Living Novels: The Form and Function of Advice Columns in the American Yiddish Press

• In Event: New Approaches to the Yiddish Press in the Americas

Abstract

This paper will explore the various ways in which early-twentieth century American Yiddish newspapers functioned as wellsprings of advice for their readers, and how the format of advice columns shaped readers’ writing and reading habits, relationship with print media, and relationship with American culture. From the Forverts’s famous “Bintel brief” column to more practical advice columns, such as Der tog’s “Briefkasten,” newspapers overflowed with letters from readers asking editors to help them navigate personal tribulations, American political infrastructures, and Jewish communal life. These columns were a key site of interaction between readers and editors, allowing readers a hand in shaping the content of these newspapers, and allowing future generations a glimpse into the lives of earlier American Jews.

However these columns--though they presented themselves as works of authentic, unmediated personal expression by readers--were in fact mediated in a variety of ways. From the beginning of the “Bintel brief” column in 1906, for example, Forverts editor Abe Cahan carefully selected which letters would go into this column to fit with his sense of what advice columns should look like, informed by his time working for American English-language newspapers. And letters from readers were often heavily edited or completely fabricated in order to construct a certain image of contemporary American Jewish life. In addition to these sometimes fictionalized or embellished published letters in advice columns, editors also received and responded to a variety of letters written to the editorial staff that never appeared in the publication asking for advice on everything from where to go to synagogue to how to navigate the bureaucratic processes of citizenship that never made it onto the pages of the newspapers. These letters, and that reveal a more multi-layered relationship between these newspapers and their readers that occurred within and without the print media itself, built around the concept of advice.

This paper will therefore use newspaper advice columns as a way to discuss the interactions between Yiddish newspaper readers and writers both on and off the page, how newspapers shaped their readers’ responses to and understanding of the world around them, and the deep influence of the American popular press on the American Yiddish press of this period. It will highlight how Yiddish newspapers served as translators between cultural spheres, both on and off the page, and explore the ways in which this mediation took on explicitly gendered dynamics.

Author

• Ayelet Brinn, University of Pennsylvania