New York City Cafés as Spaces of Modern Jewish Masculinity

• In Event: American Jews and the Transformations of Masculinity

Abstract

By the early years of the twentieth century, New York’s Lower East Side housed 250-300 cramped cafés. These cafés were a relatively new phenomenon in the American urban public space. They began to attract the gaze of both Jewish observers and Christian outsiders, such as journalist Hutchins Hapgood and writer Henry James, who became enthralled with their unique cultural rhythms. In some of these cafés, writers and intellectuals gathered alongside others from many walks of life.

In my presentation, I will focus on these “literary cafés” as spaces of modern American Jewish masculinity. By using the tools of gender and cultural geography to analyze various texts (in English, Yiddish and Hebrew), as well as images, I argue that the café can be fruitfully interpreted as a space where Jewish men enacted complex dynamics of modern Jewish masculinity. For many Jewish male writers, mostly immigrants from Eastern Europe with traditional background, the café represented a modern, secular substitute for the traditional BEYS MEDRESH (House of Study). The café contained its own internal meanings: the older and more established writers, like the rabbis of previous generations, clustered around a café table reminiscent of the tisch. The secularized rabbi and his followers interpreted, discussed, and analyzed a modern poem or a story.

Thus, for many male writers, the café was experienced as a homosocial space despite the fact that it was open to all who could pay for a cup of coffee or tea, including Jews and non-Jews, men and women. Moreover, in their stories and poems, writers often reflected upon women they encountered inside the café. They negotiated and interpreted modern Jewish masculinity through the simultaneously alluring and threatening figure of the “new (Jewish) woman,” as well as in the context of changing discourses about homosocial desire and homosexuality. Thus, from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century, the specific context of the New York Jewish café emerged as a key locus for intense explorations of Jewishness, gender, and modernity.

author

• Shachar M. Pinsker, University of Michigan