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

281 Pages·2017·21.18 MB·English

by  Eddy Portnoy

Advance Praise for
BAD RABBI
“This fascinating book contains the strangest Jews I’ve ever met in my life. It should
appeal to every history buff out there—Jewish, 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 The Year of Living Biblically:
One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible
“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 Julius Knipl: Real Estate Photographer
“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
Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage
“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 Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America
“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 Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York
“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 Born to Kvetch:
Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods
STANFORD STUDIES IN JEWISH HISTORY AND CULTURE
Edited by David Biale and Sarah Abrevaya Stein
BAD RABBI
And Other Strange but True Stories
from the Yiddish Press
EDDY PORTNOY
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
2018
© by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic
or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval
system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Portnoy, Eddy, author.
Title: Bad rabbi : and other strange but true stories from the Yiddish press
/ Eddy Portnoy.
2018
Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, . |
Series: Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
2017013491 2017015553
Identifiers: LCCN (print) | LCCN (ebook) |
9781503603974 9780804797610
ISBN (e-book) | ISBN (cloth :alk. paper) |
9781503604117
ISBN (pbk. :alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Yiddish newspapers—New York (State)—New York—History. |
Yiddish newspapers—Poland—Warsaw—History. | Jewish newspapers—New York
(State)—New York—History. | Jewish newspapers—Poland—Warsaw—History.
| Jews—New York (State)—New York—Social life and customs. |
Jews—Poland—Warsaw—Social life and customs.
4885 53 4885 53 672017
Classification: LCC PN .Y (ebook) | LCC PN .Y P (print) |
0713089924 23
DDC . —dc
2017013491
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/
102515
Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in . / Adobe Caslon Pro
For the two-bit nobodies
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For most people there is only one small step between vulgarity and
refinement, between blows and kisses, between spitting at one’s
neighbor’s face and showering him with kindness.
Isaac Bashevis Singer, In My Father’s Court
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CONTENTS
Notes on Orthography xi
Introduction: A Brief and Not Entirely Uncomplicated
1
History of the Yiddish Press
1 25
Jewish Abortion Technician
2 38
The Hebrew Girl Murderer of East New York
3 58
The Jewish Mahatma
4 1906 67
The Great Tonsil Riot of
5 73
Rivington Street’s Wheel of (Mis)Fortune
6 83
Yom Kippur Battle Royale
7 89
Attack of the Yiddish Journalists
8 95
Suicide Jews
9 103
Battle at the Bris
10 108
Urke Nachalnik: Fine Young Criminal
11 118
The Strange Case of Gimel Kuper, Mystery Journalist