Dear Editor: Advice Columns and the American Yiddish Press with Ayelet Brinn
Saturday, April 27 @ 12-1 pm at Oak Park Temple or on Zoom
Baked potato bar and potluck dessert (Passover-friendly).

At the turn of the 20th century, American Yiddish newspapers overflowed with advice columns offering implicit and explicit guidance to readers about how to live their lives. From the Forverts’s famous “A Bintel Brief” to more practical advice columns, such as Der tog’s “Letter Box” column, these publications printed countless letters from readers asking editors to help them navigate personal tribulations, American political infrastructures, and Jewish communal life.  Eventually, Yiddish newspapers became so successful at marketing themselves as fountains of advice that they had to create open office hours and hire staff members whose job it was to correspond or meet with readers eager to receive personal counsel from their favorite papers. This talk will explore the crucial role of advice columns in the development of the Yiddish press. It will highlight how these columns shaped the relationships between newspapers and their readers and how central advice columns became to the acclimation process of new immigrants eager to learn more about American life.

 Ayelet Brinn is an Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies and History at the University of Hartford, where she holds the Philip D. Feltman Professorship in Modern Jewish History. Her first book, A Revolution in Type: Gender and the Making of the American Yiddish Press, was published November 2023 with New York University Press and was named as a finalist for the 73rd National Jewish Book Awards in the category of Women’s Studies. Purchase it with a 30% discount at nyupress.com using the discount code NYUAU30. Professor Brinn will sign books after her talk.

in person or on Zoom
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