Bad Rabbi

"Eddy Portnoy's Bad Rabbi is an extraordinary thing: a gateway to the lost world of Jewish street life in pre-World War II New York and Warsaw. 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. Portnoy's book is undomesticated history; it is a time machine to an eradicated past; it is pure pleasure." -- Luc Sante * author of <i>Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York</i> * "Having devoted his misspent youth to combing the Yiddish press for seedy, shady, and shocking stories, Portnoy, the bad boy of Yiddish studies, brings bad rabbis and other miscreants into the light in this erudite and thoroughly entertaining book." -- Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett * author of <i>Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage</i> * "This fascinating book contains the strangest Jews I've ever met in my life. It should appeal to every history buff out thereJewish, gentile or otherwise. What's Yiddish for 'Buy this book, or may all your teeth fall out except one to give you a toothache'?" -- A.J. Jacobs * author of <i>The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible</i> * "Only a historian with the wit and comic sensibility of Eddy Portnoy could succeed in resurrecting these dead and forgotten Jews of New York and Warsaw. Through his painstaking research, we can vicariously experience their desperation and lack of self-control, their strange passions and their various forms of mental illness predicaments we're just one step away from ourselves." -- Ben Katchor * comic artist and creator of <i>Julius Knipl: Real Estate Photographer</i> * "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 Jews alive through vivid, erudite, and spit-take funny storytelling. 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 <i>Audiotopia: Music, Race and America</i> * "Exuberantly vulgar, blithely unconcerned with gentile opinion, these nuggets of low-class Yiddishism won't let us forget how rough-and-tumble life in Yiddishland really was." -- Michael Wex * author of <i>Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods</i> * "In the staid world of academic Yiddishists, Eddy Portnoy is a live wire, a funny guy, a mischief-maker, what they used to call in the Catskills, a tummler...Bad Rabbi is a succession of outlandish misadventures, a wild panorama populated by an astonishing array of characters... Yiddish journalists were showboats, garnishing tabloid sensationalism with literary jokes and religious references. (Given this high-low style, as well as its caustic attitudinizing and internal feuds, the Yiddish press seems like a flamboyant forerunner to the old Village Voice.) Such zesty informality carries over into Portnoy's own writing, which, in blending the erudite and vernacular, regularly tilts toward the latter." -- J. Hoberman * <i>New York Times </i> * "Don't feel guilty chuckling your way through Bad Rabbi as you read about the crazy deeds and commonplace misfortunes of marginal Jews from a century ago. " -- Renee Ghert-Zand * <i>The Times of Israel</i> * "Endlessly interesting and entertaining with stories that range from the macabre to the

Eddy Portnoy is Senior Researcher and Director of Exhibitions at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

Contents and AbstractsIntroduction: A Brief and Not Entirely Uncomplicated History of the Yiddish Press chapter abstractThis section provides a brief history of the modern Yiddish press of New York and Warsaw. It discusses the cultural, political and social contexts in which it appeared and why its development was a necessary and important phenomenon in Jewish life. Additionally, the chapter describes why and how the Yiddish press became a vehicle for drastic upheaval in Jewish life. Also discussed are the beginnings and nature of Yiddish journalism as a distinctly ethnic literary form and how a variety of journalistic occupations developed. The nature of its audience and elements of its subject matter is considered, as are the reasons for the importance of said subject matter for Jewish historiography in general. The introduction gives the reader an understanding of modern Yiddish culture while setting the stage for the subsequent chapters, which provide primary source data from the Yiddish press. 1Jewish Abortion Technician chapter abstractThis chapter considers the story of Jacob Rosenzweig, a Jewish immigrant abortionist active in New York City during the late 1860s and early 1870s. In 1871, a patient died in his care. Rosenzweig stuffed her body in a trunk and attempted to ship it to Chicago, but the decaying body was discovered in a baggage depot and police were alerted. New York City Police investigating the case were eventually led to Rosenzweig, who was caught, placed on trial, and convicted. 2The Hebrew Girl Murderer of East New York chapter abstractThis chapter details the story of Pesach Rubenstein, an eastern European Jewish immigrant in New York City who murdered his cousin/lover whom he had accidentally impregnated. Rubenstein's 1876 court case, reports of which appeared in nearly every newspaper in the United States, was the most significant interface between American media and Jews in the history of the country. 3The Jewish Mahatma chapter abstractThis chapter presents a brief biography of Naphtali Herz Imber, a poet best known for writing "Hatikva," which became the Israeli national anthem. While Imber has been the subject of biographical studies, what official narratives ignore is Imber's work as a performance psychic during the late 19th century and a mercurial alcoholic during the early 20th. 4The Great Tonsil Riot of 1906 chapter abstractThis chapter details an event that took place on New York City's Lower East Side in which rumors that children were having their throats slashed in public schools spread throughout immigrant Jewish neighborhoods. Upon hearing these rumors, tens of thousands of Jewish mothers rioted, besieging the area's public schools and demanding to see if their children were alive. 5Rivington Street's Wheel of (Mis)Fortune chapter abstractThis chapter provides a biographical sketch of Professor Abraham Hochman, one of the Lower East Side's best known psychics. Famed, among other things, for finding husbands who had abandoned their wives, Hochman engaged in all manner of dubious stunts in order to generate publicity for his business. 6Yom Kippur Battle Royale chapter abstractThis chapter details the history of anti-religious behavior on the solemn holiday of Yom Kippur and the reaction those activities engendered. Typically anarchist or socialist-oriented Jews would engage in acts of public eating on Yom Kippur, a holiday that requires a 25 hour fast. Such activity would enrage religious Jews and pitched battles would typically ensue. 7Attack of the Yiddish Journalists chapter abstractThis chapter tells the story of Hillel Tseytlen, a famed journalist who broke away from a leading Yiddish paper in Warsaw to join a competing newspaper. Doing so provoked the ire of Tseytlen's original editor, who initiated an ugly smear campaign against him. Tseytlen and his new editors fought back and a war of words broke out between two daily pa