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

Author: Portnoy Eddy

Brand: Stanford University Press

Edition: 1

Number Of Pages: 280

Details: Review

“Eddy Portnoy’s Bad Rabbi is an extraordinary thing: a gateway to the lost world of Jewish street life in pre-World War II New York and Warsaw. The Yiddish newspapers Portnoy mines were free from piety and light on decorum; instead they present a vast, roiling canvas of human behavior in all its extremes, from comedy to horror, with fiercely unbuttoned characters declaiming eloquently as stoopside choruses annotated their rants. 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

“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 light in this erudite and thoroughly entertaining book.” — Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett ― author of Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage

“This fascinating book contains the strangest Jews I’ve ever met in my life. It should appeal to every history buff out there―Jewish, gentile or otherwise. What’s Yiddish for ‘Buy this book, or may all your teeth fall out except one to give you a toothache’?” — A.J. Jacobs ― author of The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible

“Only a historian with the wit and comic sensibility of Eddy Portnoy could succeed in resurrecting these dead and forgotten Jews of New York and Warsaw. 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

“Bad Rabbi is a masterful set of finely-tuned scholarship and critical zingers that brings detailed archival history of ‘downwardly mobile’ nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jews alive through vivid, erudite, and spit-take funny storytelling. Portnoy heads straight for the urban immigrant underbelly, opens up the newspapers, and uses portraits of a vanished people and a vanished culture to not just deliver a bygone way of life, but to explode some of our most dominant conceptions of modern Jewish culture.” — Josh Kun ― author of Audiotopia: Music, Race and America

“Exuberantly vulgar, blithely unconcerned with gentile opinion, these nuggets of low-class Yiddishism won’t let us forget how rough-and-tumble life in Yiddishland really was.” — Michael Wex ― author of Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods

“In the staid world of academic Yiddishists, Eddy Portnoy is a live wire, a funny guy, a mischief-maker, what they used to call in the Catskills, a tummler…Bad Rabbi is a succession of outlandish misadventures, a wild panorama populated by an astonishing array of characters… Yiddish journalists were showboats, garnishing tabloid sensationalism with literary jokes and religious references. (Given this high-low style, as well as its caustic attitudinizing and internal feuds, the Yiddish press seems like a flamboyant forerunner to the old Village Voice.) Such zesty informality carries over into Portnoy’s own writing, which, in blending the erudite and vernacular, regularly tilts toward the latter.” — J. Hoberman ― New York Times

“Don’t feel guilty chuckling your way through Bad Rabbi as you read about the crazy deeds and commonplace misfortunes of marginal Jews from a century ago. ” — Renee Ghert-Zand ― The Times of Israel

“Endlessly interesting and entertaining with stories that range from the macabre to the hilarious.” — Southern Jewish Life Magazine

“…Portnoy’s rollicking chronicle of Jewish newspaper scandal is an entertaining plunge into unexamined corners of the Jewish past. It is a necessary intervention into Jewish historiography, reorienting the historian’s gaze to segments of the newspaper, and of

Release Date: 24-10-2017

Package Dimensions: 23x229x363