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’s 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 engage and entertain newspaper readers and in order 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 as well. Yiddish newspapers became so successful at marketing themselves as fountains of advice that they had to create open office hours and hire staff members whose job it was 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 explore how these columns shaped the relationships between newspapers and their readers and how central advice columns became to the acclimation process of new immigrants eager to learn more about American life. 

This is a joint event of the Center for Jewish Studies at Fordham University and the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University.

Ayelet Brinn (B.A. Brown University; M.A./M.L.S. Indiana University Bloomington; Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania) is the Rabin-Shvidler Joint Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies at Columbia University and Fordham University. Her research focuses on issues of gender, language, and popular culture in American Jewish History. She is currently working on a book manuscript about the gender politics of the American Yiddish press.