Abraham Cahan and the Inception of the Yiddish ‘Yellow Press’
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Max Weinreich Fellowship Lecture in American Jewish Studies
The Rose and Isidore Drench Memorial Fellowship and the Dora and Mayer Tendler Endowed Fellowship in Jewish Studies Admission: Free |
The epithet 'gele prese' (yellow press) was often leveled at the socialist Yiddish Forverts by critics of its editor, Abraham Cahan, who accused him of imitating the methods of American newspapermen Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst to the detriment of the Yiddish reading audience. This lecture traces Cahan's ideas about how to write effectively for immigrant readers back to the 1880s, his first decade in the United States. Throughout that decade, Cahan honed his skills as a socialist orator, addressing immigrant audiences in Yiddish. In 1890, he co-founded a socialist Yiddish weekly, Arbeter tsaytung, where he tested the notion that in order to entice barely literate immigrants to read Yiddish newspapers, it was necessary to present content to them in simplified, entertaining form. Several informants interviewed for YIVO's Oral History of the American Labor Movement (RG 113) attested to the efficacy of Cahan's approach.
Cahan's 'popularization' of reading material became an idée fixe to which he clung for many years, and for which he was impugned by those who blamed the 'gele' Forverts for holding back the intellectual progress of the immigrant generation.
This program takes place in the Auditorium.
About the Speaker
Ellie Kellman researches and writes about modern Yiddish literature and literary history, specializing in the history of the Yiddish periodical press and publishing industry. She is working on a book entitled Reading the New Country: Abraham Cahan and the Invention of American Jewish Popular Culture.
Among her scholarly publications are: “Exile in Warsaw: The Kultur-Lige in Poland, 1921-1924” (2015); “Aiding the Female Immigrant Reader or Entertaining Her?: The Jewish Daily Forward and its ‘Gallery of Missing Husbands’” (2014); “Faint Praise: the Early Critical Reception of Joseph Opatoshu’s Historical Novel In poylishe velder“ (2013); “The Pregnant Bride from Suffolk Street: Intraethnic Class Conflict in a Yiddish Serial Novel” (2011); and “Uneasy Patronage: Dovid Bergelson’s Years at the Forverts” (2007). She teaches Yiddish language and literature and modern Jewish literature in the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University.