"A Revolution in Type" Book Talk

Between the 1880s and 1920s, Yiddish-language newspapers rose from obscurity to become successful institutions integral to American Jewish life. During this period, Yiddish-speaking immigrants came to view newspapers as indispensable parts of their daily lives. In A Revolution in Type, Ayelet Brinn argues that women were central to the emergence of the Yiddish press as a powerful, influential force in American Jewish culture. Through rhetorical debates about women readers and writers, the producers of the Yiddish press explored how to transform their newspapers to reach a large, diverse audience. The seemingly peripheral status of women’s columns and other newspaper features supposedly aimed at a female audience—but in reality, read with great interest by male and female readers alike—meant that editors and publishers often used these articles as testing grounds for the types of content their newspapers should encompass. Brinn shows that instead of framing issues of gender as marginal, we must view them as central to understanding how the American Yiddish press developed into the influential, complex, and diverse publication field it eventually became.

Brinn will be in conversation about her book with Tony Michels, George L. Mosse Professor of American Jewish History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.