Shabbat Service and Cultural Program: Advice Columns and the Making of the American Yiddish Press

Our Shabbat service.

Cultural program:

Dear Editor: Advice Columns and the Making of the American Yiddish Press

At the turn of the twentieth century, American Yiddish newspapers overflowed with advice columns offering implicit and explicit guidance to readers about how to live their lives. From the Forverts’ famous “A Bintel Brief” to more practical advice columns, such as Der Tog’s “Letter Box” column, these publications printed countless letters from readers asking editors to help them navigate personal tribulations, American political infrastructures, and Jewish communal life.

Editors and publishers introduced these features to entertain newspaper readers and to increase circulation. But these features also encouraged audiences previously unaccustomed to reading newspapers to view these publications as central sources for information and guidance about acclimating to American life. Eventually, these interactions spilled off the page, with Yiddish newspapers hiring staff to correspond or meet with readers eager to receive personal counsel from their favorite papers.

This talk will explore the crucial role of advice columns in the development of the Yiddish press. It will highlight how these columns shaped the relationships between newspapers and their readers and how central advice columns became to the acclimation process of new immigrants anxious to learn more about American life.

Ayelet Brinn is an American Jewish historian with an expertise in gender and popular culture. She received her PhD in History from the University of Pennsylvania in 2019 and is currently a Scholar in Residence at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, where she is working on a book about the role of gender politics in the development of the American Yiddish press.

Image credit: Jacob Epstein, “In the Office of the ‘Vörwarts [Forward]’” in Hutchins Hapgood, The Spirit of the Ghetto: Studies of the Jewish Quarter in New York. 1902

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