Stories abound of immigrant Jews on the outside looking in,
clambering up the ladder of social mobility, successfully
assimilating and integrating into their new worlds. But this book
is not about the success stories. It's a paean to the bunglers, the
blockheads, and the just plain weird-Jews who were flung from
small, impoverished eastern European towns into the urban shtetls
of New York and Warsaw, where, as they say in Yiddish, their bread
landed butter side down in the dirt. These marginal Jews may have
found their way into the history books far less frequently than
their more socially upstanding neighbors, but there's one place you
can find them in force: in the Yiddish newspapers that had their
heyday from the 1880s to the 1930s. Disaster, misery, and
misfortune: you will find no better chronicle of the daily
ignominies of urban Jewish life than in the pages of the Yiddish
press. An underground history of downwardly mobile Jews, Bad Rabbi
exposes the seamy underbelly of pre-WWII New York and Warsaw, the
two major centers of Yiddish culture in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. With true stories plucked from the pages
of the Yiddish papers, Eddy Portnoy introduces us to the drunks,
thieves, murderers, wrestlers, poets, and beauty queens whose
misadventures were immortalized in print. There's the Polish rabbi
blackmailed by an American widow, mass brawls at weddings and
funerals, a psychic who specialized in locating missing husbands,
and violent gangs of Jewish mothers on the prowl-in short, not
quite the Jews you'd expect. One part Isaac Bashevis Singer, one
part Jerry Springer, this irreverent, unvarnished, and frequently
hilarious compendium of stories provides a window into an unknown
Yiddish world that was.
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