenkamp, Megan Hughes, Abby Rosen, Miriam Leshin, Laura Ogburn, Ben Krakauer, Jamie Morgenstern, and especially Kate Stahl. My deepest gratitude goes to my family for their constant support. Amy and Marshall Brinn have offered unwavering encouragement. I am so lucky to have parents who are not only supportive listeners but wonderful, careful editors and proofreaders. My brother, Lior; sister-­in-­ law, Sarah; and nieces, Nora and Sophie, offered boundless empathy and moments of much-­needed, joyful distraction. And finally, to Ben, for everything bagels and everything else.

Notes

Introduction

1. Phagan, “William Gropper and ‘Freiheit,’ ” 138–­143. On disputes between the Forverts and Frayhayt more generally, see Dovid Katz, “Introduction”; Michels, Fire in Their Hearts, chap. 5; M. Hoffman, “Red Divide”; Estraikh, Transatlantic Russian Jewishness, chap. 3. 2. Gropper, Di goldene medine, n.p. 3. Phagan, “William Gropper and ‘Freiheit,’ ” 256. 4. William Gropper, “Di yente fun ‘Forverts,’ nebakh!,” Frahayt, November 24, 1926; Phagan, “William Gropper and ‘Freiheit,’ ” 255–­263, 477. 5. Portnoy, “Creation of a Jewish Cartoon Space,” 104. On Yente Telebende and B. Kovner (aka Jacob Adler), see Glinter, Have I Got a Story for You, 33–­55. 6. “Ver zaynen unzere kritiker?,” Tsukunft, February 1912; see also Yitskhok-­Ayzik ben Arye Tsvi Halevi, “Di idish-­amerikanishe gele prese,” Naye lebn, June 1909, 390–­398, and July 1909, 460–­469; Levine, 50 yor “Forverts,” 3. 7. See, for example, “Ver zaynen unzere kritiker?,” Tsukunft, February 1912, 185; Wolfe, “Bintel Brief,” 230–­237; P. Novick, “Ab. Cahan un dos yidishe vort,” Morgn frayhayt, September 23, 1951; Rischin, Promised City, 126; Harap, Image of the Jew, 488. 8. Epstein, Profiles of Eleven, 88. 9. For an example invoking both types of arguments, see Yitskhok-­Ayzik ben Arye Tsvi Halevi, “Di idish-­amerikanishe gele prese,” Naye lebn, June 1909, 390–­398, and July 1909, 460–­469. 10. Idisher farmer (Jewish farmer, 1911–­1959); Idisher froyen-­zhurnal (Jewish Women’s Home Companion, 1922–­1923); Idishe bihne (The Jewish stage, 1897); Der groyser kundes (The big stick, 1909–­1927). For a discussion of similar ideological diversity within the Ladino press in the United States, see Ben-­Ur, “Ladino (Judeo-­Spanish) Press in the United States,” 67. 11. Michels, “Speaking to Moyshe,” 52–­53; Michels, “Socialism and the Writing of American Jewish History,” 541; Stein, Making Jews Modern, 26–­27; Fishman, Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture, chap. 1; Quint, “Yiddish Literature for the Masses?”; E. Goldstein, “Taste of Freedom.” 12. Soltes, Yiddish Press, appendix D; “About Us,” Forward, accessed August 27, 2020, https://forward.com. On the various roles played by the Yiddish press, see Wolfe, “Bintel Brief ”; Rischin, Promised City; Michels, Fire in Their Hearts.

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13. Park, Immigrant Press and Its Control, 102. For a similar formulation by Cahan himself, see Ab. Cahan, “Erinerungen fun a redaktor,” Forverts, April 23, 1922. 14. Yekhezkl Sarasohn, “A blik tsurik,” Tageblat, March 20, 1910. 15. B. Z. Goldberg, “Vos interesirt froyen?,” Tog, April 14, 1922. 16. Weinreich, Geshikhte fun der yidisher shprakh, 277–­282; Roskies, “Yiddish Popular Literature and the Female Reader”; Klepfisz, “Queens of Contradiction”; Niger, “Yiddish Literature and the Female Reader”; Seidman, Marriage Made in Heaven, chap. 1. 17. Schudson, Discovering the News; Emery and Emery, Press and America; Campbell, Yellow Journalism; Guarneri, Newsprint Metropolis. 18. Golia, Newspaper Confessions, 3; see also Juergens, Joseph Pulitzer and the New York World, chap. 5; Schudson, Discovering the News, 100–­102; Lutes, Front-­Page Girls; Fahs, Out on Assignment; Guarneri, Newsprint Metropolis, 24–­31. 19. On the communist Frayhayt as the most “American” Yiddish daily, see Dovid Katz, “Introduction,” 8; On the Morgn-­zhurnal’s attempts to be “more American,” see B. Z. Goldberg, “The Passing of The Day-­Jewish Morning Journal,” Midstream, April 1972, 19; On general trends, see Chaikin, Yidishe bleter in amerike, 132. 20. For examples of foundational works on the history of the Yiddish press written by journalists, see Chaikin, Yidishe bleter in amerike; Glatstein et al., Finf un zibetsik yor yidishe prese in amerike. For examples of historical scholarship focused on the political aspects of these papers, see Cassedy, To the Other Shore; Michels, Fire in Their Hearts; Estraikh, Transatlantic Russian Jewishness. Most of the scholarly attention has been focused on the radical press, especially the Forverts, as this publication was the most successful and highest circulating Yiddish newspaper. Chapters in Arthur Goren’s Politics and Public Culture represent some of the only sustained engagement the nonradical Yiddish press as well as Gil Ribak’s article “Organ of the Jewish People.” 21. Pratt, “Culture and Radical Politics”; Seller, “Defining Socialist Womanhood”; ­Rojanski, “Socialist Ideology, Traditional Rhetoric”; Shapiro, “Words to the Wives.” 22. Yiddish dailies surveyed for this study include Dos yidishes tageblat (Orthodox, politically moderate to conservative; 1885–­1928); Dos abend blat (socialist; 1894–­1902); Forverts (socialist; 1897–­present); Der morgn-­zhurnal (Orthodox, politically conservative, 1901–­1971); Di yidishe velt (nonpartisan; 1902–­1904); Di varhayt (socialist; 1905–­1919); Der tog (nonpartisan, intellectual; 1914–­1971); Di tsayt (socialist-­Zionist; 1920–­1922); Der frayhayt / Morgn frayhayt (communist; 1922–­1988). In choosing which periodicals to survey, I decided to include a mix of political and religious affiliations as well as periodicals that spanned a range of circulation figures and periods of publication. I surveyed each of their papers from their founding through 1926 or through whenever they ceased publication if it was before 1926. I supplemented these sources with Anglophone dailies and Yiddish-­language weeklies and monthlies, as well as archival and print sources illuminating the behind-­the-­scenes world of Yiddish journalism. 23. Each newspaper signaled its attempt to reach a public outside its ideological scope in different ways. The Tageblat called itself a “kol yisroel paper” (a paper for

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all Jews) even while eventually marketing itself as middle class, Orthodox, and Zionist; after 1902, the Forverts highlighted its desire to reach socialist as well as nonsocialist readers in editorials such as “Far vemen is der Forverts?” on March 31, 1902; and in the inaugural issue of the Tog, it highlighted the fact that “it will not be the organ of any part, group, or class of the Jewish people.” “The Day,” Tog, November 5, 1914. 24. On the gendering of newspaper content in the Anglophone and Yiddish press, see Fahs, Out on Assignment; Guarneri, Newsprint Metropolis, 24–­26; Rischin, Promised City, 126; Pratt, “Culture and Radical Politics.” 25. Wolfe, “Bintel Brief,” 240–­250; Michels, Fire in their Hearts, 103; Polland, “May a Freethinker Help a Pious Man?” 26. Heinze, Adapting to Abundance; Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History; Feiner, “Ha’isha hayehudiya hamodernit”; Prell, Fighting to Become Americans. 27. See, for example, Soltes, Yiddish Press, 177; Glatstein et al., Finf un zibetsik yor yidishe prese in amerike, 6–­7; Goren, “Jewish Press,” 216; Heinze, Adapting to Abundance, 104; Michels, Fire in Their Hearts, 93; Rojanski, “Socialist Ideology, Traditional Rhetoric,” 329. 28. For similar arguments. see Heinze, Adapting to Abundance, introduction; Michels, Fire in Their Hearts, introduction; Levinson, Exiles on Main Street, introduction; Haenni, Immigrant Scene, introduction. 29. On the influence of immigrant readers on American newspapers, see Schudson, Discovering the News, 97–­99; Guarneri, Newsprint Metropolis, 26–­28. 30. Rosa Lebensboym, “In der froyen velt,” Tog, May 28, 1915. 31. Rokhl Holtman, “Vi darf oyszen di froyen-­opteylung,” Frayhayt, March 7, 1926. For similar dynamics in the US popular press, see Fahs, Out on Assignment, 65. For a similar argument about the “benefits of marginality” of women readers in eastern European Jewish culture, see Parush, Reading Jewish Women, introduction. 32. “Di froyen delegaten fohren nokh albani,” Tageblat, February 21, 1909. 33. See, for example, G. Zelikovits, “Vaybershe sanhedrin oder froyen un di Tageblat,” Tageblat, July 16, 1901; A. Glanz, “Kultur un di froy,” Fraye arbeter shtime, October 30, 1915; B. Z. Goldberg, “Vos interesirt froyen?,” Tog, April 14, 1922; Edlin, “Der ‘tog,’ ” 71; B. Z. Goldberg, “In gang fun tog,” Tog-­morgn-­zhurnal, August 26, 1956; Marmor, Mayn lebns-­geshikhte, 753–­754; B. Z. Goldberg, “In gang fun tog,” ­Tog-­morgn-­zhurnal, September 2, 1961. 34. For similar arguments, see Hellerstein, Question of Tradition, introduction; Norich, “Translating and Teaching Yiddish Prose by Women”; Schachter, Women Writing Jewish Modernity, introduction. 35. For examples of recent translation projects, see Lempel, Oedipus in Brooklyn and Other Stories; Molodowsky, Jewish Refugee in New York; Karpilove, Diary of a Lonely Girl. This is in no way an exhaustive list but is meant to suggest the breadth of recent translations of Yiddish women’s writing.

252 | Notes

Chapter 1. Home Papers and Human Interest

1. Chaikin, Yidishe bleter in amerike, 106–­107; also retold in Howe, World of Our Fathers, 520. 2. Other scholars have also pointed to the 1890s as a turning point in Yiddish journalism. While most have focused on the role of radical politics in these transformations, this chapter focuses instead on the changing content and marketing strategies of Yiddish dailies. Chaikin, Yidishe bleter in amerike, chap. 7; Michels, “Speaking to Moyshe”; E. Goldstein, “Taste of Freedom,” 106. 3. On the changing political alignment of the Tageblat, see Chaikin, Yidishe bleter in amerike, chaps. 6–­7; Rischin, Promised City, 119; Ribak, “Organ of the Jewish People.” 4. Soltes, Yiddish Press, appendix D. 5. “An Important Departure in Yiddish Journalism,” Tageblat, August 29, 1897. For divergent descriptions of the English Department, see mastheads on December 27, 1897, January 21, 1898, and April 18, 1898. 6. Tageblat, January 7, 1898. 7. Tageblat, March 23, 1898. For broader patterns, see Guarneri, Newsprint Metropolis, 30–­32; Heinze, Adapting to Abundance, 148–­149. 8. Tageblat, September 13, 1897, and January 7, 1898. The masthead of Sarasohn’s weekly, the Gazetn, included similar designations. 9. Golia, “Courting Women, Courting Advertisers,” 622; see also Printers’ Ink, March 2, 1898. 10. Shtarkman et al., “Di sarazohn-­zikhroynes,” 281; N. W. Ayer & Son’s American Newspaper Annual and Directory, 415–­417. 11. Michels, Fire in Their Hearts, 90–­93; Denning, Mechanic Accents, 27–­37; Enstad, Ladies of Labor, 54–­58; Kellman, “Newspaper Novel,” 14–­27. On changing literacy rates among Jews in eastern Europe and US immigrants of eastern European ­Jewish descent, see Rubinow, Economic Condition of the Jews in Russia, 576–­581; Jocelyn Cohen, “Discourses of Acculturation,” 55–­79; Shandler, “Beyond the Mother Tongue”; Michels, Fire in Their Hearts, 92, 109–­113; Stampfer, Families, Rabbis and Education, chaps. 8 and 9; Parush, Reading Jewish Women, introduction. 12. Shtarkman et al., “Di sarazohn-­zikhroynes,” 281. 13. Shtarkman, “Vikhtikste momentn,” 11; Chaikin, Yidishe bleṭer in amerike, 53; ­Malakhi, “Der baginen fun der yidisher prese,” 271. 14. Shtarkman et al., “Di sarazohn-­zikhroynes,” 281; “Bashe Sarasohn, A”H,” Tageblat, June 1, 1913; “Obituary Notes,” Fourth Estate, June 7, 1913. For similar personnel constraints in radical Yiddish publishing in this period, see Sh. Yanovsky, “Di ershte 20 yor ‘Fraye arbeter shtime,’ ” Fraye arbeter shtime, November 30, 1928. 15. Guarneri, Newsprint Metropolis, 14–­21; Michels, Fire in Their Hearts, 93. 16. Rischin, Promised City, 94; Kuznets, “Immigration of Russian Jews to the United States.” 17. Chaikin, Yidishe bleter in amerike, chap. 10; Michels, “Speaking to Moyshe.”

Notes | 253

18. Printers’ Ink, February 2, 1898, 5; Fourth Estate, August 25, 1900, 3; Yekhezkl Sarasohn, “A blik tsurik,” Tageblat, March 20, 1910; Heinze, Adapting to Abundance, 155–­158; Chaikin, Yidishe bleter in amerike, 279. 19. Sarasohn, “A blik tsurik.” This phrase also frequently appeared on the paper’s masthead. 20. Michels, Fire in Their Hearts, 94; Kasriel Sarasohn vs. Arbeiter Zeitung Publishing Association, 1898, folder 2, box 1, Kasriel H. Sarasohn Collection; Yael Levi, “Jewish Community, American Authority.” 21. “Have We Any Rivals?,” Tageblat, September 13, 1898. 22. Shtarkman, “Vikhtiste momentn,” 17, 25–­26; Marmor, “Der ershter yidisher tsaytung-­trost”; Rosenfeld, “Jewish Press Magnate from East Broadway.” 23. Chaikin, Yidishe bleter in amerike, 115; Reyzen, Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur, prese un filologye, 4:859–­862. Some sources cite Paley as joining the Tageblat in 1893. 24. Chaikin, Yidishe bleter in amerike, 108–­110. 25. Zelikovits, Geklibene shriften, vii–­viii; Almi, Momentn fun a lebn, 224; Simon, “Teach Yourself Arabic—­in Yiddish!,” 3. Note that the spelling of Zelikovits’s female pseudonym changed over time from “Die Litveshe Khokhmanis” (‫ליטװעשע חכמנית‬ ‫ )דיא‬to “Di Litvishe Khokhmanis” (‫)די ליטװישע חכמנית‬, but I have standardized the spelling in the notes for the sake of consistency. 26. Tageblat, March 1, 1896; see also Howe, World of Our Fathers, 520. 27. Sarasohn, “A blik tsurik”; Rosenfeld, “Jewish Press Magnate from East Broadway,” 31. 28. “Facts and Figures” (1906) and “Read and Spread” (n.d.), in Sarasohn and Son, 172–­174. For broader trends, see Guarneri, Newsprint Metropolis, 24–­26. 29. Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History, 97; Heinze, Adapting to Abundance, chap. 6. 30. Niger, “Yiddish Literature and the Female Reader”; Roskies, “Yiddish Popular Literature and the Female Reader”; Orchan, Yots’ot me-­arba’ amot, chap. 1. 31. G. Zelikovits, “Vaybershe sanhedrin oder froyen un di Tageblat,” Tageblat, July 16, 1901. 32. L. Kobrin, Mayne fuftsik yor in amerike, vol. 1, 374–­376; Cahan, Bleter fun mayn leben, 3:461; Niger and Shatzky, Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, 8:191. For similar dynamics in the German socialist press, see Conolly-­Smith, Translating America, 56. 33. Di Litvishe Khokhmanis, “Froyen ferliren a guten lehrer,” Tageblat, July 20, 1913; E. Goldstein, “Taste of Freedom,” 110–­118; Veidlinger, Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire, 100–­101. 34. Ribak, “Organ of the Jewish People”; Z. Goldberg, “Ha-­Ḥakhmanit.” 35. Di Litvishe Khokhmanis, “Ezras noshim (Leydi’s korner),” Gazetn, January 23, 1891. 36. Zelikovits, Geklibene shriften, viii; Z. Goldberg, “Ha-­Ḥakhmanit,” 51. 37. See, for example, Di Litvishe Khokhmanis, “Ezras noshim (Leydi’s korner),” ­Tageblat, February 13, 1892.

254 | Notes

38. Di Litvishe Khokhmanis, “Leydi’s korner / Ezras noshim,” Tageblat, January 27, 1892. 39. Ribak, “Organ of the Jewish People.” 40. Golia, “Courting Women, Courting Advertisers,” 622; Carol Meyers et al., “Woman,” 180. 41. Kellman, “Newspaper Novel,” chap. 1; H. Cohen, Nifla’ot ba‘olam he-­hadash, chap. 2. 42. Shomer-­Bachelis and Shomer-­Zunser, Undzer foter Shomer; Shmeruk, “Letoldot sifrut ha-­‘shund’ be-­yiddish”; Cammy, “Judging the Judgment of Shomer”; ­Novershtern, Kan gar ha-­‘am ha-­Yehudi, chap. 2. For similar debates in Anglophone culture, see Enstad, Ladies of Labor, chap. 1; Lutes, Front-­Page Girls, 5. 43. Z. Goldberg, “Getsel Zelekoṿits u-­sifrut ha-­’shund,’  ” 183–­184. 44. Shomer-­Bachelis and Shomer-­Zunser, Undzer foter Shomer, 160–­163; Estraikh, “Best-­Selling Shomer.” 45. Di Litvishe Khokhmanis, “Nokh der khupe,” Gazetn, June 5–­November 13, 1891. On gender roles in bourgeois European Jewish culture, see Parush, Reading Jewish Women, chaps. 3–­4; Seidman, Marriage Plot, chap. 1; Gollance, It Could Lead to Dancing, chap. 4. 46. Kellman, “Newspaper Novel,” 4–­6. 47. Di Litvishe Khokhmanis, “Nokh der khupe,” Gazetn, November 6 and 13, 1891; see also Di Litvishe Khokhmanis, “Ezras noshim,” Gazetn, May 22, 1891. 48. See, for example, Di Litvishe Khokhmanis, “A vinkel fir damen,” Tageblat, April 14, 1908; Di Litvishe Khokhmanis, “Di froyen delegatn fohren nokh albani,” Tageblat, February 21, 1909; Di Litvishe Khokhmanis, “Loshn-­koydesh un froyen,” Tageblat, August 22, 1909; Di Litvishe Khokhmanis, “Vos unzere tekhter fehlt,” Tageblat, November 11, 1913. 49. Di Litvishe Khokhmanis, “A vinkel fir damen,” Tageblat, April 14, 1908. 50. See, for example, G. Zelikovits, “Vaybershe sanhedrin oder froyen un di Tageblat,” Tageblat, July 16, 1901. 51. Goren, “Jewish Press,” 210; Scanlon, Inarticulate Longings. For examples of content borrowed from the Ladies’ Home Journal and the New York Sun, respectively, see “Marriage Customs,” Tageblat, September 3, 1901; “Women Wage Earners,” Tageblat, September 24, 1899. 52. Chaikin, Yidishe bleter in amerike, 134, 318; Joseph Hirsch, “Peter Wiernik and His Views,” 18; Enstad, Ladies of Labor, 35; Baldwin, Copyright Wars, 11. 53. Sarasohn, “A blik tsurik”; Chaikin, Yidishe bleter in amerike, chaps. 6, 41, 42; Shtarkman, “Vikhtikste momentn.” See issues of the Tageblat from March 18, 1888, February 4, 1888, and January 13, 1888 for examples of citations to US ­publications. 54. For a similar argument about cartoons in the Tageblat, see Portnoy, “Creation of a Jewish Cartoon Space,” 70–­72. 55. Goren, “Jewish Press,” 210; Rabin, “People of the Press.” 56. “An Important Departure in Yiddish Journalism,” Tageblat, August 29, 1897.

Notes | 255

57. L., “Lullabies of Our Russian Mothers,” Tageblat, February 3, 1902; American Hebrew, December 13, 1901. 58. Herman, “From Priestess to Hostess”; E. Goldstein, “Between Race and Religion”; K. Goldman, Beyond the Synagogue Gallery, chap. 7. 59. Gustav Gottheil, “The Jewess as She Was and Is,” Tageblat, December 12, 1897; Ladies’ Home Journal, December 1897, 21. 60. Heinze, Adapting to Abundance, 4; Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History, chap. 3. 61. Tageblat, January 1, 1899. 62. Tageblat, January 21, 1898. 63. Heinze, Adapting to Abundance, 143–­144; Shapiro, “Words to the Wives,” 2. 64. American Jewish Yearbook, 5665, 99–­100; Ribak, Gentile New York, 76. 65. Gurock, American Jewish Orthodoxy in Historical Perspective, 1–­62; Joselit, New York’s Jewish Jews, introduction. 66. Portnoy, Bad Rabbi, 59; Stokes, I Belong to the Working Class, 88. 67. Ab. Cahan, “Erinerungen fun a redaktor,” Forverts, April 23, 1922. 68. Fahs, Out on Assignment, chap. 3; Romeyn, Street Scenes, chap. 2; Stansell, American Moderns, 18–­19. 69. Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, chap. 9; Cassedy, To the Other Shore, chap. 7; ­Michels, Fire in Their Hearts, chap. 2. 70. Cassedy, To the Other Shore, 105. 71. Michels, “Speaking to Moyshe,” 54–­59; Cahan, Bleter fun mayn leben, 3:17, 32. 72. Cahan, Bleter fun mayn leben, 3: chap. 13. 73. Steffens, Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, 313–­314. 74. Lincoln Steffens to Joseph Steffens, March 23, 1898, in Letters of Lincoln Steffens, 130. 75. Rischin, introduction to Grandma Never Lived in America, xii; Rischin, “Abraham Cahan and the New York ‘Commercial Advertiser.’ ” 76. Romeyn, Street Scenes, chap. 2; Stansell, American Moderns, 18–­19. 77. Steffens, Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, 318. 78. [Abraham Cahan], “I Can’t Stand Him,” Commercial Advertiser, October 12, 1900; Cahan, Grandma Never Lived in America, 447. Note that as most of Cahan’s English-­language articles were published anonymously, I am relying on Moses Rischin’s edited volume of Cahan’s journalism, Grandma Never Lives in America, when citing Cahan as the author. 79. [Abraham Cahan], “The God of Israel Is Getting Even with Them,” Commercial Advertiser, May 14, 1898; Cahan, Grandma Never Lived in America, 8. 80. [Abraham Cahan], “A Back Number,” Commercial Advertiser, January 24, 1901. 81. [Abraham Cahan], “East Side Journalism,” Commercial Advertiser, February 12, 1898; Cahan, Grandma Never Lived in America, 287–­290; [Cahan], “An East Side Extra,” Commercial Advertiser, April 6, 1899; Cahan Grandma Never Lived in America, 298–­300; [Cahan], “A Yiddish Sketch,” November 10, 1900, called “I Saw Paradise Open Before Me,” in Grandma Never Lived in America; Hutchins

256 | Notes

Hapgood to Abraham Cahan, May 21, 1942, folder 164, box 5, Papers of Abraham Cahan. 82. Rischin, introduction to Grandma Never Lived in America, xxxiii; see also Prell, Fighting to Become Americans, introduction and chap. 1. On similar dynamics in Cahan’s fiction, see Schachter, “Men Reading Women.” 83. [Abraham Cahan], “Marriage Brokers,” Commercial Advertiser, November 9, 1901; [Cahan], “God Is Everywhere!,” Commercial Advertiser, January 11, 1902. 84. Stansell, American Moderns, 19–­20. 85. Cahan, Bleter fun mayn leben, 4: chaps. 8–­9. 86. “Tsu die lezer,” Forverts, March 15, 1902. 87. See also “Far vemen iz der ‘Forverts’?,” Forverts, March 31, 1902. 88. Cahan, Bleter fun mayn leben, 4:300; Park, Immigrant Press and Its Control, 102, quoting Cahan. 89. Howe, World of Our Fathers, 528; see also Chaikin, Yidishe bleter in amerike, 162; Adolph Held, transcribed interview, May 9, 1964, box 2, Oral History Collection on the Labor Movement; Rogoff, Der gayst fun “Forverts,” 26–­27, 40. 90. Pinsker, Rich Brew, 15. 91. On the history of human-­interest journalism, see Mott, American Journalism, chap. 7; Fahs, Out on Assignment, chap. 3; Guarneri, Newsprint Metropolis, 126–­129. 92. Ab. Cahan, “Forvertsizmus,” Forverts, April 21, 1903. 93. Ab. Cahan, “Erinerungen fun a redaktor,” Forverts, April 23, 1922. 94. Cahan, Bleter fun mayn leben, 4:273. 95. Michels, “Speaking to Moyshe.” 96. Howe, World of Our Fathers, 531; Held interview, May 9, 1964; see also Epstein, Profiles of Eleven, 88. 97. Milkh, Di antshteyung fun ‘Forverts’; Michels, Fire in Their Hearts, chaps. 2 and 3. 98. Levine, 50 yor “Forverts,” 3. 99. Park, Immigrant Press and Its Control, 100 (emphasis added). 100. Sholem Aleichem, Dos Sholem-­Aleykhem bukh, 4 (emphasis added). For a discussion of similar formulations by Aleksander Tsederboym, the editor of the Folksblat, see Niger and Shatzky, Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, 7:603. 101. Seidman, Marriage Made in Heaven, 6; Klepfisz, “Queens of Contradiction.” 102. Chaikin, Yidishe bleter in amerike, 124; Epstein, Profiles of Eleven, 83; Cahan, Bleter fun mayn leben, 3:461. 103. See, for example, Forverts, May 24, 1899. 104. Cahan, Bleter fun mayn leben, 4:300. 105. M. Yanovsky, “Iber di froyen frage,” Forverts, March 6, 1900; S. Elizovitsh, “Di froyen-­bavegung,” Forverts, June 28, 1899. 106. Margaret Haile, “Vi azoy es hot pasirt in massachusetts,” Forverts, July 17 and 18, 1900; Elizabeth H. Thomas, “Der yetstiker tsushtand,” Forverts, November 3, 1900; Dr. Ida Badanes, “Di froyen-­frage,” Forverts, February 11, 1900; Dr. Katerina Yevzerov, “Tsur polemik iber di froyen-­frage: An antvort tsu Dr. Badanes,” Forverts,

Notes | 257

February 25, 1900; “Di froyen-­frage in der ist sayd,” Forverts, February 10, 17, and 24, 1900. 107. Kagan, Leksikon fun yidish-­shraybers, 741. 108. Sofia Hoyzfroy, “Fun a froy tsu froyen,” Forverts, April 7, 1898; Hoyzfroy, “Vaybershe taynes,” Forverts, January 8, 1902, referring to two traditional eastern European foods. Tsimmes is a type of stew, and kugel is a type of casserole. 109. Seifert, “Women’s Pages in the German-­American Radical Press”; Buhle, Women and American Socialism, 125–­128; Mary McCune, Whole Wide World without Limits, 74, 165–­167. 110. See, for example, Emma T”B, “Fir froyen un kinder,” Yidishe velt, June 29, 1902; “Girls and Marriage,” Yidishe velt, February 23–­26, 1903; advertisements, Yidishe velt, September 11, 1902. For the history of this publication, see Dawidowicz, “Louis Marshall’s Yiddish Newspaper.” 111. Shomer-­Bachelis and Shomer-­Zunser, Undzer foter Shomer, chap. 28; Chaikin, Yidishe bleter in amerike, chap. 17. 112. Brinn, “Translation, Politics, Pragmatism, and the American Yiddish Press.” 113. Pozzetta, “Italian Immigrant Press of New York City”; Miller, Ethnic Press in the United States; Jaret, “Greek, Italian, and Jewish American Ethnic Press,” 47–­50; Jaroszyńska-­Kirchmann, Polish Hearst. These sources draw distinctions between radical and nonradical newspapers with regard to formatting and content. 114. Jaret, “Greek, Italian, and Jewish American Ethnic Press,” 47–­50. 115. Michels, Fire in Their Hearts, chap. 1; Cassedy, To the Other Shore; Zaritt, “Taytsh Manifesto.” 116. Heinze, Adapting to Abundance, 222–­223; Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl, chap. 2; Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History, 92.

Chapter 2. Advice Columns and the Cultivation of a Yiddish Newspaper Audience

1. Cahan, Bleter fun mayn leben, 4:473. 2. Cahan, 4:471. 3. “Shraybt an artikel,” Forverts, March 17, 1902. 4. Cahan, Bleter fun mayn leben, 4:472. 5. “Emes’e romanen, tsugeshikt fun unzere lezer,” Forverts, January 5, 1904; “Vos is mazl?,” Forverts, March 19–­April 21, 1902; “Di debate tsvishen mener un froyen,” Forverts, October 17–­November 18, 1902; “Bashraybt di interesantste pasirung in ayer leben,” Forverts, May 25, 1902; Cahan, Bleter fun mayn leben, 4:473. 6. Cahan, Bleter fun mayn leben, 4:475. For Gottlieb’s account, see Wolfe, “Bintel Brief,” 88. 7. Cahan, Bleter fun mayn leben, 4:475. 8. For examples of analyses of the “Bintel brief,” see Wolfe, “Bintel Brief ”; Chaikin, Yidishe bleter in amerike, chap. 25; Sanders, Downtown Jews, chap. 15; Howe, World of Our Fathers, 533–­537; Greenberg and Greenberg, “Bintel brief ”; Cassedy, “Bintel brief ”; Bier, How to Become Jewish Americans?; Kirzane, “Melting Plot,”

258 | Notes

chap. 2. This is in not an exhaustive list but gives a sense of the attention the “Bintel brief ” has received. I have decided to refer to the column as “A bintel brief,” as opposed to the standard Yiddish “A bintl briv,” because this is the way the column is most often referred to in English. 9. In taking this approach, I am indebted to the work of Ellen Kellman, who took a similar approach to the Forverts’s “Galerye fun farshvundene mener” column. Kellman, “Aiding Immigrant Readers or Entertaining Them?” I am also indebted to the work of Steven Cassedy, who explored the influence of US newspapers and Russian realism on the “Bintel.” Cassedy, “Bintel brief.” 10. Golia, Newspaper Confessions, chap.1; Fahs, Out on Assignment, 94; Berlant, Female Complaint, 5–­21. 11. Guarneri, Newsprint Metropolis, 62. 12. Orchan, Yots’ot me-­arba’ amot, chap. 1; On “Briefkasten” in the German American press, see Conolly-­Smith, Translating America, 114–­116. 13. “Brief kasten,” Tageblat, July 14, 1899; “Briefkasten,” Forverts, August 21, 1907. The Morgn-­zhurnal, Yidishe velt, Varhayt, Tog, and various other papers all had similar features, spelled in various ways, including “Brief kasten,” “Briefkasten,” and “Brivkastn.” I have standardized the transliteration of the word within the text of this book but kept the original spellings in the notes, for ease of searchability. 14. “A tsubrokhene harts,” Varhayt, December 26, 1905; Howe, World of Our Fathers, 533. 15. “Tragedyes, komedyes, un poshet’e tsores fun emes’n leben,” Varhayt, beginning December 28, 1905. 16. “Der baleytse,” Varhayt, beginning March 3, 1906. 17. “Gute eytses,” Tageblat, January 28, 1898. 18. See, for example, “Correspondence,” Tageblat, July 13, 1900; “A Ghetto Symposium,” Tageblat, March 12, 1899; Heinze, Adapting to Abundance, 129. 19. “The East Side Observer,” Tageblat, January 4, 1899. 20. See, for example, MEG, “Talks with My Sisters,” Tageblat, September 20, 1900. 21. Tageblat, May 11, 1901. 22. “Letters! Letters! Letters!,” Tageblat, July 22, 1901. 23. Stokes, I Belong to the Working Class, 80. 24. For Khanaleh di hoyzfroy’s column, see Tageblat, April 24, 1903; For “Fir froyen un kinder,” see Tageblat, June 25, 1901; For “Tsvishen unz geredt, vayber,” see Tageblat, January 12, 1903. The title of the latter column also evoked that of the women’s column in the German American Staats-­Zeitung, introduced in 1891. Conolly-­Smith, Translating America, 114–­116. 25. Peiss, Cheap Amusements; Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl. 26. “East Side Problems,” Yidishe velt, March 29–­31, 1902; “To Our Lady Readers,” Yidishe velt, March 18, 1902; Sylvia, “Only Girls,” Yidishe velt, beginning March 19, 1902. On the history of this publication, see Dawidowicz, “Louis Marshall’s Yiddish Newspaper.”

Notes | 259

27. For a similar argument about different columns within the Forverts, specifically, see Wolfe, “Bintel Brief,” 85. 28. Wolfe, 178, 401; Chaikin, Yidishe bleter in amerike, 162, Cassedy, “Bintel brief,” 110. 29. Fairfax, Ladies Now and Then, 36; Fahs, Out on Assignment, 121–­122. 30. See, for example, “Advice by Mrs. Stokes,” Washington Post, July 26, 1907; Park, Immigrant Press and Its Control, 101–­102; Chaikin, Yidishe bleter in amerike, 162. 31. Fairfax, Ladies Now and Then, 34–­36. 32. For Cahan’s invocation of comedies and tragedies, see Cahan, Bleter fun mayn leben, 4:472; For an interview in the Yiddish press with Manning’s successor as “Beatrice Fairfax,” Lillian Lauferty, see Hannah Stein, “Beatrice Fairfax on the East Side’s Love-­Lorn,” Tog, March 29, 1925; On Anglophone advice columnists crafting public personas and personal narratives, see Golia, Newspaper Confessions, chap. 3. 33. “A bintel brief,” Forverts, January 20, 1906. 34. “Unzer ‘bintel brief,’ ” Forverts, March 9, 1906; Cahan, Bleter fun mayn leben, 4:480–­481. 35. Howe, World of Our Fathers, 537; Cassedy, “Bintel brief,” 116–­118; Kirzane, “Melting Plot,” 109–­110. 36. Cahan, Bleter fun mayn leben, 4:483; Cassedy, “Bintel brief,” 111. 37. Cahan, Bleter fun mayn leben, 4:476. 38. Kellman, “Newspaper Novel,” 64. 39. Chaikin, Yidishe bleter in amerike, 191; see also Cahan, Bleter fun mayn leben, 4:479. 40. For different approaches to the authenticity of the “Bintel,” see Cassedy, “Bintel brief,” 105; Bier, How to Become Jewish Americans?, 76; Wolfe, “Bintel Brief,” 283. 41. Wolfe, “Bintel Brief,” 300–­321. 42. Wolfe, 230–­237; Yitskhok-­Ayzik ben Arye Tsvi Halevi, “Di idish-­amerikanishe gele prese,” Naye lebn, June 1909, 465; Levine, 50 yor “Forverts,” 3. 43. Wisse, Little Love in Big Manhattan, 65. 44. Mani Leib to Rochelle Weprinsky, ca. 1920, in Briv—­1918–­1953, 42. For further discussions of editing the “Bintel,” see letters on pp. 21, 30, 39. 45. A. Lezerin, “Der ‘Forverts’ un zayne froyen lezerins,” Forverts, April 22, 1917; Ab. Cahan, “Erinerungen fun a redaktor,” Forverts, April 23, 1922; Wolfe, “Bintel Brief,” 86, 191–­196. 46. Wolfe, “ ‘Bintel Brief,” 334. My own survey of the paper led to similar conclusions. 47. “Der baleytse,” Varhayt, beginning March 3, 1906. 48. Wolfe, “Bintel Brief,” 162–­167, 249; see also “Vos mir lernen fun der ‘khosn-­kale frage,” Tageblat, June 1, 1911. 49. Joseph Hirsch, “Peter Wiernik and His Views,” chap. 1; Chaikin, Yidishe bleter in amerike, 134. 50. See, for example, “Muters,” Forverts, December 21, 1908; “Di dayges fun unzere kinder,” Tageblat, July 12, 1914.

260 | Notes

51. See, for example, H., “Hot an orimer arbayter rekht khosene tsu hoben?,” Varhayt, April 4, 1906; “Farvos zayt ir unfarhayrat,” Varhayt, October–­December 1909. 52. Reuven Fink, “Ver leyent di idishe tsaytungen: ‘grine’ oder ‘gele’?,” Tog, July 14, 1915; Dr. Ida Badanes, “Vi tsu hitn dos gezunt fun kinder,” Tog, beginning August 19, 1917; Park, Immigrant Press and Its Control, 63–­64. 53. Almi, Momentn fun a lebn, 209–­210; Jacob Glatstein, “A dermonung tsum yubl fun der ‘Fraye arbeter shtime,’ ” Yidisher kemfer, December 9, 1960. 54. Wolfe, “Bintel Brief,” 240–­250. 55. E. Goldstein, “Taste of Freedom”; H. Cohen, Nifla’ot ba‘olam he-­hadash, 183. 56. Cahan, Bleter fun mayn leben, 4:475–­477; For a different take, see Wolfe, “Bintel Brief,” 126. 57. Folders 343–­437, boxes 36–­42, in the Day-­Morning Journal (“Der Tog”) Papers at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research consist of correspondence from readers, some directed at specific columns, some assigned to columns by editors, and some asking to be responded to off the page. 58. Schudson, Discovering the News, 101–­103; Nord, Communities of Journalism, 109; Guarneri, Newsprint Metropolis, chap. 2. 59. Glatstein et al., introduction to Finf un zibetsik yor yidishe prese in amerike, 5–­9; Lederhendler, “Guides for the Perplexed,” 141; Michels, Fire in Their Hearts, 82; Nakhimovsky and Newman, Dear Mendl, Dear Reyzl; H. Cohen, Nifla’ot ba‘olam he-­hadash, chap. 4. 60. Howe, World of Our Fathers, 522. 61. Michels, Fire in Their Hearts, 74–­75. 62. Joseph Pulitzer, quoted in Schudson, Discovering the News, 98. 63. On similar dynamics in the US mainstream press, see Guarneri, Newsprint Metropolis, 55. 64. See, for example, Soltes, Yiddish Press, 177; Goren, “Jewish Press,” 216. 65. In the Tageblat, see a translation of the Constitution, beginning January 26, 1892, and Yoyne Paley’s series “Historye fun unzer republic,” beginning August 29, 1907. In the Tog, see Woodrow Wilson’s A History of America and the American People, beginning April 19, 1915. In the Forverts, see, “Shtudirt amerike!,” beginning February 20, 1907. 66. For similar arguments, see Bier, How to Become Jewish Americans?; Lederhendler, “Guides for the Perplexed”; Kellman, “Aiding Immigrant Readers or Entertaining Them?” 67. For examples of the Tageblat’s use of “Americanized,” see Abraham Feiler, “The Deepening Abyss,” Tageblat, January 23, 1916; and Elyash, “Vos heyst ‘amerikanizirt’?,” Tageblat, January 23, 1916. 68. Forverts, November 3, 1908; Tageblat, November 2, 1892. 69. “Three Decades and Two,” Tageblat, September 30, 1917. 70. “Aunt Ray’s Club,” Tageblat, September 8, 1919. 71. “A bintel brief,” Forverts, August 15, 1907; Michels, Fire in Their Hearts, 103; Polland, “May a Freethinker Help a Pious Man?”

Notes | 261

72. Heinze, Adapting to Abundance; Joselit, Wonders of America, chaps. 4–­6. 73. Emil Schlesinger, transcribed interview, box 6, Oral History Collection on the Labor Movement; Jewish Daily Forward Association, Fourth American City, 41; Chaikin, Yidishe bleter in amerike, chaps. 41–­42; Heinze, Adapting to Abundance, chaps. 9–­10. 74. Steinberg, Jewish Mad Men, chap. 2; Dolber, Media and Culture in the U.S. Jewish Labor Movement, chap. 2. 75. See, for example, letters to and from Dr. V. K. Folk, Lester Sagan, and Ida Sachs, March 1934, folder 418, box 41, Day-­Morning Journal (“Der Tog”) Papers. 76. Trunk, “Cultural Dimension of the American Jewish Labor Movement”; Shtarkman et al., “Di sarazohn-­zikhroynes,” 275; “Minutes Related to the Founding of the Paper,” 1914, box 2, David Shapiro Papers. 77. Polland and Soyer, Emerging Metropolis, 6. 78. Goren, Politics and Public Culture of American Jews, 30–­47, 48–­82. 79. “Talk of the East Side,” Yidishe velt, January 28, 1904. 80. “Unzer ‘bintl brief,’ ” Forverts, March 9, 1906; various articles on the Tageblat’s advice columns, Forverts, January 17–­19, 1912; Bier, How to Become Jewish Americans?, 76. 81. Kellman, “Aiding Immigrant Readers or Entertaining Them?,” 11. 82. Quoted in Wolfe, “Bintel Brief,” 186; for similar quotations, see 186–­191. 83. See Howe, World of Our Fathers, 519–­523; Michels, Fire in Their Hearts, 93–­94; Portnoy, Bad Rabbi, 10–­12. 84. Guarneri, Newsprint Metropolis, chap. 2; Golia, “Courting Women, Courting Advertisers.” 85. For sources describing the male-­centric advice in the Yiddish press, see Wolfe, “Bintel Brief,” 397; Cassedy, “Bintel brief,” 112; Gudelunas, Confidential to America, 29. On female advice columnists in the US Anglophone press, see Fahs, Out on Assignment. 86. For example, many of the letters in the Tog’s archives are addressed “Dear Sir,” suggesting that letter writers assumed they were speaking to a male interlocutor. Folder 418, box 41, Day-­Morning Journal (“Der Tog”) Papers. 87. “Sir Oracle,” Tageblat, beginning June 13, 1902. 88. Matilda Lunts, “Dray fragen,” Forverts, March 3, 1906; Lunts, “A plan far di froyen fun der ist sayd,” Forverts, March 19, 1906. 89. See, for example, “A bintel brief,” Forverts, April 3, 1906; Matilda Lunts, “Vi got shikt tsu a kargen man,” Forverts, April 7, 1906; Lunts, “Froyen, zayt nit vie lendlords tsu ayere mener!,” Forverts, April 15, 1906. See also Wolfe, “Bintel Brief,” 115. 90. Matilda Lunts, “Vie nehmen unzere froyen oyf gest,” Forverts, May 22, 1906. 91. “Unzer ‘bintel brief,” Forverts, March 9, 1906; see also Cahan, Bleter fun mayn leben, 4:477. 92. Matilda Lunts, “Vi got shikt tsu a kargen man,” Forverts, April 7, 1906. 93. “A bintel brief,” Forverts, February 6, 1906; “Di elendste yesoyme gefint foter, shvester un bruder durkh’n ‘Forverts,’ ” Forverts, January 25, 1908; “Gefunen ihr foter

262 | Notes

durkh’n ‘bintel brief ’ in filadelfia,” Forverts, January 18, 1912; “Unzere khosn kale brief,” Tageblat, June 24, 1915. 94. “Mendel Vaynshtok hot geshriben tsum ‘bintel brief ’ vegen zayn troyerige liebe,” Forverts, May 5, 1909. 95. Hyman, “Immigrant Women and Consumer Protest,” 100. 96. Der proleterishker magid, “Di sedre,” Forverts, May 17, 1902. 97. “Froyen agitiren in di shuhlen farn kheyrem,” Forverts, May 18, 1902. Other women, in contrast, chose to speak on their own behalf. See Hyman, “Immigrant Women and Consumer Protest,” 94. 98. “Er vil der ‘Forverts’ zol ihm geben a ‘permit,’ ” Forverts, May 20, 1902. 99. Morawska, Insecure Prosperity, introduction. 100. Estraikh, Transatlantic Russian Jewishness, 51. 101. “Aunt Ray’s Club,” Tageblat, March 21, 1915; see also the columns on January 10, 1916, and April 23, 1917. 102. “Aunt Ray’s Club,” Tageblat, July 11, 1915. 103. “Aunt Ray’s Club,” Tageblat, January 31, 1916. 104. “Aunt Ray’s Club,” Tageblat, June 5, 1916. 105. Soyer, Jewish Immigrant Associations, 2. 106. Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere; Anderson, Imagined Communities. For similar arguments about Yiddish newspapers, see Michels, “Speaking to Moyshe,” 74n20. For similar arguments about non-­Yiddish newspapers, see Nord, Communities of Journalism; Schudson, “News, Public, Nation”; Guarneri, Newsprint Metropolis; Gallon, Pleasure in the News, 3; Jaroszyńska-­ Kirchmann, Polish Hearst, 1–­14. 107. “Unzer ‘bintel brief,’ ” Forverts, March 9, 1906; “Vos mir lernen fun der ‘khosn-­ kale frage,” Tageblat, June 1, 1911. 108. Antin, Promised Land, 257–­258; R. Cohen, Out of the Shadow, 142, 171, 182, 256; Ganz and Ferber, Rebels, 85, 123; Stern, My Mother and I, 69, 70, 89–­90. These sources do not always specify whether they are referring to Yiddish or English newspapers. 109. R. Cohen, Out of the Shadow, 191; Roskolenko, When I Was Last on Cherry Street, 5–­7; interview with Adolph Held, May 9, 1964, 14, box 2, Oral History Collection on the Labor Movement; interview with Isidore Wissotsky, October 27, 1963, 3, box 3, Oral History Collection on the Labor Movement. 110. Stern, My Mother and I, 69; Stokes, I Belong to the Working Class, 79; interview with Pauline Newman, January 19, 1965, 9–­14, box 4, Oral History Collection on the Labor Movement; Soltes, Yiddish Press, 39. 111. Ganz and Ferber, Rebels, 60, 85; see also interview with Shlomo Shapiro, August 16, 1965, 14, box 5, Oral History Collection on the Labor Movement. 112. “A nisht-­geshribene ‘bintel brief,’ ” Forverts, June 30, 1910; Cahan, Bleter fun mayn leben, 4:483–­484; Wolfe, “Bintel Brief,” 149; interview with Bernard Lilienblum, December 6, 1963, 9, box 4, Oral History Collection on the Labor Movement;

Notes | 263

interview with Adolph Held, May 9, 1964, 7, box 2, Oral History Collection on the Labor Movement. 113. Wolfe, “Bintel Brief,” 167; Helen Atkins to H. H. Ackerman, February 2, 1934, folder 391, box 39, Day-­Morning Journal (“Der Tog”) Papers; Helen Atkins to Sam Baron, November 13, 1934, February 2, 1934, folder 434, box 42, Day-­Morning Journal (“Der Tog”) Papers. 114. Ganz and Ferber, Rebels, 109–­110. 115. Ganz and Ferber, 132–­133. 116. Bisno, Abraham Bisno, 49. 117. A. S. Shokhet, “Der tsaytungs shaliekh in di kountri shtedt,” Tageblat, March 20, 1910. 118. Gold, Jews without Money, 244. 119. Interview with Pauline Newman, January 19, 1965, 9–­14, box 5, Oral History Collection on the Labor Movement; interview with Hyman Rogoff, November 17, 1963, 10–­11, box 5, Oral History Collection on the Labor Movement; Enstad, Ladies of Labor, chap. 2; Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 26. 120. M. Goldstein, “Success or Failure?,” 29; American-­Jewish Autobiographies. 121. A. Lezerin, “Der ‘Forverts’ un zayne froyen lezerins”; Cahan, “Erinerungen fun a redaktor.” 122. Interview with Pauline Newman, January 19, 1965, 13–­15, box 5, Oral History Collection on the Labor Movement; Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 26–­27. 123. Scheier, “Clara Lemlich Shavelson,” 9. For similar accounts, see interview with Abraham Belson, December 7, 1963, 12, box 2, Oral History Collection on the Labor Movement; interview with Abe Hershkowitz, May 26, 1964, 5–­20, box 2, Oral History Collection on the Labor Movement; interview with Feyga Shapiro, August 5, 1964, 29, box 5, Oral History Collection on the Labor Movement. 124. Hasanovitz, One of Them, 2, 19, 20. For similar discussions, see Ganz and Ferber, Rebels, 97; interview with Pauline Newman, January 19, 1965, 3, box 5, Oral History Collection on the Labor Movement; Hourwich and Palmer, I Am a Worker, 6, 22, 62. 125. Soltes, Yiddish Press, 17; Chaikin, Yidishe bleter in amerike, chap. 17. 126. Bisno, Abraham Bisno, 49, 240. For a similar description, see Antin, Promised Land, 258. 127. Park, Immigrant Press and Its Control, 63; see also Soltes, Yiddish Press, 174; ­Michels, Fire in Their Hearts, chaps. 1–­2. 128. Interview with Abraham Belson, December 7, 1963, 36, box 2, Oral History Collection on the Labor Movement; interview with Bernard Lilienblum, December 6, 1963, 9, box 3, Oral History Collection on the Labor Movement; interview with Adolph Held, May 9, 1964, 7, box 2, Oral History Collection on the Labor Movement; Soltes, Yiddish Press, 40. 129. Interview with Adolph Held, May 9, 1964, 7, box 2, Oral History Collection on the Labor Movement; Soltes, Yiddish Press, 40; interview with Abraham Belson,

264 | Notes

December 7, 1963, 36, box 2, Oral History Collection on the Labor Movement; interview with Isidore Wissotsky, October 27, 1963, 2–­4, box 3, Oral History Collection on the Labor Movement. 130. Interview with Max Deutschman, February 3, 1964, 30, box 2, Oral History Collection on the Labor Movement; interview with Hyman Rogoff, November 17, 1963, 10–­12, box 5, Oral History Collection on the Labor Movement; interview with Shlomo Shapiro, August 16, 1965, 9, box 5, Oral History Collection on the Labor Movement; interview with Oscar Feuer, November 11, 1963, 2, 15, box 4, Oral History Collection on the Labor Movement; interviews with Adolph Held, Charles Zimmerman, Abe Zwerkin, Israel Breslaw, and Isidore Wissotsky, box 1, Irving Howe Papers. 131. Sometimes referred to as “Atkin” on payrolls. Folders 14–­18, box 2, Day-­Morning Journal (“Der Tog”) Papers. In addition to Atkins’s work for the Tog, she was later a founder of the Pionern froyen zhurnal. See interview with Shlomo Shapiro, August 16, 1965, 39, box 5, Oral History Collection on the Labor Movement. 132. For letters criticizing editor Ben-­Zion Goldberg for stopping his column while on vacation, see folder 390; for letters asking for vacation recommendations and research assistance, see folders 417–­420; for letters asking for job recommendations, see folder 418; for letters asking for help with immigration, see folder 438; in boxes 41–­42, Day-­Morning Journal (“Der Tog”) Papers. 133. Letters from and to S. Lerman, December 5 and 12, 1934, folder 420, box 41, Day-­ Morning Journal (“Der Tog”) Papers. 134. Letters from and to Pauline Freedman, n.d. and March 28, 1934, folder 418, box 41, Day-­Morning Journal (“Der Tog”) Papers. 135. Letters from and to Samuel Yochelson, n.d., folder 418, box 41, Day-­Morning Journal (“Der Tog”) Papers. 136. Letter from Freedman. 137. Letter from Sarah Abramson, May 17, 1918, folder 418, box 41, Day-­Morning Journal (“Der Tog”) Papers. 138. Letter from Marks Eydelman, n.d., folder 418, box 41, Day-­Morning Journal (“Der Tog”) Papers. 139. For a similar argument about English-­language papers see Nord, Communities of Journalism, chap. 11. 140. Zaborowska, How We Found America; see also H. Cohen, Nifla’ot ba‘olam he-­ hadash, chap. 5. 141. Interview with Julius Gershin, January 26–­27, 1964, 57, box 5, Oral History Collection on the Labor Movement. For similar questions, see interview with Max Deutschman, February 3, 1964, 30, box 2, Oral History Collection on the Labor Movement; interview with Abraham Belson, December 7, 1963, 36, box 2, Oral History Collection on the Labor Movement; interview with Bernard Fenster, December 6, 1963, 5, 10, box 4, Oral History Collection on the Labor Movement; interview with Jack Dubnow, July 22, 1964, 20, box 2, Oral History Collection on the Labor Movement.

Notes | 265

142. Interview with Shlomo Shapiro, August 16, 1965, 1, box 5, Oral History Collection on the Labor Movement. 143. Interview with Abraham Belson, December 7, 1963, 12, 18, box 2, Oral History Collection on the Labor Movement. See also interview with Julius Gershin, January 26–­27, 1964, box 5, Oral History Collection on the Labor Movement; interview with Louis Glass, November 4, 1963, box 2, Oral History Collection on the Labor Movement; interview with Louis Lipsky, October 20, 1963, box 4, Oral History Collection on the Labor Movement. 144. Interview with Abe Zwerkin, box 1, Irving Howe Papers.

Chapter 3. “From a Woman to Women”

1. Ginzburg’s articles ran on and off between September 1915 and June 1916. I could not find any biographical information on Ginzburg in any lexicons of Yiddish writers or pseudonym lists. For discussions of previous short-­lived attempts to publish women’s columns in the Forverts, see chaps. 1 and 2. 2. Klara Ginzburg, “Hets, tsikhtigkayt, froyen-­rekhte un liebe,” Forverts, October 7, 1915. 3. Hirsh Reyf, “Ver bet di froyen zey zolen zikh farben?,” Forverts, October 29, 1915. 4. Ginzburg, “Hets, tsikhtigkayt, froyen-­rekhte un liebe.” See also “Zey zaynen nit eynfershtanen mit Klara Ginzburg’s meynung vegen liebe,” Forverts, September 23, 1915. 5. Reyf, “Ver bet di froyen zey zolen zikh farben?” 6. See, for example, Seller, “Defining Socialist Womanhood”; Rojanski, “Socialist Ideology, Traditional Rhetoric”; Shapiro, “Words to the Wives.” 7. “Mrs. Stokes Denies Assailing Red Cross,” New York Times, May 22, 1918. 8. “Notes and Comments,” Christian Science Monitor, June 1, 1918. See also Rose Pastor Stokes to [Mr. and Mrs. Abraham H. Sarasohn], May 28, 1918, Abraham H. Sarasohn Papers. 9. On the gendering of newspaper content in the English and Yiddish-­language press, see Fahs, Out on Assignment, introduction; Rischin, Promised City, 126. For a discussion of similar assumptions about newspaper fiction, see Kellman, “Newspaper Novel,” 64–­66. 10. Chaikin, Yidishe bleter in amerike, 320; Zunser, “Jewish Literary Scene,” 293. Intermarriage rates were relatively low in the early twentieth century, but it was still a topic of concern in many Jewish circles. See McGinity, Still Jewish, 20–­25, 40–­42; Kirzane, “Ambivalent Attitudes toward Intermarriage in the Forverts.” 11. Pratt, “Culture and Radical Politics.” 12. Stokes, I Belong to the Working Class, chap. 2. 13. Stokes, 80–­83. 14. Pratt, “Culture and Radical Politics,” 81. On similar patterns in the Anglophone press, see Guarneri, Newsprint Metropolis, 42; Fahs, Out on Assignment, 2. 15. Stokes, I Belong to the Working Class, 83; Cahan, Bleter fun mayn leben, 3:459. See also Chaikin, Yidishe bleter in amerike, 99; and L. Kobrin, Mayne futsik yor in

266 | Notes

amerike, vol. 2, 45–­46, which note that the Tageblat paid more than radical publications in this period. 16. Pratt, “Culture and Radical Politics”; Kirzane, introduction to Diary of a Lonely Girl, 2–­3, L. Kobrin, Mayne futsik yor in amerike, vol. 1, chap. 12; Zucker, “Yente Serdatzky.” 17. Grace Aguilar, “The Vale of Cedars,” Tageblat, beginning January 26, 1902; Rebecca A. Altman, “Life of the Jewish Girl in the Country,” Tageblat, September 27, 1903; Esther J. Ruskay, “Intermarriage,” Tageblat, May 18, 1902; Stokes, I Belong to the Working Class, 86; Zunser, “Jewish Literary Scene”; American Jewish Yearbook, 5666, 56, 17. 18. Fahs, Out on Assignment, 4; Brinn, “Beyond the Women’s Section.” 19. Stokes, I Belong to the Working Class, 85–­86. 20. Zelda, “Just Between Ourselves, Girls,” Tageblat, September 26, 1902, December 14, 1902, April 9, 1903, and June 19, 1903. See also Enstad, Ladies of Labor, 58; Zipser and Zipser, Fire and Grace, 1–­3; Hochschild, Rebel Cinderella, chap. 3; ­Walters, “Intimate Radicals and Radical Intimacies,” chaps. 3–­4. 21. Zelda, “Just Between Ourselves, Girls,” Tageblat, December 7, 1903. 22. Zelda, “Just Between Ourselves, Girls,” Tageblat, August 12, 1903; see also R.H.P., “Mothers, Beware!,” Tageblat, August 26, 1903; Zipser and Zipser, Fire and Grace, 1–­3: McGinity, Still Jewish, 36. 23. Golia, Newspaper Confessions, chap. 3; see also Harrison-­Kahan, “Introduction,” 14; Fahs, Out on Assignment, 38–­39. 24. Zelda, “Just Between Ourselves, Girls,” Tageblat, April 3, 1903; and November 1, 1903. 25. See, for example, “Just Between Ourselves, Girls,” Tageblat, June 28, 1903. 26. Stokes, I Belong to the Working Class, 86; see also Rose Pastor, “The Builders,” Tageblat, December 27, 1903. 27. Stokes, I Belong to the Working Class, 86. 28. Stokes, 86. On similar dynamics in the Anglophone press, see Fahs, Out on Assignment, 5. 29. Stokes, I Belong to the Working Class, 84. See a letter from Rose Pastor to Isabelle Sapiro Sarasohn, n.d., and a booklet from Sapiro’s son’s confirmation, February 3, 1918, that has Stokes listed on the back, Miscellaneous Materials, Abraham H. Sarasohn Papers. 30. Stokes, I Belong to the Working Class, 86. For a fictionalized critique of similar dynamics, see Miriam Karpilove, “A Provincial Newspaper,” in Provincial Newspaper and Other Stories. 31. Stokes, I Belong to the Working Class, 87. 32. Stokes, 83–­85; Zunser, “Jewish Literary Scene,” 290–­292. 33. The interview with Stokes ran in the Tageblat on July 19, 1903; Stokes, I Belong to the Working Class, 92–­100. 34. Shapiro and Sterling, introduction to I Belong to the Working Class, xliii–­xliv; Renshaw, “Rose of the World,” 417–­418n4; folders 6A and 6B, box 6, Series II, Rose Pastor Stokes Papers.

Notes | 267

35. See, for example, Avner Tanenboym’s articles as Emma T”B: “Fir froyen un kinder,” Tageblat, June 25, 1901; and Yidishe velt, June 29, 1902. 36. M. Katz, Moyshe Kats bukh, 345. For a similar argument about Louis Miller, see Chaikin, Yidishe bleter in amerike, 218. 37. “Di orime idishe meydel un ihr milionersker amerikaner man,” Forverts, August 9, 1907. 38. See, for example, Rose Harriet Pastor, “Intermarriage,” New York Evening Post, April 8, 1905; Fahs, Out on Assignment, 25–­26; Zipser and Zipser, Fire and Grace, 70. 39. “Der senseyshon fun di englishe tsaytungen,” Forverts August 8, 1907. 40. On a similar use of images of female journalists in US “stunt journalism,” see Lutes, Front-­Page Girls, chap. 1; Harrison-­Kahan, “Introduction,” 17. 41. Cahan, Bleter fun mayn leben, 4:552. In reality, this feature ran sporadically, not every day. 42. “Advice by Mrs. Stokes,” Washington Post, July 26, 1907. 43. “Millionaire’s Wife Is Wise,” Los Angeles Times, August 20, 1907; “Rose Pastor a Love Guide,” Chicago Daily Tribune, August 11, 1907. 44. Rose Pastor Stokes, “Brief fun Forverts lezers,” Forverts, August 17 and November 2, 1907. 45. Rose Pastor Stokes, “Brief fun Forverts lezers,” Forverts, November 23, 1907. 46. “An East Side Editor,” Evening Post, July 12, 1912. 47. Park, Immigrant Press and Its Control, 101–­102. 48. The revived Lithuanian Wisewoman columns first appeared on September 12, 1907, and usually ran weekly, though there were gaps when it disappeared for weeks at a time. 49. For a discussion of similar uses of female pseudonyms by Moise Gadol, the publisher of the Ladino periodical La Amerika, see Ben-­Ur, “Judeo-­Spanish (Ladino) Press in the United States,” 69–­70; Ben-­Ur, “Ladino (Judeo-­Spanish) Press in the United States.” 50. Di Litvishe Khokhmanis, “A vinkel fir damen,” Tageblat, March 11, 1908; Di Litvishe Khokhmanis, “Di ferzorgte idishe froyen,” Tageblat, October 30, 1910; Di Litvishe Khokhmanis, “Di froyen un tsenzus,” Tageblat, May 23, 1909. For a similar assessment about the Tageblat after the introduction of its women’s page, see Shapiro, “Words to the Wives,” 133. 51. Di Litvishe Khokhmanis, “A vinkel fir damen,” Tageblat, June 3, 1908. As Rachel Rojanski has noted, the Forverts was also more willing to praise women’s contributions to the public sphere in general than to encourage readers to participate in the public sphere themselves. Rojanski, “Socialist Ideology, Traditional Rhetoric,” 337–­338. 52. Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl, chap. 2. 53. Di Litvishe Khokhmanis, “Lagboymer un froyen,” Tageblat, May 9, 1909; Di Litvishe Khokhmanis, “Tishebov un froyen,” Tageblat, August 14, 1910; Di Litvishe Khokhmanis. “Purim is yontif fir unz froyen,” Tageblat, March 23, 1913.

268 | Notes

54. Di Litvishe Khokhmanis, “Loshn koydesh un froyen,” Tageblat, August 22, 1909. 55. Di Litvishe Khokhmanis, “Tagebukh fun a boben,” Tageblat, May 15, 1911; Wengeroff, Memoirs of a Grandmother. 56. Heinze, Adapting to Abundance, chap. 6; Joselit, New York’s Jewish Jews, chap. 4 Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History; Shapiro, “Words to the Wives,” 224, 266. 57. Ehrenreich and English, For Her Own Good, chap. 5. 58. Di Litvishe Khokhmanis, “A vinkel fir damen,” Tageblat, February 26, 1908. 59. Di Litvishe Khokhmanis, “Di froyen delegaten fohren nokh albani,” Tageblat, February 21, 1909. 60. Di Litvishe Khokhmanis, “Ihr patsh in london,” Tageblat, November 27, 1910. 61. B. Z. Goldberg, “The Passing of The Day-­Jewish Morning Journal,” Midstream, April 1972, 12–­28; Kirzane, “Ambivalent Attitudes toward Intermarriage in the Forverts”; Estraikh, Transatlantic Russian Jewishness; Ribak, “Organ of the Jewish People.” 62. “Vi di amerikaner froyen arbayten,” Tageblat, May 24, 1907. 63. I. L. Dalidansky, “Di eyshes khayil,” Tageblat, July 17, 1907; see also Gedalia Bublik, “Fun der revolutsion tsu fraye liebe,” Tageblat, May 10, 1908; “Froyen arbayt,” Tageblat, January 3, 1909; “Di froy ferdint, di velt ferlirt,” Tageblat, March 1, 1910. 64. On women’s rights, see Gedaliah Bublik, “Der froyen kampf fir a vot,” Tageblat, November 6, 1906; “Froyen un idn,” Tageblat, April 11, 1907; “Froyen martsh tsu albani,” Tageblat, February 19, 1912. On education, see Hillel Zaytlin, “Di ertsihung fun unzere tekhter,” Tageblat, August 26, 1910; “Di skuls fir idishe meydlekh,” Tageblat, February 13, 1914; Shapiro, “Words to the Wives,” 286. 65. Di Litvishe Khokhmanis, “Der froyen-­kongres in stokholm,” Tageblat, June 14, 1911; see also Di Litvishe Khokhmanis, “Di vaybershe milkhome vert ernster,” Tageblat, April 6, 1913; Di Litvishe Khokhmanis, “Di vayber vos voten un di vos velen voten,” Tageblat, February 5, 1914. 66. Liza Tarlov, “Di froy un sheynhayt,” Tageblat, February 10, 1908; Madame Liza Tarloy, “ ‘Leydis fiurst,’ ” Tageblat, February 17, 1908. The spelling of the author’s name changed between these two bylines. 67. “Di idishe ‘naye froy,’ ” Tageblat, January 20, 1908. 68. Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History, 35; Roskies, Jewish Search for a Usable Past; Wenger, History Lessons; Julia Cohen, Becoming Ottomans, introduction; Hellerstein, Question of Tradition. 69. Other Jewish literary spaces included similarly contradictory gender dynamics. See Feiner “Ha’isha hayehudit hamodernit”; Krutikov, Yiddish Fiction and the Crisis of Modernity, 164–­200; Pinsker, Literary Passports, chap. 11; Schachter, Diasporic Modernisms; Seidman, Marriage Plot. 70. Di Litvishe Khokhmanis, “A vinkel fir damen,” Tageblat, March 18 and 25, 1908; Di Litvishe Khokhmanis, “Brivlakh un sodes,” Tageblat, January 9, 1910;

Notes | 269

Di ­Litvishe Khokhmanis, “Di altkayt bay froyen,” Tageblat, April 3, 1910; Di Litvishe Khokhmanis, “Gefarbte un gekalkhte,” Tageblat, July 17, 1910. 71. Di Litvishe Khokhmanis, “A vinkel fir damen,” Tageblat, December 4, 1907. 72. Di Litvishe Khokhmanis, “A vinkel fir damen,” Tageblat, August 30, 1908. 73. Di Litvishe Khokhmanis, “Zindige printsesin un der yester-­horo,” Tageblat, August 23, 1908; publicizing: “Tage-­bukh fun Printsesin Louise fun zaksen,” Tageblat, beginning August 23, 1908. See also Di Litvishe Khokhmanis, “Verter vaksen,” Tageblat, February 6, 1910. 74. Di Litvishe Khokhmanis, “A vinkel fir damen,” Tageblat, October 23, 1907. 75. Di Litvishe Khokhmanis, “Leydi’s korner,” Gazetn, June 23, 1891. On Zelikovits’s pseudonyms, see Zelikovits, Geklibene shriften, vii–­viii. 76. Getsel Zelikovits, “Di ershte ‘sofraget[’],” Tageblat, March 1, 1908; Di Litvishe Khokhmanis, “A vinkel fir damen,” Tageblat, February 26, 1908. 77. Nit-­mer-­vi-­a-­mansbil, “Mansbil’s vinkel,” Tageblat, March 5, 1908. I could not find “Nur-­a-­mansbil” or “Nit-­mer-­vi-­a-­mansbil” listed in any lexicons. But the fact that these columns were in dialogue suggests to me that they were both by Zelikovits. For a similar assessment of this column’s authorship, see Z. Goldberg, “Ha-­hakhmanit ha-­Liṭa’it.” 78. On similar debates in the Anglophone press, see Lutes, Front-­Page Girls, 1–­5, 66–­67; Golia, Newspaper Confessions, 72. 79. Nit-­mer-­vi-­a-­mansbil, “Mansbil’s vinkel,” Tageblat, March 5, 1908. 80. Di Litvishe Khohkmanis, “A vinkel fir damen,” Tageblat, April 29, 1908; Nur-­a-­ mansbil, “Mansbil’s vinkel,” Tageblat, May 6, 1908. 81. Nur-­a-­mansbil, “Mansbil’s vinkel,” Tageblat, March 12, 1908; Di Litvishe Khokhmanis,“A vinkel fir damen,” Tageblat, March 18, 1908. 82. Nur-­a-­mansbil, “Mansbil’s vinkel,” Tageblat, March 26, 1908, April 2, 1908, and May 13, 1908. 83. Kagan, Leksikon fun yidish-­shraybers, 744; Di Litvishe Khokhmanis, “A vinkel fir damen,” Tageblat, March 25, 1908. 84. Di Litvishe Khokhmanis, “Groyse froyen bevayzn zikh shoyn,” Tageblat, January 3, 1912. 85. These are the advertisements included on the back page of the Forverts, January 2, 1898. 86. See Forverts, January 6, 1900; and January 1, 1904. 87. Heinze, Adapting to Abundance, 160–­167. 88. Heinze, 65–­66. On advertisements in the European Yiddish press, Stein, Making Jews Modern, chap. 5. 89. Ribak “Organ of the Jewish People”; “Ver zaynen unzere kritiker?,” Tsukunft, February 1912, 185. 90. “Far unzere lezer un hoyptzekhlikh lezerinen,” Forverts, May 27, 1901. 91. Enstad, Ladies of Labor, 136. 92. Hyman, “Immigrant Women and Consumer Protest”; Seligman, Great Kosher Meat War of 1902.

270 | Notes

93. “Toyzender familyes oyf der ist sayd in a strayk far klenere rent,” Forverts, December 26, 1907; “A por verter tsu unzere froyen,” Forverts, November 1, 1909; “Froyen organiziren zikh in kampf gegen thayere flaysh,” Forverts, April 5, 1910. 94. “Froyen fun kvartal tsaygen simpathi tsu di straykende klurks,” Forverts, October 17, 1909. 95. “Idishe froyen!,” Forverts, April 30, 1910. 96. “Froyen beten men zol zey organiziren gegn beker-­trost,” Forverts, January 5, 1911. 97. “A por verter tsu unzere froyen,” Forverts, November 1, 1909. 98. Daniel Katz, All Together Different, 46. On similar dynamics in a later period, see Frank, Purchasing Power. 99. Heinze, Adapting to Abundance, 151–­160; Guarneri, Newsprint Metropolis, 30, 55–­56. On contemporary US and European projects fusing gender, consumption, and politics, see Finnegan, Selling Suffrage; Reuveni, Consumer Culture and the Making of Modern Jewish Identity, chap. 8. 100. “Divizshon street center fun damen kleyder,” Morgn-­zhurnal, April 2, 1916. On the politics of the Morgn-­zhurnal, see Goren, Politics and Public Culture of American Jews, 100–­109. 101. Bebel, Die Frau und der Sozialismus. 102. B. Feygenboym, “Bebel’s ‘froy,’ ” Forverts, December 23, 1909. 103. See book advertisements from January 4, 1912, and May 1, 1912; H. Cohen, Nifla’ot ba‘olam he-­hadash, chap. 4. 104. Forverts, January 7, 1912. 105. “Vos heyst a guter shidekh,” Forverts, January 12, 1912. 106. “Men hot moyre tsu hoben kinder,” Forverts, January 13, 1912; “Zey danken got vos zey zaynen nit keyn vayber,” Forverts, January 18, 1912. 107. “Hoben froyen 9 mos reyd?,” Forverts, January 20, 1912; “Farvos zaynen di amohlige froyen geven shehner vi hayntige?,” Forverts, January 24, 1912. 108. “A mahmedanishe froy tor afile keyn doktor nit zehn,” Forverts, January 30, 1912; “Geshlosen az froyen hoben keyn neshomes nit,” Forverts, February 1, 1912. 109. “Zey danken got vos zey zaynen nit keyn vayber,” Forverts, January 18, 1912; “Tsvishen meshugene froyen zaynen di mehrste yunge,” Forverts, January 29, 1912; “Yede muter kukt dem toyt in ponim arayn,” Forverts, January 28, 1912. 110. “Ver zaynen unzere kritiker?,” Tsukunft, February 1912, 185. 111. “Ver zaynen unzere kritiker?,” 185. 112. Michels, Fire in Their Hearts, 117–­120, 151–­152. 113. Av. Kaspe, “Unzer ‘Tsukunft’ un unzer ‘Forverts,’ ” Tsukunft, January 1912, 47; M. Winchevsky, “Aleksander Yonas,” Tsukunft, February 1912, 119–­120; Av. Kaspe, “Unzer ‘Tsukunft’ un unzer ‘Forverts’ [Part II],” Tsukunft, February 1912, 151–­156; [Di redaktsion], “Ver zaynen unzere kritiker?,” Tsukunft, February 1912, 182–­187; Michels, Fire in Their Hearts, 151–­152. 114. Harap, Image of the Jew in American Literature, 488. 115. “Ver iz August Bebel?,” Forverts, June 20–­July 9, 1912; “Bebel’s berihmter bukh ‘Di froy,’ ” Forverts, July 14–­August 16, 1912; “Di froyen-­frage,” Forverts, August 18–­22, 1912.

Notes | 271

1 16. P. Novick, “Ab. Cahan un dos yidishe vort,” Morgn frayhayt, September 23, 1951. 117. Harap, Image of the Jew in American Literature, 488; see also Buhle, Women and American Socialism, 300 (citing Harap as her source).

Chapter 4. The Advent of Women’s Pages in the American Yiddish Press

1. Anna Weiss, “In der froyen velt,” Tog, February 20, 1917. 2. Novershtern, “ ‘Who Would Have Believed That a Bronze Statue Can Weep,’ ” 435; Shapiro, “Words to the Wives,” 68. 3. “ ‘Der tog,’ ” Tog, November 5, 1914; “The Day,” pamphlet, folder 248, box 8, Herman Bernstein Papers. 4. Fahs, Out on Assignment, chap. 2; Conolly-­Smith, Translating America, chap. 4. 5. Orchan, Yots’ot me-­arba’ amot, 23; N. Cohen, “Shund and the Tabloids,” 197. 6. Seller, “Defining Socialist Womanhood”; Rojanski, “Socialist Ideology, Traditional Rhetoric”; Shapiro, “Words to the Wives.” 7. Soltes, Yiddish Press, 25; Chaikin, Yidishe bleter in amerike, chap. 26. 8. “Froyen-­interesen,” Forverts, beginning February 11, 1917. 9. The first issue in which this material moved to the Tageblat’s back page was May 22, 1914. 10. “A fergrester zuntog-­‘Forverts,’ ” Forverts, March 18, 1916. 11. See, for example, Klara Ginzburg, “Fun a froy tsu froyen,” and Hillel Rogoff, “Di neshome fun a kind,” Forverts, April 2, 1916. 12. See for example, the Tageblat’s “Khosn-­kale frage” appeared in the women’s section on November 18, 1914, and next to the paper’s serialized fiction on November 22, 1914, when the title was instead “Khosn kale brief.” See also the serialized fiction in Di tsayt on September 17 and 18, 1920. 13. The last appearance of the title “Di froy un di heym” was June 13, 1917; see also “Report of Editorial Conference January 27, 1926,” folder 10, box 1, Day-­Morning Journal (“Der Tog”) Papers; “Itemized Budget for Inside Staff Editorial Dep’t. (undated),” folder 123, box 8, Papers of William Edlin. 14. Di tsayt, September 4 and 11, 1920, respectively. On Di tsayt, see Rojanski, “Rise and Fall of ‘Die Zeit.’ ” 15. Soltes, Yiddish Press, 25, 185–­186; Chaikin, Yidishe bleter in amerike, chap. 26. 16. Der redaktsion, “Dos ‘Tageblat’ tsu di lezer,” Tageblat, September 20, 1914. 17. “A Lezerin,” “Der ‘Forverts’ un zayne froyen lezerins,” Forverts, April 22, 1917. “A Lezerin” is probably a pseudonym for Cahan. 18. “A fergrester zuntog-­‘Forverts,’ ” Forverts, March 18, 1916. 19. “Dem kumenden zuntog,” Morgn-­zhurnal, April 4, 1916. 20. Niger and Shatzky, Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, 5:426. 21. “Dem kumenden zuntog,” Morgn-­zhurnal, April 4, 1916; “Dos ‘Tageblat’ tsu di lezer,” Tageblat, September 20, 1914. For the way competition impacted other newspaper sections, see Warnke, “Immigrant Popular Culture as Contested Sphere.”

272 | Notes

22. Dolber, Media and Culture in the U.S. Jewish Labor Movement, 26; Steinberg, Jewish Mad Men, 90; Marchand, Advertising the American Dream. 23. Dolber, Media and Culture in the U.S. Jewish Labor Movement, 32. 24. “Standard Newspaper Data: Jewish Daily Forward New York, N.Y.,” advertising circular, October 15, 1931. 25. Jewish Daily Forward Association, Fourth American City, 33. 26. See, for example, Tageblat, January 7, 1915. 27. Seller, “Defining Socialist Womanhood,” 427. 28. Berger, “Making of the American Baleboste/Housewife,” 57. 29. Peiss, Cheap Amusements; Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl; Enstad, Ladies of Labor. 30. Soltes, Yiddish Press; Goren, “Jewish Press,” 218. 31. Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History, chap. 3; Heinze, Adapting to Abundance, chap. 6. 32. Anna Weiss, “In der froyen velt,” Tog, February 20, 1917. 33. Rosa Lebensboym, “In der froyen velt,” Tog, May 15, 1915, and June 4, 1915. 34. R. Lebensboym, “In der froyen velt,” Tog, February 12, 1915. For a similar argument about the Forverts, see Shapiro, “Words to the Wives,” 60. 35. Shapiro, “Words to the Wives,” 118; Estraikh, Transatlantic Russian Jewishness, 132. 36. “Lezt dos shabes baym tish,” Tageblat, October 8, 1915; “Perl fun prokim,” Tageblat, beginning June 21, 1915. 37. For a similar assessment of the Forverts’s women’s page, see Shapiro, “Words to the Wives,” 113. 38. Miriam Razin, “Di froy un der yakres,” Tog, February 20, 1917. 39. See, for example, “Der froyen-­kongres in stokholm,” Tageblat, June 14, 1911. For an example of an article supporting the suffrage movement, see Gedalia Bublik, “Der froyen kamf fir a vot,” Tageblat, November 6, 1906. 40. See, for example, S. Elizovits, “Di froyen-­bevegung,” Forverts, June 28, 1899; Dr. K. Fornberg, “A nayer nusekh in der froyen-­frage,” Forverts, April 20, 1904. 41. Buhle, Women and American Socialism, 105. 42. Rojanski, “Socialist Ideology, Traditional Rhetoric,” 334; Shapiro, “Words to the Wives,” chap. 5. 43. See, for example, “Vi es arbet a kinder-­shul in sovet-­rusland,” Frayhayt, March 14, 1926; “De tsefalung fun der familye in der kapitalistisher sistem,” Frayhayt, July 25 and August 1, 1926; Rokhl Holtman, “Di neshome fun hoyz,” Frayhayt, August 6, 1926. 44. Kirsch-­Holtman, Mayn lebns-­veg, 75. 45. Rojanski, “Socialist Ideology, Traditional Rhetoric,” 347. 46. Seller, “Defining Socialist Womanhood,” 418; Rukhl Schaechter, “How the Forverts Historically Related to Its Women Readers,” Forward, June 10, 2022, https:// forward.com. 47. Seller, “Defining Socialist Womanhood,” 432; Weiman-­Kelman, Queer Expectations, 94–­95. 48. Reyzen, Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur, prese un filologye, 4:222–­223. 49. Rae Malis, “Di debyutantin,” Tog, February 20, 1917.

Notes | 273

50. Malis. 51. “Di geshikhte fun’m tashentikhel,” Tog, February 20, 1917. 52. Kellman, “Aiding Immigrant Readers or Entertaining Them?,” 8. 53. Pratt, “Culture and Radical Politics,” 76–­77. 54. Reyzen, Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur, prese un filologye, 4:222–­223; “Rae Raskin,” in Simon et al., Who’s Who in American Jewry, 489–­490. 55. S. L. Blumenson, “From the American Scene: Culture on Rutgers Square,” Commentary, July 1950, 69. 56. “Hoyz-­virtshaft,” Tsayt, September 4, 1920. 57. Rae Raskin, “Tsu vos darfen froyen politik?,” Froyen-­zhurnal, December 1922, 16. For an in-­depth analysis of Raskin’s other articles in the Froyen-­zhurnal, see Shapiro, “Words to the Wives,” 189. 58. Adella Kean Zametkin, “Iber der froyen velt,” Fraynd 6 (March 1915): 13–­16; ­ McCune, “Whole Wide World without Limits,” 53–­54, 73–­75, 217n23. Note: Not to be confused with the European Yiddish daily of the same name. 59. Adella Kean [Zametkin], “In der froyen velt,” Tog, July 8, 1918, and September 23, 1918; “Ven iz di geburt-­kontrol bavegung geboyren gevorn,” Tog, August 1, 1923. 60. Adella Kean Zametkin, “Fun a froy tsu froyen,” Tog, April 27, 1918; see also April 20, 1918, and June 18, 1918. 61. Rogoff, Der gayst fun “Forverts,” 38; Epstein, Profiles of Eleven, 88. 62. B. Z. Goldberg, “The Passing of The Day-­Jewish Morning Journal,” Midstream, April 1972, 19. 63. Fahs, Out on Assignment, 65. 64. Sarah B. Smith, “Bilder fun di korts,” Tog, February 20, 1917. 65. Howe, World of Our Fathers, 547. For broader patterns, see Zaritt, “Sarah Smith.” 66. Lutes, Front-­Page Girls, chap. 3; Fahs, Out on Assignment, 117. 67. For a full assessment of Hermalin’s articles in the Tog, see Shapiro, “Words to the Wives,” 21, 66–­67, 133. 68. H., “Di froy voz iz arunter fun glaykhen veg,” Tog, February 20, 1917. 69. Leola Allard, “Forgives Wife Who Eloped with Brother,” Chicago Examiner, February 14, 1917. On Allard’s career, see Ross, Ladies of the Press, 547–­548; Kaszuba, “Mob Sisters,” 255–­271. 70. Zaritt, “Sarah Smith.” 71. Fahs, Out on Assignment, 66. 72. “A fergrester zuntog-­‘Forverts,’ ” Forverts, March 18, 1916. 73. Fahs, Out on Assignment, 12, 59; Guarneri, Newsprint Metropolis, 31–­32. 74. Guarneri, Newsprint Metropolis, 19–­20; Scanlon, Inarticulate Longings. 75. Varhayt: beginning July 4, 1916; Tageblat: beginning February 11, 1918; Morgn-­ zhurnal: beginning May 8, 1922. 76. On the overlap in staff members between Yiddish dailies and publications, see Shapiro, “Words to the Wives,” 42. On women who wrote for women’s magazines in Europe, see Kellman, “Feminism and Fiction”; Lisek, “Feminist Discourse in Women’s Yiddish Press in Poland.”

274 | Notes

77. Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History, 116–­118. 78. “Dos ‘Tageblat’ tsu di lezer,” Tageblat, September 20, 1914. 79. Edlin, “Der ‘tog,’ ” 70–­72; Kellman, “First Years of Der tog.” 80. N. Cohen, “Shund and the Tabloids”; Stein, Making Jews Modern; Veidlinger, Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire, 82–­112. 81. Chaikin, Yidishe bleter in amerike, 232. 82. Chaikin, 232; see also Edlin, “Der ‘tog,’ ” 70–­72; Howe, World of Our Fathers, 54; B. Z. Goldberg, “Ab. Cahan, der historisher emes,” Yidishe kultur, June 1972, 13. 83. Tenenbaum, Geshtaltn baym shrayb-­tish, 47–­51; Zucker, “Yente Serdatzky,” 69; Pratt, “Culture and Radical Politics,” 70–­7 1. 84. Orchan, Yots’ot me-­arba’ amot, 130; see also Lisek, “Leaving Behind the Froyen-­ vinkl.” 85. Pratt, “Culture and Radical Politics,” 76–­77. 86. Soltes, Yiddish Press, xii. 87. Chaikin, Yidishe bleter in amerike, chap. 42. 88. See, for example, Hayim Malits, “Di heym un di froy,” Morgn-­zhurnal, January 6, 1918, and November 10, 1918; Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History, 116–­120; Joselit, Wonders of America, 15. On changing vocational and educational patterns of American Jewish women, see Klapper, Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America, chap. 2. 89. Hayim Malits, “Di heym un di froy,” Morgn-­zhurnal, June 6, 1920. 90. Mock and Larson, Words That Won the War; Dawidowicz, “Louis Marshall and the Jewish Daily Forward”; Conolly-­Smith, “Reading Between the Lines”; Estraikh, Transatlantic Russian Jewishness, chap. 1. 91. Special Report by J. V. Foster, September 26, 1917, from the National Archives, cited in Szajkowski, Jews, Wars, and Communism, 140. 92. Rappaport, “American Yiddish Press and the European Conflict in 1914”; Ribak, “Victory of the Slavs Means a Deathblow for Democracy.” 93. Jewish Daily News, masthead, beginning July 29, 1914. 94. “The Day,” pamphlet, folder 248, box 8, Herman Bernstein Papers; see also Isaac Hourwich, “Talk United States,” Tog, December 13, 1914 (English Supplement). 95. “A Newspaper with a Good Policy,” New York Times, May 16, 1914. 96. Dolber, Media and Culture in the U.S. Jewish Labor Movement, 14. 97. Dolber, 32. 98. Conolly-­Smith, Translating America, 114–­116. 99. Dovid Katz, “Introduction,” 8; Goldberg, “Passing of The Day-­Jewish Morning Journal,” 16. On general trends, see Chaikin, Yidishe bleter in amerike, 132. 100. Soltes, Yiddish Press, 37. 101. For a fictionalized account of these dynamics, see Karpilove, Provincial News­ paper. 102. Hayim Malits, “Di heym un di froy,” Morgn-­zhurnal, April 9, 1916. 103. Hayim Malits, “Di heym un di froy,” Morgn-­zhurnal, February 4, 1917, February 3, 1918, and January 5, 1919.

Notes | 275

1 04. Malits, Di heym un di froy, foreword, n.p. 105. B. Z. Goldberg, “Vos interesirt froyen?,” Tog, April 14, 1922. 106. Soltes, Yiddish Press, 62. 107. Soltes, 57n1; also cited on 62n1. 108. B. Z. Goldberg, “Vos interesirt froyen?,” Tog, April 14, 1922. 109. “BZG Biography,” n.d., 2, folder: “Biography B.Z.G.,” box 72, Ben-­Zion Goldberg (Benjamin Waife) Papers. 110. Memorandum on the Reorganization of the Editorial Department by S. Dingol, n.d., folder 9, box 1, Day-­Morning Journal (“Der Tog”) Papers. 111. Adella Kean [Zametkin], “Fun a froy tsu froyen,” Tog, March 6, 1922. 112. “Unzer ‘Frayhayt,’ ” Frayhayt, April 2, 1922. 113. “Der vuks fun der ‘Frayhayt,’ ” Frayhayt, April 25, 1926; “ ‘Forverts’ is getsvungen tsu advertayzn,” Frayhayt, May 2, 1926. 114. Dovid Katz, “Introduction”; M. Hoffman, “Red Divide”; Estraikh, Transatlantic Russian Jewishness, chap. 3; Michels, Fire in Their Hearts, chap. 5. 115. “Dertstehlt ayer froy . . . ,” Frayhayt, April 2, 1922. 116. For Holtman’s account of her time at the Frayhayt, see Kirsch-­Holtman, Mayn lebns-­veg, 75. For her other journalistic pursuits, see McCune, “Whole Wide World without Limits,” 169–­171, 245n30. 117. R.H., “Vi darf oyszen di froyen-­opteylung,” Frayhayt, March 7, 1926. 118. Rokhl Holtman, “Vos darf mit zikh forshteln di froyen-­opteylung?” Frayhayt, February 21, 1926. 119. Holtman. 120. Holtman. 121. R.H., “Vi darf oyszen di froyen-­opteylung.” 122. Edlin, “Der ‘tog,’ ” 69. 123. For divergent scholarly assessments of editors’ statements about female writers and their relationship to historical truth, see Pratt, “Cultural and Radical Politics,” 76–­77; Klepfisz, “Queens of Contradiction”; Novershtern, “Ha-­kolot ve-­ha-­ makhela”; Hellerstein, Question of Tradition, introduction; Norich, “Translating and Teaching Yiddish Prose by Women”; Schachter, Women Writing Jewish Modernity, introduction.

Chapter 5. “Women and Men Who Are Like Women”

1. Reuben Iceland to Anna Margolin, January 8, 1921, folder 13, box 1, Anna Margolin Papers. On the Fraye arbeter shtime’s literary reputation, see Jacob Glatstein, “A dermonung tsum yubl fun der ‘Fraye arbeter shtime,’ ” Yidisher kemfer, December 9, 1960; Harshav and Harshav, American Yiddish Poetry, 29. 2. Reuben Iceland to Anna Margolin, January 11, 1921, folder 1, box 1, Anna Margolin Papers. Translation from Novershtern, “Who Would Have Believed that a Bronze Statue Can Weep,” 436. For a fictionalized account of these events, see Weprinsky, Dos kreytsn fun di hent, 94–­95. 3. Chaikin, Yidishe bleter in amerike, 258–­259.

276 | Notes

4. Edlin, “Der ‘tog,’ ” 71; see also Pratt, “Culture and Radical Politics,” 76–­77. 5. Marmor, Mayn lebns-­geshikhte, 753. 6. Botoshansky, Portretn fun yidishe shrayber, 251; Klepfisz, “Queens of Contradiction,” 25. 7. Miron, Traveler Disguised; Klepfisz, “Queens of Contradiction”; Seidman, Marriage Made in Heaven, 17; Brenner, “Authorial Fictions,” introduction. 8. Brenner, “Authorial Fictions,” 48–­49, 207–­208; Chajes, Otsar beduye ha-­shem; Niger, “Yidishe literatur un di lezerin,” 81; Zinberg, History of Jewish Literature, 250–­253; Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs, 127. 9. Miron, Traveler Disguised, 16; Klepfisz, “Queens of Contradiction,” 34; Seidman, Marriage Made in Heaven, 6–­7. 10. Chaikin, Yidishe bleter in amerike, 31, 7, 32–­36. 11. Niger and Shatzky, Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, 2:256–­261. 12. Niger and Shatzky, 2:46; Kagan, Leksikon fun yidish-­shraybers, 718; William Cody, “Why Marriage Fails,” box 62, Ben-­Zion Goldberg (Benjamin Waife) Papers. 13. Glatstein, quoted in Pat, Shmuesn mit yidishe shrayber, 84. For the short story, see Jacob Glatstein, “A geferlekhe froy,” Fraye arbeter shtime, September 28, 1914. 14. For various accounts, see Hadda, Yankev Glatshteyn, 11; Niger and Shatzky, Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, 2:256–­261; Tabatshnik, “Conversation with Jacob Glatstein”; Schwarz, “Jacob Glatstein,” 46–­48. 15. See, for example, Pat, Shmuesn mit yidishe shrayber; and Glatstein, “A dermonung tsum yubl fun der ‘Fraye arbeter shtime,’ ” Yidisher kemfer, December 9, 1960. 16. Klara Blum, “A gezang,” Fraye arbeter shtime, January 11, 1919. The first stanza is Janet Hadda’s translation, from Yankev Glatshteyn, 181n2. She did not include a translation of the second stanza, so that translation is my own. 17. Pinsker, Rich Brew, chap. 5. 18. Hadda, Yankev Glatshteyn, 181n2. 19. Hellerstein, “Against ‘Girl-­Songs,’ ” 73; Novershtern, “Ha-­kolot ve-­ha-­makhela,” 69. 20. See, for example, Klara Blum, “Er shlaft,” “Farnakhtn,” “Zog nisht,” and “Emetsns kind iz geshtorbn,” Fraye arbeter shtime, February 9, March 15, March 22, and May 3, 1919, respectively. 21. Klara Blum, “Benkshaft,” Fraye arbeter shtime, February 9, 1919. 22. Jacob Glatstein, “1919,” Poezye 1, no. 1 (June 1919): 6, translation by Kathryn Hellerstein and Benjamin Harshav, in Harshav and Harshav, American Yiddish Poetry, 209; Novershtern, “Young Glatstein and the Structure of His First Book of Poems,” 131; see also Novershtern, “Ha-­kolot ve-­ha-­makhela,” 69. 23. Harshav and Harshav, American Yiddish Poetry, 209; Hadda, Yankev Glatshteyn, 15; Novershtern, “Ha-­kolot ve-­ha-­makhela.” 24. Chaikin, Yidishe bleter in amerike, 258–­259; see also Y. Slonim, “Dikhter vos shraybn unter farshtelte nemen,” Varhayt, April 14, 1918; Nadir, Nadirgang, 54–­55; Jacob Glatstein, “A dermonung tsum yubl fun der ‘Fraye arbeter shtime,’ ” Yidisher kemfer, December 9, 1960; Novershtern, “Who Would Have Believed That a Bronze Statue Can Weep,” 437.

Notes | 277

25. Y. Slonim, “Dikhter vos shraybn unter farshtelte nemen,” Varhayt, April 14, 1918; Jones, “Anna Margolin,” 166; Novershtern, “Young Glatstein and the Structure of His First Book of Poems,” 131. 26. The identifiably female bylines in 1918 were Ida Glazer Andrews, Malka Rokhl Lyofman, Sore Vir, Emma Goldman, Miriam Karpilove, Sheyndl Bedrik, Liza Gudman, and Sore Frumkin. This list discounts work signed only with initials or anonymously or works by women written in foreign languages and translated by men into Yiddish. For biographical information on Glazer-­Andrews, see Niger and Shatzky, Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, 2:252–­253. For autobiographical information on Goldman, see Goldman, Living My Life. For biographical information on Karpilove, see Kirzane, introduction to Diary of a Lonely Girl. I could not find Lyofman, Vir, Bedrik, Gudman, or Frumkin in any lexicons, pseudonym lists or list of female writers of Yiddish literature. 27. For a similar argument, see Novershtern, “Ha-­kolot ve-­ha-­makhela,” 69. 28. A. Leyeles, “Zind,” Fraye arbeter shtime, September 19, 1914; Moyshe Leyb Halpern, “Yunge,” “Knekhtish blut,” “Es vet zayn,” Fraye arbeter shtime, July 19, 1919; H. Leyvik, “In keynem’s land,” Fraye arbeter shtime, November 2, 1918; “Fun khinezishe liriker” (translated from the English by L. Isaacson), Fraye arbeter shtime, April 5, 1919; Sully Prudhomme, “Do unten” (translated from the French by M. A. Herbert), Fraye arbeter shtime, October 20, 1917. 29. “Briefkasten,” Fraye arbeter shtime, December 14, 1918. 30. Jacob Glatstein, “A dermonung tsum yubl fun der ‘Fraye arbeter shtime,’ ” Yidisher kemfer, December 9, 1960. 31. The “Briefkasten” on December 7 lists a rejected poem called “Farnakhten” (Evenings), which is the name of a poem that Glatstein eventually published as Klara Blum on March 15, 1919. However, Glatstein suggested that the “Briefkasten” published a lengthier note specifically to him, rather than a rejection. 32. See, for example, “Briefkasten,” Fraye arbeter shtime, February 8 and February 15, 1919. 33. See, for example, “Briefkasten,” Fraye arbeter shtime, April 5, 1919. 34. “Briefkasten,” Fraye arbeter shtime, May 10, 1919. 35. Jacob Glatstein, “A dermonung tsum yubl fun der ‘Fraye arbeter shtime,’ ” Yidisher kemfer, December 9, 1960. 36. Ida Brener, “Der emes vegn farhayratn lebn,” Tog, March 6, 1921. 37. On Goldberg’s subsequent career, see Niger and Shatzky, Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, 2:46; Estraikh, Transatlantic Russian Jewishness, 261–­264. For reflections by his onetime secretary, the author Patricia Highsmith, see Highsmith, Patricia Highsmith. 38. For similar arguments about Yiddish theater, see Solomon, Re-­dressing the Canon, chap. 4; W. Hoffman, Passing Game, chap. 3. 39. Niger and Shatzky, Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, 2:46; “BZG Biography,” n.d., 2, folder: “Biography B.Z.G.,” box 72, Ben-­Zion Goldberg (Benjamin Waife) Papers.

278 | Notes

40. “Philosophy, Psychology, and Anthropology Announcement.” 41. B. Z. Goldberg, miscellaneous undated notes, item 7 box 4, Ben-­Zion Goldberg (Benjamin Waife) Papers. See also B. Z. Goldberg, notes and articles about sexuality, box 17, Ben-­Zion Goldberg (Benjamin Waife) Papers; B.-­Z. Goldberg, Sacred Fire; Hale, Freud and the Americans, 421. 42. B. Z. Goldberg, notes from lectures on psychology and other topics, folder: Jewish Teachers Seminary (Yiddish) (1920), box 67, Ben-­Zion Goldberg (Benjamin Waife) Papers; Winer, “Jewish Teachers’ Seminary and People’s University.” 43. Waife-­Goldberg, My Father, Sholom Aleichem, 285–­286; “B. Z. Goldberg, Columnist, Dies,” New York Times, December 30, 1972. 44. See, for example, B. Z. Goldberg, “Di geshlekht-­frage in skul,” Tageblat, October 6, 1913; Goldberg, “Di ershte froy in kongres,” Tageblat, July 17, 1914; Goldberg, “Yidishe studentkes,” Tageblat, June 2, 1914. 45. B. Z. Goldberg, “Politik un psikologye,” Tageblat, June 28, 1914. 46. “BZG Biography,” 2. 47. B. Z. Goldberg, “Fun vanen nemt zikh der bagrif fun neshome,” Tog, October 24, 1920. 48. Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres, 171. 49. See, for example, B. Z. Goldberg, “Vos iz di neshome,” Tog, November 7, 1921. 50. “BZG Biography,” 2–­3. 51. Ida Brener, “Der emes vegn farhayratn lebn,” Tog, March 6, 1921, March 13, 1921, March 20, 1921, and April 9, 1921. 52. Ida Brener, “Der emes vegn farhayratn lebn,” Tog, March 20, 1921. 53. Ida Brener, “Der emes vegn farhayratn lebn,” Tog, May 30, 1921. 54. Simmons, Making Marriage Modern, 4, 7; see also Stansell, American Moderns, chaps. 7 and 8. 55. Simmons, Making Marriage Modern, 65. 56. Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History, chap. 2; Seidman, Marriage Plot. 57. Ida Brener, “Brivlakh fun a froy,” Tog, June 16, 1921. 58. “B.Z.G. Biography,” 2. 59. B. Z. Goldberg, “Tsvishn di firer fun reform yidntum,” Tog, January 28, 1923; Goldberg, “Geendikt di skul—­vos vayter?,” Tog, June 30, 1923; Goldberg, “In a mormonishe tempel,” Tog, May 29, 1922; Goldberg, “In der englisher teater,” Tog, April 12, 1923. 60. Botoshansky, Portretn fun yidishe shrayber, 251. 61. William Cody, “Why Marriage Fails: A Study in the Psychology of Married Life,” box 62, Ben-­Zion Goldberg (Benjamin Waife) Papers. 62. See, for example, I. Brener, “Yeder mit zayn pekl,” Tog, May 19, 1922, in which Brener is referred to as one of “many doctors” whom a patient has consulted. 63. Kellman, “Newspaper Novel,” 227. 64. Max Weinreich to Abraham Cahan, March 24, 1920, folder 70, box 3, Abraham Cahan Papers. Weinreich’s articles as Brener ran in the Forverts throughout 1920

Notes | 279

and 1921. On Weinreich’s relationship to the Forverts in this period, see Estraikh, Transatlantic Russian Jewishness, chap. 5. 65. Almi, Momentn fun a lebn, 205. For another example of a poet who wrote under female pseudonyms before immigrating to the US, see Moyshe Leyb Halpern. Iceland, Fun unzer friling, 45; Wisse, Little Love in Big Manhattan, 77. 66. Almi, Momentn fun a lebn, 209–­210. 67. Almi, 209–­210 68. Korman, “Forvort”; Hellerstein, Question of Tradition, chap. 1; Jones, “Problematic, Fraught, Confusing, Paralyzing—­and Fantastic”; Weiman-­Kelman, Queer Expectations, chap. 5; Novershtern, “Ha-­kolot ve-­ha-­makhela.” 69. Zeydler, “Vi a foygele”; Almi, Momentn fun a lebn, 205–­206. 70. Almi, Momentn fun a lebn, 206, 209–­210. 71. See, for example, Sore Brener, “Di letste sensatsyonele pasirungen in berlin,” Forverts, December 14, 1920; Brener, “Di daytshe prese kokht mit di ganves fun a kayzer,” Forverts, January 10, 1921; Brener, “Interesante naye eyntselhaytn vegen dem kharakter fun Roze Luxenburg,” Forverts, January 23, 1921; Brener, Der privat-­leben fun der held un martirer Karl Liebknekht,” Forverts, January 28, 1921. 72. Marmor, Mayn lebns-­geshikhte, 753–­754. For similar descriptions of female authors by male commentators, see A. Glanz, “Kultur un di froy,” Fraye arbeter shtime, October 30, 1915; B. Z. Goldberg, “In gang fun tog,” Tog-­morgn-­zhurnal, September 2, 1961. For discussions of these tropes, see Jones, “Criticizing Women”; Norich, “Translating and Teaching Yiddish Prose by Women”; Schachter, Women Writing Jewish Modernity, introduction. 73. Marmor, Mayn lebns-­geshikhte, 754. 74. Iceland, From Our Springtime, 143; original: Iceland, Fun unzer friling, 152; see also Khave Gros, “In shlafloze nekht,” Fraye arbeter shtime, February 6, 1909; “Briefastn,” Fraye arbeter shtime, February 6, 1909. 75. Pratt, “Culture and Radical Politics.” 76. Iceland, From Our Springtime, 123. 77. Iceland, 143–­144. 78. Iceland, 159, 148; Zucker, “Ana Margolin un di poezye fun dem geshpoltenem ikh,” 175; Jones, “Anna Margolin,” 166. 79. Wisse, Little Love in Big Manhattan, 98, 287, 162. 80. Rosa Lebensboym, “In der froyen velt,” Tog, May 28, 1915. 81. Rosa Lebensboym, “In der froyen velt,” Tog, June 11, 1915. 82. Woodrow Wilson, “Di geshikhte fun amerike un fun amerikaner folk” (no translator listed), Tog, beginning April 19, 1915. 83. Rosa Lebensboym to H. L. Gordon, January 22, 1918, folder 9, box 1, Anna Margolin Papers. 84. Rosa Lebensboym to H. L. Gordon, January 17, 1917, November 14, 1918, folder 9, box 1, Anna Margolin Papers; Rosa Lebensboym to H. L. Gordon, November 1 and 6, 1917, folder 6, box 1, Anna Margolin Papers.

280 | Notes

85. Letters between Rosa Lebensboym and Reuben Iceland, December 17 and 20, 1920, January 18, 1921, September 19, 1922, and July 8, 1923, folder 1, box 1, Reuben Iceland Papers. See also Novershtern’s transcriptions of several of these letters in “Anna Margolin”; Pratt, “Anna Margolin’s ‘Lider,’ ” 23. 86. Pratt, “Culture and Radical Politics,” 81. 87. H. L. Gordon to Rosa Lebensboym, June 9, 1922, folder 9, box 1, Anna Margolin Papers. 88. Reuben Iceland to Rosa Lebensboym, March 9, 1925, folder 13, box 1, Anna Margolin Papers. 89. Rosa Lebensboym to Reuben Iceland, September 25, 1923, folder 1, box 1, Reuben Iceland Papers. 90. Rosa Lebensboym to Reuben Iceland, December 17, 1920, folder 1, box 1, Reuben Iceland Papers. 91. Adella Kean Zametkin, “Fun a froy tsu froyen,” Tog, April 20, 1918. For similar statements by writers working for European publications, see Schachter, Women Writing Jewish Modernity, introduction; Lisek, “Leaving Behind the Froyen-­ vinkl”; Norich and Szymaniak, “Women Writers in Yiddish Literature.” 92. Rokhl Holtman, “Vos darf mit zikh forshteln di froyen-­opteylung,” Frayhayt, February 21, 1926. 93. R.H., “Vi darf oyszen di froyen-­opteylung,” Frayhayt, March 7, 1926. 94. Karpilove, Provincial Newspaper and Other Stories. 95. Kirzane, introduction to Provincial Newspaper and Other Stories. 96. Iceland, From Our Springtime, 144. Possible articles that fit Iceland’s description include “Turgenev’s gelibte, di zingerin Madam Vardo,” Forverts, June 1, 1910; “A drama fun dem parizer nakht-­leben,” Forverts, August 12, 1910. 97. Howe, World of Our Fathers, 546; Michels, “Jean Jaffe”; Edlin, “Der ‘tog,’ ” 69–­72. 98. Adella Kean [Zametkin], “Kapitalizmus un alerley khalas,” Arbeter tsaytung, March 3, 1895; Stokes, I Belong to the Working Class: 86; Zunser, “Jewish Literary Scene in New York.” 99. Sources that identify these as pseudonyms for Lebensboym include Iceland, From Our Springtime, 163; Novershtern, “Who Would Have Believed a Bronze Statue Can Weep,” 435. Examples of her pseudonymous articles include Sofia Brandt, “Vi zikh tsu fotografiren,” Tog, March 6, 1917; Sofia Brandt, “Vi azoy vert men shlank?,” Tog, February 26, 1917. 100. Rosa Lebensboym to Reuben Iceland, September 20, 1923, folder 1, box 1, Reuben Iceland Papers. Translations she describes in this letter include Osip Dymov, “Di fayern fun heyligen oylem,” Tog, September 3, 1923; Osip Dymov, “Er vart,” Tog, September 11, 1923. Neither lists a translator for Dymov’s work when published in the Tog. 101. See, for example, Payroll, February 28–­March 6, 1925, folder 217, box 25, Day-­ Morning Journal (“Der Tog”) Papers. 102. Iceland, From Our Springtime, 129. 103. Rosa Lebensboym to Reuben Iceland, September 23, 1923, folder 1, box 1, Reuben Iceland Papers.

Notes | 281

104. Reyzen, Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur, prese un filologye, 3:639–­640; N. ­Kobrin, “Mayne eltern—­Leon un Paulina Kobrin,” 284; Reyzen, Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur, prese un filologye, 1:990; Kirsch-­Holtman, Mayn lebns-­veg, 65–­75; Cahan, Bleter fun mayn leben, 3:461. For a discussion of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s use of female translators in a later period, see Zaritt, Jewish American Writing and World Literature, 113–­114. 105. Parush, Reading Jewish Women, introduction. 106. Iceland, From Our Springtime, 140–­148; Jones, “Anna Margolin,” 164–­165. 107. Wisse, Little Love in Big Manhattan, 65, 152. 108. L. Kobrin, Mayne fuftsik yor in amerike, vol. 1, 374–­376. 109. N. Kobrin, “Mayne eltern—­Leon un Paulina Kobrin,” 284. 110. Reyzen, Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur, prese un filologye, 3:370. 111. L. Kobrin, Mayne fuftsik yor in amerike, vol. 1, n.p. 112. Zunser, “Jewish Literary Scene”; “Mrs. Zametkin Dead: A Socialist Leader,” New York Times, May 20, 1931. 113. Folders 343–­437 of Der tog’s archives consist of correspondence from readers, most of which include replies signed by Atkins. Boxes 36–­42, Day-­Morning Journal (“Der Tog”) Papers. 114. Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History; Feiner, “Ha’isha hayehudiya hamodernit”; Prell, Fighting to Become Americans. 115. Soltes, Yiddish Press; Zaritt, “World Awaits Your Yiddish Word.” 116. For a similar argument, see Klepfisz, “Queens of Contradiction,” 25. For ­similar arguments about Yiddish theater, see Solomon, Re-­dressing the Canon, 8–­9. 117. Pratt, “Culture and Radical Politics, 76–­77; see also Brenner, “Authorial Fictions,” 93; Novershtern, Ha-­kolot ve-­ha-­makhela.” 118. Rojanski, “Socialist Ideology, Traditional Rhetoric,” 342. For discussions of this divergence, see Norich, “Translating and Teaching Yiddish Prose by Women”; Jones, “How to Suppress Yiddish Women’s Writing.”

Epilogue

1. Hobson, First Papers. 2. Hobson, Gentleman’s Agreement; Gentleman’s Agreement, dir. Elia Kazan (20th Century Fox, 1947). On the connections between Hobson’s writing and activism, see Gordan, “From Antisemitism to Homophobia”; Gordan, “Laura Z. Hobson and the Making of Gentleman’s Agreement.” On the contemporary resonance of First Papers, see Hobson, Laura Z., 9; Frank Kappler, “Nostalgic Job by an Angry Pen,” Life, November 27, 1964, 16. 3. Hobson, Laura Z., 7. 4. Laura Z. Hobson to Roger Baldwin, July 1, 1953, First Papers Scrapbook, box 2 oversize, Laura Keane Zametkin Hobson Papers; Laura Z. Hobson, Laura Z., 9. 5. Annie Bell to Laura Z. Hobson, January 10, 1965, Correspondence from Readers, 1964–­1982, box 31, Laura Keane Zametkin Hobson Papers.

282 | Notes

6. Julia Shachat to Laura Z. Hobson, May 5, 1981, Correspondence from Readers, 1964–­1982, box 31, Laura Keane Zametkin Hobson Papers. 7. Julia Shachat to Laura Z. Hobson, February 23, 1965, and May 5, 1981, Correspondence from Readers, 1964–­1982, box 31, Laura Keane Zametkin Hobson Papers. 8. Alexander Holzberg to Laura Z Hobson, December 20, 1964, Correspondence from Readers, 1964–­1982, box 31. 9. Laura Z. Hobson to Sylvia M. Lopen, March 6, 1965, Correspondence from Readers, 1964–­1982, box 31, Laura Keane Zametkin Hobson Papers. 10. Laura Z. Hobson, notes during drafting of First Papers, binder vol. 1, 66E, box 31, Laura Keane Zametkin Hobson Papers. 11. Hobson, First Papers, 228. 12. Hobson, 244. 13. Hobson, 283. 14. Hobson, 313. 15. Adolph Held, transcribed interview, May 9, 1964, box 2, Oral Histories on the Labor Movement. Correspondence between B. Z. Goldberg and S. Dingol, 1927, folder 7, box 1, Day-­Morning Journal (“Der Tog”) Papers. 16. Hobson, Laura Z., 160. 17. Kagan, Leksikon fun yidish-­shraybers, 741. 18. [Mikhail Zametkin], “Fun a froy tsu froyen,” Forverts, April 7, 1898. 19. Hobson, Laura Z., 11, 22–­23; Michels, Fire in Their Hearts, 155. 20. See, for example, J. C. Rich, “60 Years of the Jewish Daily Forward,” in Hobson, notes during drafting of First Papers, binder vol. 1, 64–­66, box 31, Laura Keane Zametkin Hobson Papers; Laura Z. Hobson to Moses Rischin, December 17, 1962, Correspondence about Publishing, box 31, Laura Keane Zametkin Hobson Papers. 21. M. Winchevsky, “ ‘Fraye prese’ un der ‘Forverts,’ ” Varhayt, January 11, 1906; L. Kobrin, Mayne fuftsik yor in amerike, vol. 1, chap. 14; Howe, World of Our Fathers, 524; Harap, Image of the Jew in American Literature, 488; Michels, Fire in Their Hearts, 104–­105. 22. Hobson, notes during drafting of First Papers, binder vol. 1, 66F, box 31, Laura Keane Zametkin Hobson Papers; original citation: Rischin, Promised City, 126. 23. Hobson, notes during drafting of First Papers, binder vol. 1, 66E, box 31, Laura Keane Zametkin Hobson Papers. 24. Moses Rischin to Laura Z. Hobson, October 12, 1962, and Laura Z. Hobson to Moses Rischin, December 17, 1962, Correspondence about Publishing, box 31, Laura Keane Zametkin Hobson Papers. 25. Rischin, “Responsa.” 26. Moses Rischin to Laura Z. Hobson, October 12, 1962, Correspondence about Publishing, box 31, Laura Keane Zametkin Hobson Papers. 27. Hobson, First Papers, 78. 28. Hobson, chap. 29.

Notes | 283

29. Adella Kean Zametkin, “Fun a froy tsu froyen,” Tog, April 20, 1918. The timing of Kean Zametkin’s debut in the Tog was slightly later than that of her fictional counterpart in First Papers. 30. Zametkin, Der froys handbukh, 7–­8; Hobson, Laura Z., 11–­12; Wiley, Autobiography. 31. Zametkin, Der froys handbukh, 7–­8. 32. Hobson, Laura Z., 11. 33. “Mrs. Zametkin Dead: A Socialist Leader,” New York Times, May 20, 1931. 34. Adella Kean [Zametkin], “Di naye froy (The New Woman),” Arbeter tsaytung, May 29, 1896. 35. Adella Kean [Zametkin], “Kapitalizmus un alerley khulas,” Arbeter tsaytung, March 3, 1895; Kean [Zametkin], “Sotsial-­politishe visenshaften,” Arbeter tsaytung, September 14, 1894. 36. Kean [Zametkin], “Sotsial-­politishe visenshaften.” 37. “Fun der redaktsion,” Arbeter tsaytung, September 14, 1894. 38. Michels, “Speaking to Moyshe.” 39. Pla”i, “Nile,” Arbeter tsaytung, October 5, 1894. 40. Hobson, Laura Z., 12, 36, 64; Cassedy, To the Other Shore, 101–­103; McCune, “The Whole Wide World without Limits,” 74, 165–­167. 41. “Mrs. Zametkin Dead.” 42. “Mrs. Adela Kiyen Zametkin un Dr. Anna Ingerman geshtorben,” Forverts, May 20, 1931. As Kean Zametkin died on the same day as another female socialist leader, Anna Ingerman, several publications published joint obituaries. See also “Dr. Anna Ingerman and Mrs. Zametkin Meet Death,” New Leader, May 23, 1931. 43. “Di fershtorbene genasin Adela Kiyen Zametkin un Dr. Ana [sic] Ingerman,” Forverts, May 21, 1931. 44. Reyzen, Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur, prese un filologye, 3:639–­640. 45. Reyzen, 1:1038; “From Lexicon of Yiddish Writers; Mr. M. Zametkin,” binder vol. 1, n.p., box 31, Laura Keane Zametkin Hobson Papers. 46. Hobson, First Papers, 322. 47. Reyzen, Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur, prese, un filologye, 3:640; N. G. Tshernishevski, “Vos zol men thon” (trans. Adela Kean and M. Zametkin), Tageblat, August 27–­December 9, 1914; Tshernishevski, Vos thut men. Note that this edition of the book does not list the Zametkins as translators, so I am relying on Reyzen’s assessment, as well as the similarities between these translations. 48. Sofia Hoyzfroy, “Fun a froy tsu froyen” Forverts, April 7, 1898; Sofia Hoyzfroy, “Vaybershe taynes” Forverts, January 8, 1902. 49. Goren, “Jewish Press,” 206–­218. For one example of the Yiddish press’s mobilization against immigration restrictions, see letters from readers asking the paper to intercede on their behalf with immigration officials, in folder 438, box 42, Day-­ Morning Journal (“Der Tog”) Papers. 50. Chaikin, Yidishe bleter in amerike, 218. 51. Chaikin, chap. 39.

284 | Notes

52. B. Z. Goldberg, “The Passing of The Day-­Jewish Morning Journal,” Midstream, April 1972, 12–­28. 53. Shulman and Weber, Leksikon fun Forverts shrayber; Kellman, “Newspaper Novel”; Kirzane, introduction to Diary of a Lonely Girl, 2–­3 Zaritt, Jewish American Writing and World Literature. 54. Chaikin, Yidishe bleter in amerike, chap. 47. 55. Kelman, Station Identification; Dolber, Media and Culture in the U.S. Jewish Labor Movement; items related to the Day’s ventures into radio, in folder 8, box 1, Day-­ Morning Journal (“Der Tog”) Papers. 56. Folders 343–­438, boxes 36–­42, Day-­Morning Journal (“Der Tog”) Papers. 57. Jaclyn Peiser, “In Print since 1897, The Forward Goes Digital Only,” New York Times, January 17, 2019. 58. Rachel Fishman Fedderson, “The Forward, America’s Leading Jewish News Organization, Goes All Digital,” Forward, January 17, 2019. 59. “A New Editor at the Forward,” New York Times, May 13, 2008; “Boris Sandler Retires as Editor of the Yiddish Forward,” Forward, March 9, 2016. 60. Miriam Hoffman, “Mayne ershte trit in mantsbilshn forverts-­byuro,” Forverts, March 28, 2019. 61. Fox, “Schaechter Sisters, Rukhl and Gitl.”

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Index

Abend blat, 27, 31–­32, 236 Abramson, Sarah, 97 acculturation: advertisements and, 43, 82–­83; advice columns and, 78–­83, 97–­99; in the Anglophone press, 49–­50; debates over, 43–­44; English pages in newspapers and, 26–­28; equality of women and, 36, 120–­125; multiple definitions of culture and, 17–­18; oral histories in newspapers and, 99; role of women in, 34, 59, 123; tradition and, 28, 123 advertisements: in acculturation, 43, 82–­83; advertising circulars, 34; advice columns and, 82–­83, 87; in Anglophone publications, 43; for Bebel’s book, 134–­138; classified and want ads, 4, 15, 94, 134; contingent on female readers, 27–­28, 33–­34, 54–­55, 142, 149–­150; to demonstrate loyalty, 170; for the Empress of China, 23; encouraging women to engage with, 124, 128, 130–­131; English Department and, 26–­27; expansion of daily presses and, 9, 25–­27, 31, 129–­130; incorporation into articles, 27; radical ideologies and, 103, 129–­134, 136; for socialist activities, 82; in women’s pages, 150–­151; women’s pages in attracting, 3, 8–­9, 13, 27–­28, 55, 1650 Advertiser. See Commercial Advertiser advice columns: in acculturation of new immigrants, 78–­83, 97–­99; advertisements and, 82–­83, 87; in the American press, 64–­66, 70–­7 1, 79–­80; attract-

ing female readers with, 8–­9, 64–­65, 74–­78; criticism of, 3, 74; elements in, 64; female writers of, 69, 85, 86–­87; First Papers (Hobson) on, 228–­229; in forming a sense of Jewish community, 90–­91; gendered descriptions of, 87–­88; as guides to daily life, 78–­80; human-­ interest material in, 65–­70; importance of, 57, 76–­78, 88–­89; Jewish institutional life and, 83–­85; local and distant audiences for, 86, 89–­91, 100; on local resources and institutions, 83–­85; male authority in, 86, 100; political ideology and, 87–­88; reader contributions to, 62–­63, 66–­69, 91–­99; readers connected to papers by, 5–­6, 10–­11, 62–­63, 65–­66, 85–­88, 91; reader visits to editorial offices, 92–­93; reasons for reading, 94–­98; role in press development, 64–­65; staff contributions to, 76–­77; in the Tageblat, 65–­70, 77–­78, 81–­82, 86–­88; tragic consequences from not heeding, 88; in the Varhayt, 67; for young, female readers, 39, 69–­70, 150, 203. See also names of specific columns “Advice to the Lovelorn” (Fairfax), 70–­7 1 “The adviser” (“Der baleytse”; Varhayt), 67, 76 After the Wedding (Nokh der khupe; Zelikovits), 38–­39 Allard, Leola, 163 Almi, A. (Elyahu Sheps), 77, 206 Americanization. See acculturation American Jewess, 43

303

304 | Index

American press: advice columns in, 64–­66, 70–­7 1, 79–­80; Cahan writing for, 44, 45–­46, 48–­51; depictions of immigrant lives in, 46, 48–­49; human-­interest articles in, 24–­25, 45, 60; magazines for women, 165–­166; marketing strategies from, 26, 32, 45; as sources for the Yiddish press, 24, 34, 40–­44, 47, 59, 163–­164; women’s pages competing with, 143 Anglophone press. See American press Arbeter Ring, 82 Arbeter tsaytung, 27, 47–­48, 53, 215, 236–­238 Ashkenazi Jews, 30–­31, 202, 217 Atkins, Helen, 86, 96, 219 “Aunt Ray’s Club,” 90–­91 “Der baleytse” (Varhayt), 67, 76 Beard, Mary Ritter, 211 Bebel, August, 134–­138 Bell, Annie, 226 Belson, Abraham, 99 “Benkshaft” (Blum [Glatstein]), 191 Berger, Shulamith Z., 151 “Bilder fun di korts” (Smith), 161–­162 “Bintel brief ” (Forverts): American press influence on, 70–­72; benefits of, 75–­76; Cahan’s replies to, 72–­73; corrections and fabrication of letters, 72–­74, 85; functions of, 64–­65, 70–­7 1, 76; gender of editors, 86, 112; gender of readers, 64–­65, 74–­78, 87–­88; impacts on readers’ lives, 88–­89, 94; Leib as editor of, 74–­75; literary nature of, 72; origin of, 62–­65, 67, 70–­7 1; Pastor as editor of, 112, 114–­117; readers’ letters in, 62–­63, 66–­70, 72, 82, 91–­92, 97; Rischin on, 232; “spoken Bintel” at newspaper offices, 92–­93. See also advice columns; letters from readers Bisno, Abraham, 95 Blum, Klara (Jacob Glatstein), 186, 187–­193

Blumenson, S. L., 158–­159 Boas, Franz, 200 Botoshansky, Jacob, 204 boycotts and strikes, press support of, 47, 88–­89, 94, 130–­134 Bradley, Ann, 124 Brandt, Sofia (Rosa Lebensboym), 216 Brener, I. (Ben-­Zion Goldberg), 203 Brener, Ida (Ben-­Zion Goldberg), 197–­198, 200, 201–­205 “Briefkasten,” 66, 77–­78, 195 Cahan, Abraham: “Bintel brief ” created by, 62–­65, 72–­76; at the Commercial Advertiser, 46–­51; as court reporter, 49; criticism of, by radical intelligentsia, 1–­4, 54–­55; Gropper’s cartoon of, 1–­3; handkerchief article by, 157–­158; Imber and, 44–­45; increasing female readership, 4, 45–­46, 53–­54, 57–­58, 257n108; intended audience of, 4, 7–­8, 53–­54; promotion of Bebel’s book, 134–­138; return to the Forverts (1902), 51–­52; soliciting letters from readers, 62–­63; as writer for the American press, 44, 45–­46, 48–­51 Cahan, Anna, 216–­217 Cassedy, Steven, 72, 258 n9 Chaikin, Joseph: on “Bintel brief,” 73; on the European Yiddish press, 166–­167; on the Fraye arbeter shtime, 193–­194; history of the Yiddish press, 32, 186, 242; on Pastor’s popularity, 104 classified and want ads, 4, 15, 94, 134 Cohen, Rose, 92, 98 Commercial Advertiser: depiction of immigrant lives in, 48–­51; human interest articles in, 45–­46 Conolly-­Smith, Peter, 170, “A Corner for Ladies” (Zelikovits), 118, 119–­120, 267n51 correspondence networks, 90–­91 court reporters, 161–­162

Index | 305

Dalidansky, I. L., 122 “Di debyutantin” (“The debutante”; ­Malis), 156–­158 Dix, Dorothy (Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer), 108, 162, 228 Dolber, Brian, 150, 170 Dymov, Osip, 216 “Each with His Burden” (I. Brener [Goldberg]), 204–­205 “The East Side Observer” (Tageblat), 40, 68, 109 editorials, questions for readers in, 77 Edlin, William, 160–­161, 179–­180, 182, 200–­201, 203 Eisner, Jane, 243 Elizovitsh, S., 57 Elyash (Elyahu Steps), 206 Emma T”B (Avner Tanenboym), 35, 59–­60 Empress of China, misleading story on, 23 English Department (Tageblat), 39–­44; Anglophone press material in, 40–­41; discontinuation of, 104; female writers for, 26–­27, 68, 104, 106–­107; Pastor’s writings for, 68, 104; roles of, 26–­27, 43–­44, 68, 150; surveying readers’ interest in, 68; women’s content in, 39–­40, 68, 107; write-­in contests, 68 English-­language Jewish periodicals, 40–­41 Epstein, Melech, 4 “Ethics of the Dustpan” (Pastor), 107 etiquette guides, 81 European Yiddish press: American Yiddish press preceding, 6, 24, 60–­61; becoming commercial presses, 166–­168; censorship laws on, 6, 28–­29, 166; pseudonyms of male authors in, 184 Evening Journal, 70–­7 1 “Ezras noshim,” 36–­37, 242 Fahs, Alice, 164 Fairfax, Beatrice (Marie Manning), 70–­7 1, 108, 228

“Far der arbeter-­un hoyz-­froy” (Frayhayt), 176–­178 Fedderson, Rachel Fishman, 243 female pseudonyms: appearance of modernity in, 182, 222; to diversify bylines, 208; of female writers, 104, 107–­108, 126, 182, 183, 194; gender politics subverted by, 186; of male writers ashamed of writing in Yiddish, 56; of male writers of women’s columns, 35, 38, 118, 181–­184, 187, 222; as more likely to be published, 181–­182, 188, 193–­195; for poetry men should not write, 196–­197; readers unaware of gender, 39, 104, 210; for serialized fiction writing, 35, 38, 205; style difference in men writing as, 188–­191, 193, 203, 205–­206; women’s “voices” versus women writers, 20, 35–­36, 183; in Yiddish culture, 181, 184–­186 female readers: advertisers and, 27–­28, 33–­34, 54–­55, 142, 149–­150; “Bintel brief ” and, 64–­65, 74–­78, 87–­88; conflated as mass audience, 3–­4, 8, 16–­17, 24–­25, 174; and Jewish culture, 9–­10; efforts to attract, 3–­5, 8–­9, 27–­28, 45–­46, 64–­65, 74–­78; of the Forverts, 4, 45–­46, 53–­54, 57–­58, 148–­149; human-­ interest pieces and, 9, 45–­46, 56–­57; improving reading skills, 76, 94, 148, 168; moving into the middle class, 142–­143; newspaper sections read by, 124–­126, 171–­174; Sholem Aleichem on, 56; of the Tageblat, 8, 10, 33–­34, 59–­60; Yiddish press expansion and, 10, 25–­ 26, 45–­46, 64–­65, 229–­230; young, 39, 69–­70, 150, 203 female writers: bylines limited for, 18–­20, 194, 208–­213, 216–­220, 236, 277n26; for the English Department, 26–­27, 68, 104, 106–­107; in European venues, 206, 279n65; gendered critiques of, 20, 183, 208–­209; on men writing under

306 | Index

female writers (cont.) obstacles to, 183, 208–­209, 221, 239; relationships with men and, 217–­219; shifting gender dynamics and, 222–­223; as signals of a paper’s modernity, 182; style required of, 188–­190, 196–­197, 203; undermined by editors, 237–­238; as undervalued, 118, 239–­240; writing anonymously, 104, 110, 215–­216, 220. See also female pseudonyms; names of specific writers Feygen, Dvoyre (Elyahu Steps), 77, 207–­208 Feygenboym, Benjamin, 135, 137 First Papers (Hobson): on Americanization of the Yiddish press, 228–­229; Hobson family history in, 226–­228; influence of current events on, 226; influence of Rischin on, 232–­234; Kean Zametkin’s character in, 226, 234–­241; low status of women’s content and, 232, 233; Mikhail Zametkin’s character in, 230–­234; plot of, 225, 227, 228–­229, 234–­235; on women’s role in the Yiddish press, 229–­231. See also Hobson, Laura Z. food safety, 160 “For the working [woman] and housewife” (“Far der arbeter-­un hoyz-­froy”; Frayhayt), 176–­178 Forverts (Forward): advertisements in, 128–­129; Americanization of, 52, 57; Bebel’s book translation by, 134–­138; Cahan’s return to (1902), 51–­52; commercial appeal of, 3; competition with the Frayhayt, 175; coverage of boycotts and strikes, 88–­89; debates on role of ideology, 47–­48; expanded Sunday editions, 164; features and human-­ interest articles in, 45–­46, 52–­53; early women’s content in, 57–­58, 146, 257n108; “From a woman to women” (“Fun a froy tsu froyen”; Klara

Ginzburg), 101–­102; From a woman to women” (“Fun a froy tsu froyen”; Sofia Housewife [Zametkin]), 57, 230, 240;“Gallery of missing husbands” (“Galerye fun farshvundene mener”), 85; as the highest circulating Yiddish daily, 25–­26; human-­interest articles in, 44–­46, 52–­55; ideology of, 12, 25–­26, 59, 117, 136, 250n23; importance of female readers, 59, 148–­149; increasing female readers, 4, 45–­46, 53–­54, 57–­58; innovations under Cahan, 44–­46; intended audience for, 7–­8, 53–­54; Kean Zametkin obituary in, 239; Kreutzer Sonata (Tolstoy) translation in, 135; Pastor’s columns in, 111–­112, 114–­118; sensationalism in, 2, 4, 52, 137–­138; serialized fiction in, 93, 101, 205; on the suffrage movement, 154–­155; switch to digital form, 243; Vladeck at, 149–­150; as a voice for socialist doctrine, 45; women’s columns by Lunts, 87–­88; “Women’s interests” (“Froyen interesen”), 146, 151; Yiddish Yiddish in, 51–­52. See also “Bintel brief ” Forverts Association, 48 Franklin, Benjamin, 186 Die Frau und der Sozialismus (Bebel), 134–­138 Fraye arbeter shtime: “Briefkasten” in, 195; female bylines in, 193–­195, 277n26; “A gezang” (Blum [Glatstein]), 189–­190; Lebensboym at, 210; as literary venue, 158, 181, 187, 193–­197; style expected of women’s writing, 188–­190, 196–­197 Frayhayt: Communist Party funding of, 176; criticism of Cahan, 1–­3; founding of, 175–­176; as intellectually driven, 13, 95; women’s columns in, 19, 141, 155, 176–­178, 213; women’s page, 155, 176–­178, 213–­214 Der fraynd (The friend, European daily newspaper), 78

Index | 307

Der fraynd (The Friend, American monthly newspaper), 159–­160, 237 Freedman, Pauline, 96–­97 “From a woman to women (“Fun a foy tsu froyen”; Ginzburg; Forverts), 101–­102, 146 “From a woman to women” (“Fun a foy tsu froyen”; Kean Zametkin; Tog), 160, 235, 240 “From a woman to women” (“Fun a foy tsu froyen”; Sofia Housewife [Zametkin]; Forverts), 57, 230, 240 Fromenson, A. H., 43, 106–­107, 109, 110–­111 “Froyen interesen” (Forverts), 146, 151 Di froyen-­velt, 165 Froyen-­zhurnal, 158, 159 Der froy’s handbukh (Kean Zametkin), 235–­238 “Di froy un di familye” (Tageblat), 146, 151 “Di froy un di heym” (Tog), 143–­146 “Di froy vos iz arunter fun glaykehn veg” (Hermalin), 163–­164 “Fun a froy tsu froyen” (Ginzburg), 101–­102, 146 “Fun a froy tsu froyen” (Sofia Housewife [Zametkin]), 57, 101–­102, 240 “Fun a froy tsu froyen” (Kean Zametkin), 160, 235, 240 “Galerye fun farshvundene mener,” 85 Ganz, Marie, 92–­93 Gazetn, 28, 119 Gentlemen’s Agreement (Hobson), 225 German socialist papers, 46–­47, 58 “A gezang” (Blum [Glatstein]), 189–­190 Gilmer, Elizabeth Meriwether, 108 Ginzburg, Klara, 101–­102, 146 Glantz-­Leyeles, Aaron, 187–­188, 194, 277 n28 Glatstein, Jacob: “1919,” 191–­192; “Benkshaft” (“Longing”), 191; early career of, 220–­211; “A gezang” (“A song”), 189–­ 190; as Klara Blum, 186, 187–­193; style

changes with pseudonym use, 182–­184, 186–­191, 193; Yanovsky on, 195, 196 Glazer-­Andrews, Ida, 194 Gold, Michael (Itzok Isaac Granich), 94 Goldberg, Ben-­Zion: critical of Edlin’s editorial style, 160–­161; as I. Brener, 204–­205; as Ida Brener, 197–­198, 201–­203; “In the course of the day” (“In gang fun tog”), 204; “Letters of a Young Woman,” 203; life and education of, 198–­199; on married life, 197–­198, 201–­203; origin story, 220–­221; pseudonyms used by, 182–­183, 186, 197–­198, 201–­205; “Soul Loneliness,” 201; “The Truth about Married Life,” 197–­198, 201; “What Is the Soul,” 199; on women’s content, 8, 172–­173, 174–­175; writing under his own name, 199–­201, 204–­205 Goldberg, Ze’ev, 35 Di goldene medine (The golden land), 1–­3 Goldman, Emma, 194 Goldstein, Minnie, 94 Gordon, Hirsh-­Leyb, 212 Goren, Arthur, 84 Gottheil, Gustav, 41–­42 Gottlieb, Leon, 62–­63, 72–­73 Granich, Itzok Isaac, 94 Gropper, William, 1–­3, 4 Gross, Khave (Rosa Lebensboym), 209 Der groyser kundes (The big stick), 13, 75, 112, 113 Hadda, Janet, 190 Haile, Margaret, 57 Haisraeli, 40 handkerchief, articles on the, 157–­158 Handlin, Oscar, 233 Harap, Louis, 138 Hasanovitz, Elizabeth, 94 Heinze, Andrew, 82, 129 Held, Adolph, 54, 95 Hermalin, David, 111, 112–­113, 163–­164

308 | Index

“Di heym un di froy” (Malits), 151, 172 A History of the American People (­Wilson), 211–­212 Hobson, Laura Z.: father’s women’s columns unknown to, 231–­232; Gentlemen’s Agreement, 225; inability to read Yiddish sources, 231–­232; influence of parents on, 226–­227, 239; mother’s early work unknown to, 236–­239; role of gender in the Yiddish press and, 234. See also First Papers (Hobson) Hoffman, Miriam, 243 Hollingworth, Leta Stetter, 202 Holtman, Rokhl, 155, 176–­178, 213–­214, 216–­217 Holzberg, Alexander, 227 “home papers,” 9, 27–­28, 34 Howe, Irving, 99, 162 human-­interest articles: in the American press, 24–­25, 45, 60; in the Commercial Advertiser, 48–­51; First Papers (Hobson) on, 228–­229; as forging common ground, 50; in the Forverts, 44–­46, 52–­55; gendered criticism of, 44–­45, 55, 87–­88; as signaling female readership, 9, 45–­46, 56–­57. See also advice columns; women’s columns Hyman, Paula, 88 Iceland, Reuben, 181–­182, 210, 212–­213, 216 ideology of the Yiddish press: advertisements and, 103, 129–­134, 136; advice columns and, 87–­88; balancing, with mass appeal, 13, 251n23; content of women’s pages and, 10, 57–­58, 102–­103, 140–­143, 152–­156, 176–­178; debates on the role of, 47–­48; of the Forverts, 12, 25–­26, 59, 117, 136, 250n23; ideology of writers and, 12–­13, 158–­161; letters from readers and, 81–­82, 101–­102; in marketing strategies, 250n23; Pastor and, 104, 107, 116–­117; of the Tageblat, 12, 25–­26, 41–­44, 250n23; Zelikovits and, 10, 119

Imber, Naftali Herz, 44–­45 immigration. See Jewish immigrants “In der froyen velt” (Lebensboym), 152–­153, 210–­214 “In gang fun tog” (Goldberg), 204 Ingerman, Anna, 283n42 interfaith marriage: Lithuanian Wisewoman on, 120; of Pastor, 107–­108, 111; Tageblat and, 104, 107, 265n10 “In the course of the day” (“In gang fun tog”; Goldberg), 204 “In the Women’s World” (“In der froyen velt”; Lebensboym), 152–­153, 210–­214 Introspectivists (Inzikhistn), 187–­188, 194 “The Jewess as She Was and Is” (Gottheil), 41–­42 Jewish community culture, cultivating, 83–­85, 89–­91 Jewish immigrants: anti-­immigrant sentiment, 169, 226; Ashkenazi Jews in the 1890s, 30–­31; depictions of lives of, 46, 48–­51; gender dynamics of immigration, 61; immigration curtailment, 168, 241, 283n49; improving reading skills of, 76, 94, 95, 148, 168; patriotism of, 17–­18; Spanish-­American War and, 49. See also acculturation “The Jewish New Woman” (Tageblat), 123 Jewish tradition: advice on local institutions and resources, 83–­85; consumer culture and, 82; women’s columns and, 34, 36–­37, 119–­121 job listings, 4, 15, 94, 134 Johnson–­Reed Act of 1924, 241, 283n49 “Just Between Ourselves, Girls” (Pastor), 69–­70, 86, 103–­105, 107 Kamaiky, Leon, 31 Karpilove, Miriam, 106, 194, 214 Katz, Daniel, 131 Katz, Moyshe, 112

Index | 309

Kean Zametkin, Adella: editors undermining, 238; First Papers (Hobson) and, 226, 234–­241; obituaries of, 239, 283n42; radical perspective of, 159–­161, 175, 215; topics of women’s columns of, 159–­161, 213, 235–­237; as translator, 216–­217, 240, 283n47; on the Yiddish press exploiting women, 213 Kellman, Ellen, 73, 85, 206, 258n9 Kirzane, Jessica, 214 Kligsberg, Moses, 98 Kobrin, Leon, 218–­219 Kobrin, Paulina Segal, 216, 218–­219 Korman, Ezra, 207 Kovner, B. (Jacob Adler), 3 Krantz, Philip, 47, 60 Kreutzer Sonata (Tolstoy) translation, 135 Ladies’ Home Journal, 41–­42, 43, 165 Lebensboym, Rosa: as Anna Margolin, 181–­182, 209–­220; anonymous or pseudonymous articles of, 140–­141, 209, 215–­216; career trajectory critique, 208–­209; critique of women’s pages, 140–­141, 152–­153, 156; as editor of “The woman and the home” (“Di froy un di heym”), 143–­144, 145–­146; on gendered stereotypes, 214; “In the Women’s World” (“In der froyen velt”), 152–­153, 210–­214; as Khave Gross, 209; on limitations placed upon female writers, 19, 183, 210–­213, 219–­220; poetry of, 181–­182, 210; staff positions and relationships of, 217, 219; as translator for the Tog, 216 Leib, Mani, 74–­75 Leksikon fun yidish shraybers (Kagan), 232 Lemlich, Clara, 94 letters from readers: in “Bintel brief,” 62–­63, 66–­70, 72, 82, 91–­92, 97; in “Briefkasten,” 66, 77–­78, 195; correcting and rewriting, 72–­74, 85; ideology and, 81–­82, 101–­102; in Merely-­a-­Man’s

columns, 127; Pastor’s columns and, 105–­106, 108, 114, 116; responses to advice columns, 91–­99; unpublished letters, 96–­97 “Letters of a Young Woman” (Ida Brener [Goldberg]), 203 Levin, Klara. See Lebensboym, Rosa Levine, S. D., 55 “Leydi’s korner” (Zelikovits), 36–­37 Liberman, Elias, 187 Lithuanian Wisewoman (“Di litvishe khokhmanis”; Zelikovits): After the Wedding (Nokh der khupe), 38–­39; choice of Zelikovits to write, 34–­35, 36–­37; “A Corner for the Ladies,” 118, 119–­120, 267n51; debate with Merely-­ a-­Man, 127–­128; fictionalized origin story of, 38–­39; on frustrations of female writers, 19–­20; “Men’s Corner,” 119–­120, 126–­128; moral messages by, 124–­125; on reading newspapers broadly, 124–­126; used for mass appeal, 119; on voting rights for women, 121–­122, 125–­126 “Lullabies of Our Russian Mothers,” 41 Lunts, Matilda, 87–­88 Luria, Esther, 156 “Magazine Page,” 165 Making Marriage Modern (Simmons), 202 Malis, Rae (Rae Raskin), 156–­159 Malits, Hayim, 23–­24, 149, 168–­169, 172 Manning, Marie, as Beatrice Fairfax, 70–­7 1, 108, 228 Margolin, Anna, 181–­182, 209–­220 marketing strategies: of American newspapers, 26, 32, 45; female pseudonyms in, 183; gendered strategies, 11, 26, 86, 149; ideology in, 250n23; reader relationships in, 86; sensationalism in, 23, 116 Marmor, Kalman, 182, 208–­209 marriage brokers (shadkhns), 50, 81

310 | Index

married life, 57–­58, 120–­121, 197–­198, 201–­203 Marshall, Louis, 59, 70 maskilim, 29–­30, 38, 67, 167, 217 “Mener un froyen” (Tog), 76 “Men’s Corner” (Zelikovits), 119–­120, 126–­128 “Merely-­a-­Man” (“Nur-­a-­Mansbil,” ­Zelikovits), 118, 126–­128 Miller, Louis, 67, 129, 169, 242 Minkoff, Nahum, 187 Mirkin, Esther (Elyahu Sheps), 207 Montessori, Maria, 235 Morgn frayhayt, 138 Morgn-­zhurnal: advertisements in, 83, 94, 130, 134; expanded Sunday edition, 149; “Di heym un di froy” (Malits), 151, 172; Justice Dept. and, 169; on labor activism, 134; “Magazine Page,” 165; merger with the Tog (1952), 242; started by Saperstein, 60; want ads in, 94; Wiernik as editor, 60; women’s columns in, 141, 149, 151, 168–­169, 172 Most, Johann, 46 Dos naye land, 158 Newman, Pauline, 94 news agents, 93 “The New Woman” (Kean Zametkin), 236 New York Commercial Advertiser. See Commercial Advertiser New York Journal, 8–­9, 48 New York Sun, 47 New York World, 8–­9 “1919” (Glatstein), 191–­193 Novick, Paul, 137–­138 “Only Girls” (Sylvia; Yidishe velt), 70 Orchan, Nurit, 167 oyfklerung, 80 Paley, Yoyne, 23, 32 Park, Robert, 55, 95, 117

Pastor, Anna, 131, 132 Pastor (Stokes), Rose Harriet: as “Bintel brief ” editor, 112, 114–­117; “Ethics of the Dustpan,” 107; at the Forverts, 111–­112, 114–­118; Fromenson friendship with, 110–­111; ideology of the Yiddish press and, 104, 107, 116–­117; “Just Between Ourselves, Girls,” 69–­70, 86, 103–­105, 107; letter writing by, 69; life of, 103–­104, 105–­106, 115; marriage to Stokes, 107–­108, 111, 118; pay of, 106; political views of, 108–­109, 110–­111, 114, 116–­118; popularity of, 104, 114–­118, 265n10; at the Tageblat, 69, 104–­106, 107–­110, 116–­117, 265n10 Peretz, I. L., 206–­208 The Promised City (Rischin), 232–­234 pseudonyms, in Yiddish literature, 104, 181, 184–­185, 232. See also female pseudonyms rabbinic authorities, newspapers and, 81–­83, 89 Rabinovich, Marie, 199 Rabinovich, Shalom (Sholem Aleichem), 55–­56, 185, 199 Rachel (wife of Rabbi Akiva) story, 36 Raskin, Rae (Rae Malis), 156–­159 Razin, Miriam, 154 readers of the Yiddish press: Cahan’s intended audience, 4, 7–­8, 53–­54; close bond with the press, 85–­86, 92–­93, 97–­99; correspondence networks for, 90–­91; in debates between gendered columns, 118–­119, 127–­128; diversity of reading by, 77–­78, 94; growth of the middle class among, 142–­143, 168–­169; importance of press to, 5–­7; improving reading skills, 76, 94, 95, 148, 168; as interactive with the press, 92–­93; seeking escapism, 94; Soltes’s survey of, 171–­174; unpublished letters from, 96–­97; young people as, 26–­27, 90–­91, 150–­152.

Index | 311

See also advice columns; “Bintel brief ”; female readers; letters from readers Reform Judaism, Yiddish press and, 41–­42 Reyf, Hirsh, 101 Reyzen, Zalman, 240, 283n47 Ribak, Gil, 35, 36 Rischin, Moses, 48, 50, 232–­234 Rogoff, Hillel, 53, 146 Rojanski, Rachel, 155–­157 Rubin, Ben, 92–­93 Russian Revolution (1905), 138 Russian Revolution (1917), 153, 169 Saperstein, Joseph, 60 Sapiro, Belle, 110 Sarasohn family, 26–­27, 30–­31, 32; Abraham, 110; Bashe, 30, 35; Kasriel Tsvi, 28–­30, 31, 110; Yekhezkl, 8, 31 “Scenes from the courts” (“Bilder fun di korts”; Smith), 161–­162 Schaechter, Rukhl, 243–­244 Seidman, Naomi, 56–­57 Seller, Maxine, 151, 155–­156 sensationalism: American press as model for, 23; in the Forverts, 2, 4, 52, 137–­138; as marketing strategy, 23, 28, 116; in the Tageblat, 32–­33 Serdatsky, Yente, 106, 167 serialized fiction: cartoon of readers of, 75; female pseudonyms in, 20, 37–­38, 205–­206; in the Forverts, 93, 101, 205; location of, 147; in the Morgn-­zhurnal, 60; Promised City (Rischin) on, 247; criticism of, 37, 55, 93, 137–­138 shadkhns (marriage brokers), 50, 81 Shapiro, David, 175 Shapiro, Shlomo, 99 Shaykevitsh, Nokhem Meyer “Shomer,” 38, 60, 95 Sheps, Elyahu, 182, 206–­208 Shokhet, A. S., 93 Sholem Aleichem (Shalom Rabinovich), 55–­56, 185, 199

Shomer (Nokhem Meyer Shaykevitsh), 38, 60, 95 “shund”, serialized fiction as, 37, 55, 137–­138 Shvidel, Polly, 101–­102 Simmons, Christina, 202 “Sir Oracle” (Tageblat), 86 Smith, Sarah B., 161–­162, 164 Sofia Housewife (Mikhail Zametkin), 57–­58, 230–­231, 240, 257n108 Soltes, Mordecai, 168, 171–­174 Sore bas Tovim, 185 Sore Brener (Max Weinreich), 206, 208 “Soul Loneliness” (Ida Brener [Goldberg]), 201 Soviet Union, Yiddish press and, 153 Spanish–­American War, 49 Staats-­Zeitung, 170 Stansell, Christine, 50 Steffens, Lincoln, 48–­49, 51 Stokes, J. G. Phelps, 103 strikes and boycotts, support for, 47, 88–­89, 94, 130–­134 Tageblat (Dos yidishes tageblat): acculturation and, 43–­44; advertisements in, 43, 129–­130; advice columns in, 65–­70, 77–­ 78, 81–­82, 86–­88; for all Jewish readers, 13, 31, 58; American press sources for, 41–­44; as an American newspaper, 28–­33, 170; “Aunt Ray’s Club,” 90–­91; circulation of, 26–­27; closure of (1928), 242; “A Corner for Ladies” (Zelikovits), 118, 119–­120, 120n51; debates between gendered columns, 118–­119, 126–­128; “The East Side Observer,” 40, 68, 109; English Department, 26–­27, 39–­44, 68, 104, 105–­109; “Ethics of the Dustpan” (Pastor), 107; female readers’ importance to, 8, 10, 33–­34, 59–­60; fiction and poetry in, 37–­38, 104, 106–­ 107; financing of, 30; founding of, 28; Fromenson at, 43–­44, 106–­107, 109, 110–­111; front page layout, 28–­30;

312 | Index

Tageblat (Dos yidishes tageblat) (cont.) Goldberg’s women’s columns in, 200; as a “home paper,” 27–­28, 34; ideology of, 12, 25–­26, 41–­44, 250n23; interfaith marriage and, 104, 107–­108, 265n10; introduction of women’s columns, 149; “The Jewess as She Was and Is” (Gottheil), 41–­42; “The Jewish New Woman,” 123; “Just Between Ourselves, Girls” (Pastor), 69–­70, 86, 103–­105, 107, 117; “Leydi’s korner” (Zelikovits), 36–­37; Lithuanian Wisewoman (see Lithuanian Wisewoman); “Lullabies of Our Russian Mothers,” 41; “Magazine Page,” 165; “Men’s Corner” (Zelikovits), 119–­ 120, 126–­128; “the new Tageblat” for the family, 148; Pastor at, 69, 104–­106, 107–­ 110, 116–­117, 265n10; Pastor’s trial and, 103–­104; on reading broadly across sections, 124–­125; religious guidance in, 59, 91, 107–­108, 120, 122; sensationalism in, 32–­33; “Talks with My Sisters” (MEG), 68; Wiernik at, 40; “The woman and the family” (“Di froy un di familye”), 146, 151; women on staff of, 19–­20, 104–­ 110; on women’s roles in society, 119–­121, 154; younger readers of, 26, 91, 150 “Talks with My Sisters” (MEG), 68 Tanenboym, Avner, 35, 38, 39, 59–­60 Tarlov, Liza, 122 Teglekhe gazetn (Daily Gazette), 28 tkhines, 56, 185 Tog: debates over content of women’s pages, 140–­141, 143; “Di debyutantin” (Malis), 156–­158; “Each with His Burden” (I. Brener [Goldberg]), 204–­205; Edlin on innovations in, 179–­180; entertainment and culture in, 156–­157; European Yiddish press and, 166–­167; “From a woman to women” (“Fun a froy tsu froyen”; Kean Zametkin), 160; Goldberg as managing editor of, 197–­198; Hermalin as writer for, 112; “In the course of

the day” (“In gang fun tog”; Goldberg), 204; “In the women’s world” (“In der froyen velt”), 152–­153, 210–­214; “Letters of a young woman” (Ida Brener [Goldberg]), 203; “Men and women” (“Mener un froyen”), 76; mergers of, 241–­242; photographs on women’s page, 144; “Scenes from the courts” (“Bilder fun di korts”; Smith), 161–­162; “Soul Loneliness” (Ida Brener [Goldberg]), 201; “The Truth about Married Life” (Ida Brener [Goldberg]), 197–­198, 201; unpublished letters from and to readers, 96–­97; urging readers to learn English, 170; “What Is the Soul” (Goldberg), 199–­200; “The woman and the home” (“Di froy un di heym”), 143–­144, 145–­146; “The woman who strays from the straight path” (“Di froy vos iz arunter fun glaykehn veg”; Hermalin), 163–­164 “Tragedies, Comedies, and Simple Sorrows from True Life” (Varhayt), 67 translators, female, 216–­217, 240–­241 Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911, 84 “The Truth about Married Life” (Ida Brener [Goldberg]), 197–­198, 201 Di tsayt, 147, 155, 158–­159 Tsukunft, 13, 136–­138 “Un zi redt” (Gropper), 1–­3 Varhayt, 67, 76, 165, 169, 241–­242 “Vi a foygele” (Zeydler), 207 Vladeck, Baruch, 149–­150, 170 voting rights for women: voting guides, 80–­81; women’s columns on, 154–­155; Zelikovits on, 121–­122, 125–­126 Waife, Ben-­Zion. See Goldberg, Ben-­Zion want ads, 4, 15, 94, 134 Weinreich, Max, 182, 206, 208 Weinstein, Miriam, 85

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Weiss, Anna (Rosa Lebensboym), 140–­ 144, 216 Wengeroff, Pauline, 120 “What Is the Soul” (Goldberg), 199–­200 “What Is to Be Done?” (Chernyshevsky), 240 Wiernik, Bertha, 216–­217 Wiernik, Peter, 40, 60, 216–­217 Wiley, Harvey, 235 Wilson, Woodrow, 211–­212 Wisse, Ruth, 211 Wolfe, George, 73–­74, 97 “The woman and the home” (“Di froy un di heym”; Tog), 143–­144, 145–­147 The woman’s handbook (Kean Zametkin), 235–­238 “The woman who strays from the straight path” (“Di froy vos iz arunter fun glaykehn veg”; Hermalin), 163–­164 women: as consumers, 9, 150–­152; derisive portrayals of men as, 1–­3; in the domestic sphere, 41–­42, 119–­120, 120n51, 122–­123; on the editorial staff, 112, 114–­ 117, 181–­183; educational rights of, 122; gender balance in immigration, 61; married women’s roles, 57–­58, 120–­121, 163, 197–­198, 201–­203; men stigmatized as, 8; newspapers on equality of, 36, 57, 125–­126; realities of mothers versus daughters, 69–­70; in the socialist struggle, 58–­59; status in modernity and change, 221–­222; as strong readers, 148; supporting strikes, 88–­89, 94, 130–­ 134; as translators, 216–­217, 240–­241; voting rights, 80–­81, 121–­122, 125–­126, 154–­155; women’s rights advocacy, 122–­ 123; working behind the scenes, 18, 21, 86, 109–­110, 216, 239. See also female readers; female writers women’s columns: to balance out intellectual content, 141; in both English and Yiddish venues, 114; competition and experimentation in, 145–­152; criticism of, 1–­4,

44–­45, 87–­88, 101–­102, 228–­229; debates with men’s columns, 118–­119, 126–­128; low status of, 232–­233; roles of, 119–­122; as socialist intervention, 230; as testing grounds for content, 7. See also female pseudonyms; names of specific columns women’s content: debates over, 140–­142, 171–­177; descriptions of, 14; early attempts at the Forverts, 57–­58, 257n108; ideology and, 10, 47, 102–­103, 140–­143, 152–­156, 176–­177; Judaism and middle-­ class ideals in, 59, 91, 120, 122; lack of prestige for writers of, 14–­15, 19–­20, 104, 112–­114, 118; male and female readers of, 15, 37, 46, 56; on married life, 197–­198, 201–­203; seen as light and entertaining, 175–­176, 213–­214 women’s pages: advertisements on, 151–­152; divergent ideas of women’s interests, 171–­172, 177; editorial laxness on, 19, 161; entertainment in, 156–­157, 162; inconsistent boundaries of, 147; Lebensboym’s critique of, 152–­153, 156; introduction of (1914–­1926), 142–­143, 146–­147; limited space for, 213–­214; male readers of, 172–­174; mastheads on, 144, 145–­146, 151, 156; modeled after magazines, 165–­166; political messaging on, 152–­156; Soviet Union and, 153; style of writing in, 183–­184, 188–­191, 193, 196–­197, 203; on women’s suffrage, 154–­155. See also names of specific women’s pages women’s suffrage. See voting rights for women women writers. See female writers Workmen’s Advocate, 47 World War I and the Yiddish press, 147–­148, 152–­153, 168, 169–­171, 241, 283n49 write-­in contests and columns, 5, 62, 64–­65, 67–­68, 77 Yanovsky, M., 57, 194 Yanovsky, Saul, 187–­188, 193–­196, 209

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Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (­Cahan), 48 “yellow” journalism, 23, 32–­33, 59. See also sensationalism Yente Telebende (character), 3 Yevzerov, Katerina, 57 Yiddish language: gendered standards for poetry in, 190–­191; in newspapers, 37, 184; religious texts in, 56–­57; Sholem Aleichem on, 55–­56; stigma of using, 8, 29–­30, 185; used by radical organizers, 46–­47; “Yiddish Yiddish,” 51–­52 Yiddish press: as American newspapers, 169–­171; American papers as sources for, 24, 34, 40–­44, 47, 59, 163–­164; on American popular culture, 156–­157, 162, 164; anti-­immigrant sentiment and, 169; back issues and US loyalty, 169; challenges of (1914–­1926), 142–­143, 222; children’s columns, 26–­27, 90–­91, 150–­152; classified and want ads, 4, 15, 94, 134; competition among, 13, 23, 84, 175; competition with Anglophone press, 143, 166–­169; court reporters in, 161–­162; debates on the role of, 16–­17, 47–­48, 94; early radical newspapers, 46–­48; educational role of, 94, 95, 148, 168; expanded Sunday editions, 149, 164; expansion dependent on female readers, 10, 25, 45–­46, 64–­65, 229–­230; German socialist papers as models for, 46–­47; as “home papers,” 9, 27–­28, 34; in Jewish community culture, 83–­85, 89–­91; local editions of, 90; “Magazine Page” in, 165; for the masses, 4, 7–­8, 53–­54, 55, 89–­90; as matchmakers, 96, 97; no European model for, 24, 28–­29, 46, 60–­61, 166; oral histories on, 98–­99; religious authority and, 81–­83, 89; as source materials on Jewish culture, 15–­16; as supplements to Anglophone papers, 242–­243; support for strikes and boycotts, 47, 88–­89, 94, 130–­134; as transitional

publications, 95; Triangle Shirtwaist fire funerals and, 84; women as translators for, 216–­219, 240–­241; women’s bylines limited in, 18–­20, 194, 208–­213, 216–­220, 236, 277n26; on women’s roles, 119–­122, 120n51; women working behind the scenes at, 18, 21, 86, 109–­110, 216, 239. See also advertisements; female writers; ideology of the Yiddish press; names of specific publications Yidishe dikhterins: Antologye (Korman), 207 Der yidisher froyen-­zhurnal, 165–­166 Dos yidishes tageblat. See Tageblat Yidishe velt, 59–­60, 70, 85 YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 206 Yochelson, Samuel, 96 Yudishe gazetn, 28, 119 Dos yudishes folks-­blat, 56 Di yunge (school of poetry), 194–­195 Zaborowska, Magdalena J., 97–­98 Zametkin, Mikhail: First Papers (Hobson) and, 226, 228–­234; on gender politics of socialists, 58; as Sofia Housewife, 57–­58, 230–­231, 240, 257n108; translation projects, 240; on women’s content, 230 Zelda. See Pastor (Stokes), Rose Harriet Zelikovits, Getsel: After the Wedding (Nokh der khupe), 38–­39; background of, 33; on daily lives of women, 123–­124; debates between gendered columns by, 118–­119, 126–­128; ideology in writing of, 10, 119; “Leydi’s korner,” 36–­37; as the Lithuanian Wisewoman (see Lithuanian Wisewoman); as “Merely-­a-­Man,” 118, 119–­120, 126–­128; serialized fiction of, 37–­38; at the Tageblat, 32–­33; on women reading newspapers broadly, 124–­ 126; on women’s equality, 125–­126; on women’s roles in society, 119–­121, 120n51 Zevin, Israel (Tashrak), 110 Zeydler, Esther (Sheps), 207 Zwerkin, Abe, 99

About the Author

Ayelet Brinn is Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies and History at the University of Hartford, where she holds the Philip D. Feltman Chair in Modern Jewish History.

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