1629668605     

49493638X                        

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Bad rabbi : and other strange but true stories from the Yiddish press / Eddy Portnoy

Portnoy, Eddy, 1965- [Verfasserin/Verfasser]

Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, [2018] [© 2018]

x, 265 Seiten : Illustrationen

Englisch

Includes bibliographical references and index

Erscheint auch als: Bad rabbi (Online-Ausgabe)

Online version: Portnoy, Eddy, author : Bad rabbi. - Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2017

978-1-5036-0411-7 (pbk. : alk. paper); 978-0-8047-9761-0 (cloth : alk. paper)

978-1-5036-0397-4 (ISBN der parallelen Ausgabe im Fernzugriff)

OCoLC: 1015869714     

OCoLC: 1015869714 (aus SWB)     

PN4885.Y53

071.3089924 ; 071.3089924     Ähnliche Literatur

bisacsh: LAN008000

LOC-SH: Yiddish newspapers -- History -- New York (State) -- New York ; Yiddish newspapers -- History -- Poland -- Warsaw ; Jewish newspapers -- History -- New York (State) -- New York ; Jewish newspapers -- History -- Poland -- Warsaw ; Jews -- Social life and customs -- New York (State) -- New York ; Jews -- Social life and customs -- Poland -- Warsaw -- New York (State) -- New York -- Poland -- Warsaw -- History

Stories abound of immigrant Jews on the outside looking in, clambering up the ladder of social mobility, successfully assimilating and integrating into their new worlds. But this book is not about the success stories. It's a paean to the bunglers, the blockheads, and the just plain weird-Jews who were flung from small, impoverished eastern European towns into the urban shtetls of New York and Warsaw, where, as they say in Yiddish, their bread landed butter side down in the dirt. These marginal Jews may have found their way into the history books far less frequently than their more socially upstanding neighbors, but there's one place you can find them in force: in the Yiddish newspapers that had their heyday from the 1880s to the 1930s. Disaster, misery, and misfortune: you will find no better chronicle of the daily ignominies of urban Jewish life than in the pages of the Yiddish press. An underground history of downwardly mobile Jews, Bad Rabbi exposes the seamy underbelly of pre-WWII New York and Warsaw, the two major centers of Yiddish culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With true stories plucked from the pages of the Yiddish papers, Eddy Portnoy introduces us to the drunks, thieves, murderers, wrestlers, poets, and beauty queens whose misadventures were immortalized in print. There's the Polish rabbi blackmailed by an American widow, mass brawls at weddings and funerals, a psychic who specialized in locating missing husbands, and violent gangs of Jewish mothers on the prowl-in short, not quite the Jews you'd expect. One part Isaac Bashevis Singer, one part Jerry Springer, this irreverent, unvarnished, and frequently hilarious compendium of stories provides a window into an unknown Yiddish world that was.