"The Seamy Underbelly of Yiddishland: Brawlers, Crooks, and Charlatans in the Yiddish Press" with Eddy Portnoy

"The Seamy Underbelly of Yiddishland: Brawlers, Crooks, and Charlatans in the Yiddish Press" with Eddy Portnoy
Date
Tue April 9th 2019, 5:30 - 7:00pm
Event Sponsor
Taube Center for Jewish Studies, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
Location
Building 460, 4th floor, Terrace Room (426)
Speaker:

An underground history of downwardly mobile Jews, Bad Rabbi and Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press 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 (YIVO Institute for Jewish Research) introduces us to the drunks, thieves, murderers, wrestlers, poets, and beauty queens whose misadventures were immortalized in print.