What the world really needs is a study of dumb Jews, Peter Gay remarked while disparaging a book about how “the Jewish genius” had, so the author claimed, invented modernity. Eddy Portnoy in Bad Rabbi: And Other Strange But True Stories From the Yiddish Press has come along to answer Gay's request. Bad Rabbiexplores the sensational offerings of the Yiddish newspapers in both America and Eastern Europe, which featured, Portnoy says, “multitudes of mediocre Jews, many of whom lived on the verge of modernity, yet were often backward and stupid.” You won't meet any Einsteins here, but you will get to know some bad hombres, and some extremely silly ones too. The bad rabbi of the title is a bit disappointing, but Portnoy's archival digging has turned up some rewarding, and bizarre, nuggets from the Yiddish-speaking world of a century ago.
Bad Rabbi contains no stories of piety, scholarship, moneymaking smarts, or it-takes-a-shtetl wholesomeness. Instead, Portnoy gives us drunks, obese wrestlers, hopelessly clumsy criminals, and vitriol throwers. (Hurling acid in someone's face seems to have been a popular pastime around the turn of the century, especially in courtroom settings.) From the 1870s on, Yiddish newspapers explained the world to an eager Jewish audience. Almost all Yiddish writers were, at one point or another, journalists, and they often highlighted the salacious and freakish.
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