10 - The Rise of Jewish Mass Culture: Press, Literature, Theatre

Summary

And how they read their paper! It was not merely a superficial and cursory skimming through the columns … The Jew who did not read his newspaper from beginning to end felt as though he had wasted his few coppers on it. He read the lines and, on account of the censorship, also between the lines. And when the head of the family returned home from his daily chores, he would sit down to read out the article by his favourite writer to the members of his family …

MOSHE SNEH on the situation before 1914

THE PROCESSES of industrialization, urbanization, and secularization which gathered pace in the course of the nineteenth century produced, out of the break-up of traditional ways of life, a modern mass culture. This in its turn further undermined long-established patterns of thinking and acting. This cycle was also to be seen in Jewish eastern Europe, where in the larger towns a Jewish popular culture, expressed for the most part in Yiddish, began to emerge in the decades before 1914. It manifested itself in mass-circulation newspapers and magazines, popular literature, music, and theatre. Its principal characteristics have been described by Michael Steinlauf:

For several generations of East European Jews, this culture defined the texture of everyday life … These were Jews who lived in two worlds. On one hand, they could take for granted Jewish law and custom, folklore and legend, as these had developed for centuries in the Polish lands. Regardless of their degree of practice or even belief, they were intimately acquainted with this cultural storehouse; its contents were still instantly recognizable and—more or less ambiguously—still attractive. On the other hand, these were also Jews accustomed to trains, telegraphs, newspapers, and later radios, telephones, automobiles, ballot boxes, and public schools.

Considerable attention has been devoted in recent historical scholarship to the emergence of popular culture in Europe and North America. Investigation of this phenomenon in Jewish eastern Europe has developed more slowly, although Irving Howe has provided an extensive account of the world of Jewish immigrants to the United States.