Review of A Revolution in Type: Gender and the Making of the American Yiddish Press by Ayelet Brinn

In 1909, the anarchist Yiddish newspaper Fraye arbeter shtime featured a short story titled “In shlafloze nekht” (On sleepless nights), written by author Khave Gross. The newspaper’s longtime editor, Saul Yanovsky (1864-1939) reportedly cast doubt on the authorship of this and other short stories submitted by Gross, believing that the author of such striking fiction must be a man hiding behind a feminine pseudonym. But the author was, in fact, a woman named Rosa Lebensboym, better known to contemporary readers as Anna Margolin (1887-1952). Even as the author behind both pseudonyms gained prominence for her modernist poetry, readers continued to suspect that her complex works were produced by a man.

In some respects, doubts about women’s authorship were not unique to this era nor were they restricted to Jewish cultures. ^{1 1} Even today, fierce debates about women’s authorship and pseudonyms continue to animate the literary world, as with the case of the mysterious pen name Elena Ferrante, who some believe to be a man. See Karen Bojar, In Search of Elena Ferrante: The Novels and the Question of Authorship (McFarland, 2018). However, in the American Yiddish press, suspicions about the gender identity of writers were part of a wider transformation in reading and writing practices, as well as in the role of the press in the lives of its readers. In A Revolution in Type, Ayelet Brinn shows how gender became the fundamental prism through which the Yiddish press negotiated the contours of Jewish life in America. From the industry’s modern beginning in the 1870s, Brinn traces the decades-long process that led to the debates about the authorship of Anna Margolin and many other writers in the 1920s. Throughout this period, which was marked by mass migration of East European Jews, Yiddish newspapers rose to prominence and became profitable and influential institutions in American Jewish culture. At its peak, the most popular Yiddish daily newspaper, the Forverts, surpassed the circulation of the New York Times (7). The story of how this happened, in Brinn’s telling, centers on women, both real and imagined.

The American Yiddish press began seeking a female readership in the 1890s by offering a variety of materials explicitly or implicitly addressing female readers, such as advice columns, human interest stories, and popular fiction. In doing so, they were following the model set by the mass-consumption-oriented publications in the mainstream American press. The pursuits of female readers also tapped into long-standing traditions within Jewish cultures that conflated mass audiences with a female or feminized audience. For centuries, the gendered pecking order of the Jewish “sexual-linguistic system” placed Yiddish at the feminine bottom. ^{2 2} Naomi Seidman, A Marriage Made in Heaven: The Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish (University of California Press, 1997). Writing in Yiddish was described by some as meant for “women and men who are like women”—those not educated enough to read Hebrew—but this distinction reflected the cultural and political aspirations of authors and communal leaders more than the realities of Jewish literary cultures. ^{3 3} Max Weinreich, The History of the Yiddish Language, trans. Shlomo Noble and Joshua Fishman (University of Chicago Press, 1980), 276.

Brinn offers a thoroughly researched account of how such claims about the reading needs and habits of women became the foundation for “a new discursive forum and new relationships between East European Jewish immigrants and American culture” (11). One of its most popular features was advice columns, which audiences read and wrote to in search of information and entertainment, fostering an intimate sense of belonging that established the Yiddish press as a source of authority for Jews navigating urbanization, acculturation, and economic hardship. But, as products of popular culture, readers’ letters were also curated and edited to amplify their entertainment value. By analyzing such genres across the ideological spectrum – from radical and anarchist to traditional and orthodox – Brinn explores different approaches to the delicate balancing act of entertainment, edification, ideological proselytization, and profitability.

Herein lies one of the main contributions of A Revolution in Type: the collapse of the traditional distinction between the commercial and the ideological, the popular and the political. As Brinn points out, studies of the Jewish press have hitherto centered on the “serious” sections of newspapers – frontpage headlines, editorials, and highbrow literature. Literary studies also tend to neglect popular or non-canonical literary forms. It is not surprising that the forms traditionally deemed “trivial” and therefore unworthy of scholarly consideration coincide with the segments associated with women’s reading and writing. However, Brinn’s reading of these materials as part of a “holistic history” of the Yiddish press, within the broader frameworks of American and global Jewish cultures, reveals that issues of gender were not marginal or peripheral but rather inherently political and central to the development of the American Jewish culture.

A Revolution in Type shows how the inclusion of materials by and for women became a flexible signifier used for ideologically divergent aims – to present a publication as more radical, popular, American, modern, or traditional. Brinn skillfully exposes the discursive function of gender, as shorthand for a mass audience in a consumer-driven market, while calling attention to the space that women’s content allowed for debating gender roles and the actual implications that this “revolution” had on women working in the Yiddish newspaper industry. The desire of newspaper producers to signal their Americanness and exude popular appeal fueled a thirst for women’s writing, but that did not necessarily result in more writing by women. Much of the so-called “women’s content” was written by men and it was difficult for women to earn a living as writers in the Yiddish press. When the vogue of women’s content reached its zenith, in the first decade of the twentieth century, rumors about countless men using women’s pseudonyms led readers and critics to doubt the authorship of women such as Anna Margolin. Paradoxically, spotlighting gender resulted, at least in part, in further marginalization of women writers.

In this regard, A Revolution in Type joins recent efforts by scholars and translators to recover the vast terrain of women’s contribution to Yiddish culture, which, as Brinn points out, included not only writing but also translation and editorial and administrative labor that often went unrecognized. Anna Margolin’s fame resulted in more archival materials documenting her life and work, which drew scholarly attention. However, women such as Adella Kean Zametkin, Paulina Segal Kobrin, Bertha Wiernik, and Anna Cahan worked behind the scenes, primarily as translators, and their roles have remained obscure.

Shedding light on the full spectrum of women’s participation in Yiddish print culture is a daunting task, considering limitations such as a lack of archival documentation and the use of pseudonyms. Brinn faces these challenges head-on, utilizing a wide array of sources that include the newspapers and their archives, letters, memoirs, oral histories, poetry, and prose. While acknowledging the deficiency of the archive and the evidence provided by men about their working and personal relations with women writers, this study also illustrates how much can be learned by leaning into the “smoke and mirrors” involved in the gendered production of Yiddish popular culture. Brinn’s analysis of literary pseudonyms in the final chapter illustrates just that: writing with and about feminine pseudonyms by Margolin, Jacob Glatstein, and B.Z. Goldberg reflects both the internalization and subversion of gendered expectations as part of a broader discourse of modernization and cultural-political change in the Yiddish press. Beyond their significance in Jewish cultural history, such narratives about “passing” as women authors challenge the validity of a gendered categorization of literature, considering what defines “women’s writing” and whether that definition lies in the writing process or in the expectations imposed by editors and readers.

One question that stayed with me at the end of A Revolution in Type concerns the nature of the eponymous Revolution. The varied discussions of the needs and interests of women readers described in the book often appear to be detached from the experiences of actual women. Women became “pawns and symbols” for struggles about ideology, cultural supremacy, and commercial success. In today’s terms, we might view the attempt to boast a feminine veneer as a means of “virtue signaling,” an insincere strategy for performing progressive, modern, American ideals, with little regard for the lived reality of women, especially those in the newspaper industry. As Brinn points out on several instances, the rhetoric of modernity and change that undergirds the gendered dynamics of the Yiddish press at times appears to be at odds with a reality marked by anxiety, competition, and consumer-driven cultural production that often sidelines women as it elevated their symbolic significance. Revolutions are often construed as drastic shifts that break with the past, but, as this book shows, the forces of continuity echo throughout the transformations entailed in the making of the American Yiddish press.

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to end legal protection of women’s reproductive freedom (and the alarming sense that more is yet to come), discussions about the experiences of women and their symbolic function in debates about social change seem more relevant and urgent than ever. Ayelet Brinn’s comprehensive account of the gender dynamics that shaped American Jewish culture during its formative years reminds us that revolutions, especially those that have to do with gender, are never finite or complete. With exquisite prose and nuanced analysis of a wide array of sources, A Revolution in Type offers a timely and forceful contribution to the study of Jewish history, culture, and gender.