Bad Rabbi and Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press by Eddy Portnoy

Abstract

Reviewed by: Bad Rabbi and Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press by Eddy Portnoy Daniel H. Magilow Eddy Portnoy. Bad Rabbi and Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018. Pp. 280. Paper $19.95. ISBN 9781503604117. In the rich introduction to his tour of Yiddishland as recorded (and sensationalized) in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Yiddish press, Eddy Portnoy identifies a crucial tension between history and memory. Portnoy, who is a Senior Researcher and Director of Exhibitions at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, notes that “History’s mandate should cover a broad swath, but nostalgia dictates that we remember only certain things.” Then, in the humorous, irreverent, and delightfully snarky tone that is the signature of Bad Rabbi and Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish, Portnoy qualifies the claim: “Family lore conveniently forgets that Zeyde the antiques dealer was actually Zeyde the beggar, or that Bubbe the saintly seamstress was also Bubbe the hooker, who turned tricks during the slack season to make ends meet.” (22) That Yiddish disappeared because its native speakers were lost to genocide or cultural assimilation has only fueled this nostalgia. Attempts to reconstruct this lost world have been heavily mediated by the records left by leading figures of Jewish civilization: rabbis, politicians, scholars, businessmen, writers, and artists of the sort Irving Howe catalogued in his 1976 classic World of Our Fathers. As Portnoy emphasizes, our image of pre-World War II Ashkenazim comes largely from “hypermediated pop culture fantasy phenomena as Fiddler on the Roof, the paintings of Marc Chagall, or perhaps the photographs of Roman Vishniac.” (23) [End Page 86] But what of the Jewish masses, termed amkho in Yiddish, whom Portnoy characterizes as the “poor, explosively angry, and occasionally half-witted Jewish underclass” (17) and “the uniquely Jewish rabble”? (23) Focusing our attention on this marginalized group through the lens of the immensely popular Yiddish press not only helps delineate the contours of an otherwise unrecognized normalcy within pre-war Jewish culture, it also fulfills an important historical role, for “if we decide to ignore the sometimes ugly realities of our pasts, we lose some of the pieces of the story that make us human and we do a disservice to the historical record.” (22) Bad Rabbi humanizes the amkho through a series of short chapters that delve deep into the tawdry and seamy sides of urban Jewish life, mostly if not exclusively in New York and Warsaw. Interspersing material from well-known English-language newspapers like The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post with now-obscure Yiddish titles such as Moment, Haynt, Morgn zhurnal, and Yidishes tageblat, Bad Rabbi sketches out quotidian Jewish existence of a century ago in eighteen highly readable chapters. We learn of fistfights and chair-throwing at the Warsaw Rabbinate’s divorce court, riots sparked by secular Jews more inclined to feast than fast on Yom Kippur, and Orthodox outrage when the “60-something married with children” Warsaw Kehila president Heshl Farbin sang the Hebrew Bible’s lascivious Song of Songs at a banquet honoring Zofia Oldak, the twenty-something “Frida Kahlo look-alike” and “Miss Judea 1929.” Bad Rabbi’s appeal derives in no small measure from such sensationalist tabloid fodder. Yet for all of the humor and seediness of the episodes Portnoy reconstructs, their ramifications frequently transcend the parochial Jewish ghetto. For instance, Bad Rabbi’s first tale, “Jewish Abortion Technician,” recounts the 1871 scandal of the self-styled abortion provider Jacob Rosenzweig. It begins with the discovery of the decomposing body of seventeen-year old Alice Bowlsby in a trunk at a Hudson River train depot. Police soon traced the crime to Rosenzweig, whose credentials as an ob-gyn began and ended when he paid a $10 “physician revenue tax” and placed a shingle on his storefront identifying himself as a doctor. Rosenzweig’s arrest and subsequent manslaughter conviction made headlines in both the Yiddish and non-Yiddish press, but more importantly, the case and others like it “opened the floodgates for the anti-abortion crusaders.” (36) The scandal of the Jewish abortion technician helped...