Socialist Ideology, Traditional Rhetoric: Images of Women in American Yiddish Socialist Dailies, 1918-1922 (Critical Essay)

The Yiddish press in the United States came into existence with the beginning of Jewish immigration from eastern Europe and soon became, like any other foreign language press, a very important immigrant institution. (1) It encompassed a wide range of newspapers and periodicals, including not only monthlies and weeklies but also dailies, several of which were already appearing at the turn of the century. Almost all the Yiddish dailies reflected their own ideological tendency, ranging from Orthodox to Zionist to socialist, and they were, to some extent, intended to advance the interests of these groups and parties and to support their political struggles. (2) Nonetheless, scholars--following the pioneering studies of Robert E. Park and Mordechai Soltes--have largely agreed that Yiddish newspapers in the United States were not merely a tool to advance various ideologies; they were also important agents of acculturation and Americanization for Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe. (3) At the end of World War I, by which time Jewish immigration to the United States had begun its decline, there were five Yiddish dailies in the United States. Each attempted in its own way to deal with all aspects of Jewish immigrant life: politics, culture, social and economic activities, and even family matters. They aspired to help create the profile of the American Jew and to shape the image of Jewish immigrant society. Three important figures in the American Yiddish world--the poet Jacob Glatstein, the journalist and critic Shmuel Niger, and the journalist and editor Hillel Rogof--eloquently (though somewhat nostalgically) recalled these aims in the opening essay to a book marking the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Yiddish press in the United States: "The Yiddish newspaper gave the immigrant a face. It made him a socialist, a Zionist, or a supporter of diaspora nationalism. But generally it made him a proud American Jew.... The newspaper in Yiddish was the stock market of ideas and of ideals. It shaped Jewish life." (4) Thus, an examination of how the Yiddish press discussed Jewish women, the ways in which it tried to appeal to them and to mold their image, will reveal how it viewed their place and their roles in eastern European Jewish immigrant society in the United States and will also tell us much about their status in that society. In the following pages, I will examine the image of immigrant women in the Yiddish socialist dailies in the United States as they were depicted in four different arenas: the public sphere, the workplace, the world of writing, and the family.