Miss Amerike: Gender, Mass Culture, and the American Yiddish Press

This lecture will explore the long, complex history of men writing under female pseudonyms in the American Yiddish press. Pseudonym use had been a common practice within Yiddish for centuries—with some authors taking on many different fictitious names throughout their lives. In nineteenth-century Europe, men who wrote under female pseudonyms often did so out of a sense of shame about writing in Yiddish—as opposed to Hebrew, which was seen by elites as a more literary, highbrow language. In contrast, men writing under female pseudonyms in 20th-Century American Yiddish newspapers asserted that they were doing so not out of a sense of shame, but to increase their chances of publication in newspapers eager to feature women’s voices and attract female readers. The use of female pseudonyms therefore provides a window into the ways in which interactions between American and Jewish culture allowed writers to draw on literary traditions in new ways and forge new understandings of gender and Jewish culture.