Yiddish in America

by Milton Doroshkin

"The heart of this study is the social and cultural role of Yiddish in the community of the Eastern European immigrants to America in the last decades of the nineteenth and the first two decades of the twentieth centuries. These Jewish newcomers were poor working-class people who were strangely divided between religious piety and radical socialism. They became the sweat-shop toilers and ghetto dwellers. They lived in a colorful world of "landsman" fraternalism, Yiddish theater, literature and press. To illustrate his thesis that the Jews were integrated in a community of Yiddish institutional life, Dr. Doroshkin has selected two important institutions that were instrumental in helping the immigrants to bridge his "shtetl" culture to his new life and needs: the Yiddish press, and landsmanshaft and fraternal organization. The American Jewish labor movement is woven into the background of the study as a fundamental strand in the total fiber of the Yiddish culture.^ This work closely exami