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The Lower East Side Meets Greenwich Village Immigrant Jews, Yiddish, and the New York Intellectual Scene tony michels Starting in the 1880s, immigrant Jewish intellectuals fluent in various languages began to use Yiddish for journalistic, literary, educational, and political purposes. A similar turn to Yiddish occurred two decades earlier in Russia, when a small number of maskilim began writing fiction in Yiddish, thus laying the foundation of modern Yiddish literature.1 However, the Yiddishization of Jewish intellectuals proceeded most rapidly and extensively in the United States, especially, but not only, in New York City. By the 1890s, dozens of intellectuals , based primarily in the Yiddish press and the Jewish labor movement ,wrote and lectured in Yiddish on a regular basis.2 Their numbers continued to grow until Congress drastically curtailed immigration from Europe in the mid-1920s. Before World War I, no other city in the world hosted a larger Yiddish-speaking intellectual community than New York.3 The turn to Yiddish did not lead to isolation from American intellectual life, as one might assume. All immigrant Jewish intellectuals sooner or later learned English, many wrote in the language, and some even achieved recognition among their English-speaking peers. Furthermore, immigrant Jewish intellectuals played an important role in the development of the Englishspeaking intelligentsia located primarily in Greenwich Village. European in orientation, politically radical, outsiders to “respectable society” yet highly regarded within the immigrant Jewish community, Yiddish-speaking intellectuals fascinated their American-born counterparts, who, as David Hollinger writes, “looked to a new intelligentsia to manifest a more diverse, more broadly based emotional and intellectual existence, and they were eager for this cause to be advanced by persons of any ethnic origin.”4 Jews constituted that new intelligentsia. American-born intellectuals, mostly of middle- to upper-class 70 T o n y M i c h e l s Protestant backgrounds, sought out and interacted with immigrant Jews in cafés, left-wing political organizations, settlement houses, journals, and other institutions.5 Immigrant Jews expanded the horizons of American intellectuals by serving as agents of radical thought, Russian politics and literature, and Yiddish culture.6 As a result native-born intellectuals moved from “the more staid realms of reform into a bohemia open to different forms of radicalism,” as Christine Stansell has argued.7 In stressing the pivotal role played by Jews in the American intelligentsia, Stansell and Hollinger depart from the tendency of historians to treat immigrant Jewish intellectuals in near isolation from their American-born counterparts.8 Still, further exploration is needed. Who interacted with whom? What were the points of contact? How did immigrant Jews influence English-speaking intellectual life? The present essay attempts to draw out some of the extensive ties between two intellectual communities: one based in the Lower East Side, the other in nearby Greenwich Village. Two kinds of cultural crossings are charted here: the movement of immigrant Jewish intellectuals to the Yiddish language and their concurrent interactions with native-born, English-speaking intellectuals.Connections drawn between the two yield a picture of the American intelligentsia as more ethnically and culturally diverse than often supposed. The immigrant Jewish intelligentsia took shape as a socially and culturally signi ficant community through its use of Yiddish. Through the Jewish vernacular, intellectuals cohered as a distinct stratum of opinion shapers,producers of culture , political leaders, and labor activists within the immigrant Jewish population writ large. Ironically, their turn to Yiddish marked an abrupt departure from their original self-conception as intellectuals. At the beginning of their adult lives, few, if any, immigrant Jewish intellectuals would have considered zhargon, as they often referred to Yiddish with condescension if not derision, a natural or desirable choice. Many individuals did not know the language well, if at all, and in any case regarded it as inappropriate for formal or elevated discourse. The idea of using Yiddish in literary, educational, or political capacities would have struck virtually all of them as ridiculous had they considered it. That the turn to Yiddish should happen in the United States, thousands of miles from the Yiddish-speaking heartland of eastern Europe, would have seemed fantastic. What, then, explains the collective move to Yiddish? One may identify two main factors,neither unique to the American context but that nonetheless achieved fuller expression in the United States than anywhere in eastern Europe before World War I. Each may be distinguished conceptually, but they actually overlapped with and reinforced one another. Ideology lay behind the...

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