Bad Rabbi: And Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press (Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture)

Eddy Portnoy is Senior Researcher and Director of Exhibitions at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

Portnoy's book is undomesticated history; it is a time machine to an eradicated past; it is pure pleasure." (Luc Sante author of Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York) . It should appeal to every history buff out thereJewish, gentile or otherwise. Through his painstaking research, we can vicariously experience their desperation and lack of self-control, their strange passions and their various forms of mental illness – predicaments we're just one step away from ourselves." (Ben Katchor comic artist and creator of Julius Knipl: Real Estate Photographer)"Having devoted his misspent youth to combing the Yiddish press for seedy, shady, and shocking stories, Portnoy, the bad boy of Yiddish studies, brings bad rabbis and other miscreants into the ligh

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. 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. One part Isaac Bashevis Singer, one part Jerry Springer, this irreverent, unvarnished, and freque