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Stories abound of immigrant Jews on the outside looking in, clambering up the ladder of social mobility, successfully assimilating and integrating into their new worlds. But this book is not about the success stories. It's a paean to the bunglers, the blockheads, and the just plain weird—Jews who were flung from small, impoverished eastern European towns into the urban shtetls of New York and Warsaw, where, as they say in Yiddish, their bread landed butter side down in the dirt. These marginal Jews may have found their way into the history books far less frequently than their more socially upstanding neighbors, but there's one place you can find them in force: in the Yiddish newspapers that had their heyday from the 1880s to the 1930s. Disaster, misery, and misfortune: you will find no better chronicle of the daily ignominies of urban Jewish life than in the pages of the Yiddish press. An underground history of downwardly mobile Jews, Bad Rabbi exposes the seamy underbelly of pre-WWII New York and Warsaw, the two major centers of Yiddish culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With true stories plucked from the pages of the Yiddish papers, Eddy Portnoy introduces us to the drunks, thieves, murderers, wrestlers, poets, and beauty queens whose misadventures were immortalized in print. There's the Polish rabbi blackmailed by an American widow, mass brawls at weddings and funerals, a psychic who specialized in locating missing husbands, and violent gangs of Jewish mothers on the prowl—in short, not quite the Jews you'd expect. One part Isaac Bashevis Singer, one part Jerry Springer, this irreverent, unvarnished, and frequently hilarious compendium of stories provides a window into an unknown Yiddish world that was.
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Product details
Series: Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture
Paperback: 280 pages
Publisher: Stanford University Press; 1 edition (October 24, 2017)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 150360411X
ISBN-13: 978-1503604117
Product Dimensions:
6 x 0.7 x 9 inches
Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.3 out of 5 stars
26 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#347,689 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Many American Jews would like you to associate the word "Jew" with the likes of Albert Einstein or Jonas Salk, as they themselves do. But not all Jews are geniuses or benefactors of mankind. Like every ethnic group, Jewry has always had its share of lowlives, sleazeballs, weirdos and raving lunatics--but their stories would be lost to history were it not for being preserved in the almost-never-read archives of the late Yiddish press. (Who's to read old Yiddish newspapers any more? Only Eddy Portnoy.) Whenever a Jewish sleaze did make the news, my older relatives would squirm; their criterion for judgment about everything was first and foremost "Is it good for the Jews?" (My father used to say of Roy Cohn, "That's the kind of Jew that anti-Semites can love.") The only reason these histories were preserved was that anti-Semites could not read them and thus could not exploit them. Still, a fair number of them comport with popular anti-Semitic stereotypes, suggesting that the bigots had at least second-hand if not direct experience with the sordid underbelly of Jewish society. The stories are fascinating, sometimes hilarious, but one still fears they will play into the hands of bigots even if the squalid, teeming slums of the Lower East Side and of Warsaw, the incubators of all that, are long gone. One reads of riots spawned by ludicrous rumors about doctors and public health, and one thinks of the systematic murder of vaccination teams and the spreading of wild rumors by Islamic extremists today. Same story, different protagonists! (There is something touching about the saga of Urke Nachlnik, a career criminal who became a litterateur and journalist and ended up an anti-Nazi guerrilla martyr. Think about that trajectory.)
Sounded better from the reviews than it turned out to be. The text was repetitious and the stories were not that interesting. Still, it's one of the few books available to give you a perspective on the yiddish press.I'm sure the material is out there for a better book than this. Let's hope someone writes one!
The introductory material alone is well worth the price of this book. Mr. Portnoy gives us a much-needed perspective to understand the time and place when this material was created. In my parents' and grandparents' generations, they were adamant about condemning anything in print that dared to show our people as anything but good, the mentshes of our people. I often argued, "C'mon, there is no one group of people that is either all good or all bad." They would agree, of course, but were terrified of even more oppression of our people if anyone could see anything truly negative. I think that even they would like this book. The bizarre material (which reads like a comic book) researched and collected from actual printed news articles of past eras is framed in a loving, sympathetic, yet utterly humorous context. Thank you, Mr. Portnoy, for making me laugh. Knowing that this stuff really happened could have been horrifying -- but because of how it was presented, it gave me joy and gratitude for our present time, which is hopefully not like that!!! (OK, maybe it is somewhere, but like I said, I was/am sheltered LOL). Fascinating read. You won't find anything like this elsewhere.
The topic interested me - there is value to showing a more multi-faceted picture of a community than is typically known. One of the values is that when people pine for “the good old days, when everyone was a saint, unlike today ...†we know that there were always good and bad people, and this is true of any group. Some of my gripes have to do with the too-light manner in which some of the serious matters are written about. The line that bothered me the most, and still does, is about a victim of the Holocaust: Reb Dan was shipped off to Treblinka ... “No one ever heard of Reb Dan after that because, quite literally, he went up in smoke.†I found that deeply distasteful. I wish the author would see this so that he’d know how offensive it is. He could have finished the sentence “... because of his tragic end.â€
It is difficult to put this down--always wondering what the next chapter will bring. The bios of a range of colorful characters are presented, who you will appreciate are not forgotten by this book. A good picture also of the surrounding culture. That said, the text should have been reviewed by a proofreader for the occasional forgotten word, but no matter--if you are the type that the cover picture and title makes curious, you will enjoy it. Reading before bedtime, you will go to sleep laughing.
Stories bizarre, funny, and poignant. Strange but true only begins to describe this. I love attempting to read the Yiddish newspaper articles from which these stories were gleaned.
New York Times Sunday book review reviewed this book and it sounded interesting so I bought it from Amazon on my e-book. It is sort of interesting but gets tedious after a while.
These rabbis may be bad, but the writing is good. Very good. Thanks to author, Eddy Portnoy, for shining a clear light on a part of Jewish life that had only existed in shadows. Hilarious, poignant, and heartbreaking, I read it in one sitting.
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