Bad Rabbi: And Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press (Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture)
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.68 (701 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 150360411X |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 280 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2013-06-06 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
The Yiddish newspapers Portnoy mines were free from piety and light on decorum; instead they present a vast, roiling canvas of human behavior in all its extremes, from comedy to horror, with fiercely unbuttoned characters declaiming eloquently as stoopside choruses annotated their rants. What's Yiddish for 'Buy this book, or may all your teeth fall out except one to give you a toothache'?" (A.J. Portnoy heads straight for the urban immigrant underbelly, opens up the newspapers, and uses portraits of a vanished people and a vanished culture to not just deliver a bygone way of life, but to explode some of our most dominant conceptions of modern Jewish culture." (Josh Kun author of Audiotopia: Music, Race and America)"This fascinating book contains the strangest Jews I've ever met in my life. "Bad Rabbi is a masterful set of finely-tuned scholarship and critical zingers that brings detailed archival history of 'downwardly mobile' nineteenth- and twentieth-century
. Eddy Portnoy is Senior Researcher and Director of Exhibitions at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
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