Stories abound of immigrant Jews on the outside looking in, clambering up the ladder of social mobility and successfully assimilating 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. An underground history of downwardly mobile Jews, Bad Rabbi mines the Yiddish press to expose 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--Page 4 of cover.
- | Author: Eddy Portnoy
- | Publisher: Stanford University Press
- | Publication Date: Oct 24, 2017
- | Number of Pages: 280 pages
- | Language: English
- | Binding: Paperback/History
- | ISBN-10: 150360411X
- | ISBN-13: 9781503604117