“Two Writers in Our House”: Unearthing Women’s Contributions to the American Yiddish Press

Throughout its period of peak influence, the American Yiddish press was a male-dominated sphere. While American Yiddish newspapers featured content for and by women throughout their runs, and a small number of women achieved positions on the editorial boards of major Yiddish newspapers, the vast majority of writers, editors, and publishers associated with these publications were male. Because of this, most histories of the Yiddish press have focused their attention on the work that men performed in the development of American Yiddish print culture. In the past four decades, however, scholars of Yiddish literature and American Jewish history have begun to challenge these narratives by exploring the work that women performed as writers in a variety of genres, including journalism, poetry, and prose fiction, and how women were able to forge careers within this male-dominated publishing sphere.

This paper seeks to further our understanding of the roles that women played in the development of the American Yiddish press by uncovering the hidden work that women performed behind the scenes of major Yiddish newspapers. Memoirs, payrolls, and archival letters reveal that women worked behind the scenes at every major Yiddish newspaper, mainly as secretaries, cashiers, and translators. Many of these women were the spouses or children of editors of male writers and editors, and often worked in collaboration with their family members. However, they generally did not receive credit for their contributions on the pages of these newspapers. This paper will therefore explore the hidden contributions women performed in the development of the Yiddish press, as well as how and why these contributions were written out of the history of the Yiddish press by sources that privileged the work of editors over that of their staffs, or the work of men over the women that they collaborated with throughout their careers.