Bad Rabbi: And Other Strange But True Stories from the Yiddish Press

Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture

De: Eddy Portnoy

Narrado por: Peter Lerman

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. This irreverent, unvarnished, and frequently hilarious compendium of stories provides a window into an unknown Yiddish world that was.

The book is published by Stanford University Press. The audiobook is published by University Press Audiobooks.

©2018 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University (P)2025 Redwood Audiobooks

Reseñas de la Crítica

"A book that took chutzpah to write but is a sheer pleasure to read." (Jewish Journal)

"Titillating and fast-paced storytelling that nevertheless offers historical depth and grounding." (H-Judaic)

"Endlessly interesting and entertaining with stories that range from the macabre to the hilarious." (Southern Jewish Life Magazine)

It is a good look at the (mostly) hilarious!

these excerpts from the newspapers of the day give a deep dive into the cultures and lifestyles of the poor and marginal. it was mostly new immigrants doing the best they could in a new land, or residents of Eastern Europe who were not very well accepted by their neighbors, but trying hard to make a life for themselves.