Rewriting the Diaspora: Images of Eastern Europe in the Bialystok Landsmanshaft Press, 1921-45

Jews are often summoned as the model diasporic group in the academy, but few understand how the concept of diaspora actually informed Jewish immigrant identity in early-twentieth-century America. Both popular folklore and scholarship portray Jewish life, culture, and identity as shaped exclusively by Jews' diasporic mentality rooted in their dispersal from the Land of Israel. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, the mass migration of Jews from Eastern Europe reshaped Jews' understanding of exile and diaspora. Using a transnational lens, this article examines the newspapers created by one group of East European Jewish immigrants, all of whom hailed from the city of Bialystok in northeastern Poland, focusing on immigrants' depictions of Eastern Europe and their imagined relationship to it. Through a close reading of the pages of the Bialystoker Stimme (The Voice of Bialystok), a newspaper launched in New York in 1921 and read throughout the world, I argue that the depictions contained in these Yiddish newspapers belie the standard, static view of Jewish diasporic identity in America. Some East European Jews saw America as exile and themselves as still anchored in the crucible of Eastern Europe—fundamentally challenging long-standing notions of how Jews conceptualized the state of being in exile prevalent in scholarship in Diaspora studies and American Jewish history.