A brief blog on the development of Chanukah advertising in the United States. Of course, this included ads in Yiddish papers. As Chanukah became an increasingly prominent holiday, merchandisers saw an opportunity to create demand for decorations and games similar to the Christmas shopping season. Advertisements selling would-be Chanukah gifts and products were welcomed by the newspapers.
A brief look at the history of The Forward Building, in the heart of the Lower East Side.
General CJH Inquiries
Lillian Goldman Reading Room
Ackman and Ziff Genealogy Institute
Author Ayelet Brinn is in conversation with Anita Norich about her new book, A Revolution in Type, a fascinating glimpse into the complex and often unexpected ways that women and ideas about women shaped widely read Jewish newspapers.
Between the 1880s and 1920s, Yiddish-language newspapers rose from obscurity to become successful institutions integral to American Jewish life. During this period, Yiddish-speaking immigrants came to view newspapers as indispensable parts of their daily lives. For many Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, acclimating to America became inextricably intertwined with becoming a devoted reader of the Yiddish periodical press, as the newspapers and their staffs became a fusion of friends, religious and political authorities, tour guides, matchmakers, and social welfare agencies.
Brinn argues that questions related to women were central to the emergence of the Yiddish press as a powerful, influential force in American Jewish culture. The book explores the discovery of previously unknown work by female writers in the Yiddish press, whose contributions most often appeared without attribution; it also examines the work of men who wrote under women’s names to break into the press. Brinn shows that instead of framing issues of gender as marginal, we must view them as central to understanding how the American Yiddish press developed into the influential, complex, and diverse publication field it eventually became.
IYP is an ongoing Yiddish language bibliographical project. In the IYP online database are recorded the contents of over 1,000 periodicals published worldwide from 1862 onward. N.B.: General search terms must be written in Yiddish, with Yiddish letters.
NYPL curator Lyudmila Sholokhova and NYU Professor Gennady Estraikh analyze selections from the Yiddish daily newspaper Forverts (Forward) and discuss its tremendous impact on generations of readers—and generations of scholars—since its founding in 1897.
A research guide for Jewish newspapers created by librarians at NYPL's Dorot Division. This guide includes but is not limited to Yiddish newspapers.
"The problem of Jewish men abandoning their families was so severe that along with the National Desertion Bureau, Yiddish newspapers like the Forverts, with a daily readership in the hundreds of thousands, published a popular column called 'The Gallery of Missing Husbands,' which featured mug shots and descriptions of men who had left their wives and families in the lurch." Readers who believed to have seen the men were encouraged to write in a report to the paper. [JTA]
"The Tageblatt, founded in 1885, represented the Orthodox religious point of view. The Morgen Journal was also Orthodox and was the first (1901) truly successful Yiddish morning paper. The 1890s saw the beginning of the Forvarts (Jewish Daily Forward), a socialist paper, which, under the guiding hand of Abraham Cahan, became the largest Yiddish newspaper in the world. In the same decade the Freie Arbeiter Shtime was born, representing the anarchists. Even the weekly La America (1910-25), a Ladino paper for Sephardic readers, printed a Yiddish column to attract advertisers in the greater Eastern European community."
Access to digitized Yiddish periodicals hosted by the National Library of Israel's Historical Jewish Press Project. This includes Yiddish papers from North America, Europe, Latin America, and Israel.