In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Socialist Ideology, Traditional Rhetoric:Images of Women in American Yiddish Socialist Dailies, 1918–1922
  • Rachel Rojanski (bio)

The Yiddish press in the United States came into existence with the beginning of Jewish immigration from eastern Europe and soon became, like any other foreign language press, a very important immigrant institution. 1 It encompassed a wide range of newspapers and periodicals, including not only monthlies and weeklies but also dailies, several of which were already appearing at the turn of the century. Almost all the Yiddish dailies reflected their own ideological tendency, ranging from Orthodox to Zionist to socialist, and they were, to some extent, intended to advance the interests of these groups and parties and to support their political struggles.2 Nonetheless, scholars—following the pioneering studies of Robert E. Park and Mordechai Soltes—have largely agreed that Yiddish newspapers in the United States were not merely a tool to advance various ideologies; they were also important agents of acculturation and Americanization for Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe.3

At the end of World War I, by which time Jewish immigration to the United States had begun its decline, there were five Yiddish dailies in the United States. Each attempted in its own way to deal with all aspects of Jewish immigrant life: politics, culture, social and economic activities, and even family matters. They aspired to help create the profile of the American Jew and to shape the image of Jewish immigrant society. Three important figures in the American Yiddish world—the poet Jacob Glatstein, the journalist and critic Shmuel Niger, and the journalist and editor Hillel Rogof—eloquently (though somewhat nostalgically) recalled these aims in the opening essay to a book marking the seventy-fifth anniversary [End Page 329] of the Yiddish press in the United States: "The Yiddish newspaper gave the immigrant a face. It made him a socialist, a Zionist, or a supporter of diaspora nationalism. But generally it made him a proud American Jew. . . . The newspaper in Yiddish was the stock market of ideas and of ideals. It shaped Jewish life."4 Thus, an examination of how the Yiddish press discussed Jewish women, the ways in which it tried to appeal to them and to mold their image, will reveal how it viewed their place and their roles in eastern European Jewish immigrant society in the United States and will also tell us much about their status in that society. In the following pages, I will examine the image of immigrant women in the Yiddish socialist dailies in the United States as they were depicted in four different arenas: the public sphere, the workplace, the world of writing, and the family.

The dailies I will discuss are the two socialist newspapers: Di tsayt, published from August 1920 to April 1922 by the Labor Zionist movement, Poalei Zion; and the much more successful Forverts (Jewish Daily Forward), founded in 1897, which was the most important Yiddish newspaper in the United States and also the most widely circulated foreign language newspaper in the country.5 I have chosen to discuss these dailies both because their editors and writers exerted a strong influence on the Jewish public scene, adhering to progressive, liberal views and using the papers to achieve public and political aims, and because, unlike the other Yiddish dailies, they had special pages for women. Since it is impossible to draw a full comparison between these two papers because of Di tsayt's short life, the bulk of material presented is drawn from the Forverts with relevant insights from Di tsayt.

Since they published regular women's pages dealing with a range of issues beyond simple housekeeping and health matters, both socialist dailies viewed the status of Jewish women in the spirit of the progressive ideologies they represented. Yet, the content of the women's pages, and especially their rhetoric, also had a great deal in common with the view of women's status and role prevalent in what was still a rather conservative eastern European Jewish immigrant society.6 In order to explain this, [End Page 330] I shall argue that although the Yiddish press used traditional images of Jewish women as mothers and housewives, its portrayal...

pdf

Share