Introduction

Significantly, the newspaper reader in this joke was clean-shaven, without the beard or sidecurls (peyes*) of observant, or frum,* Jewish males, performing a religiously forbidden act: smoking on Saturday, the Shabbos (the Sabbath). Just as significant is what the smoker-on-Shabbos is doing: reading a Yiddish newspaper. Hence the greenhorn’s confusion: who are these people? They look and act differently than those in his own cultural milieu. Further, what the clean-shaven smoker has in his hands is likewise something new: a newspaper, in Yiddish yet. This book looks at how the Yiddish press sought to create Jewish-American identities for one particular set of readers not mentioned in the above-quoted joke: women. Women, identity, and the printed word sit at the center of this book, which examines two women’s magazines and the women’s pages in three daily newspapers, from 1913, when the first Yiddish women’s magazine appeared, until 1925 when the Immigration Act of 1924 took effect, ending mass migration.