Two Trials of Yiddish Newspapers in New York, 1929 / עתונים, עתונאים וסופרים על ספסל הנאשמים: לפרשת שני המשפטים של עתוני היידיש בניו יורק, 1929

• Published in: קשר 1999-11 (26), p.49-55
• Main Authors: נחשון, עדנה, Nahshon, Edna
• Format: Article
• Language: Hebrew
• ISSN: 0792-0113; 0792-0113

Yiddish cultural life in the US thrived during the 1920s, supported avidly by the leftist Jewish immigrant workers who arrived from Eastern Europe following the First World War. They turned the Yiddish press, Yiddish literature and Yiddish theater into a substitute for the religious practices that they had abandoned. Within this mass trend, the Jewish Communist movement had a particular interest in providing for the cultural needs of the workers. In their thinking, catering to the cultural taste of the workers would help forge a closed radical world that would reduce the dependence of party members on "bourgeois" cultural providers and strengthen the sense of political belonging. Not only ought workers fight together for the cause, they should spend their leisure time together, too. The Communists were convinced that they could organize unaffiliated but sympathetic Yiddish-speaking intellectuals into a common front. Such intellectuals, they believed, could not hope to be accepted into mainstream American cultural life in any case. Opposing the communists in a long and bitter rivalry were the socialists, branded by the communists as the "right" and viewed as ideologically inferior. Important centers of power for each movement were the Yiddish dailies identified with each camp: the socialistic Forverts ("Forward") and the Communist Freiheit ("Freedom"). The former had a circulation of 200,000 during the 1920s, while the latter had only 16,000 then, although it reached 30,000 in 1930. Freiheit, however, could not be judged by circulation figures alone. From the time it was founded in 1922 it established high literary standards and attracted some of the best Yiddish writers and poets as contributors, including H. Leivick, Moshe Nadir and Moshe Leib Halpern. Most of the contributors were not communists themselves but admired the multi-faceted Yiddish cultural blossoming in the Soviet Union then. Freiheit's animosity toward the Forverts was not only political, namely for diluting its socialist commitment with the passage of time, but also stemmed from Forverts' willingness to publish sensationalist material and lowbrow literature using "common" language filled with Americanisms. These transgressions were perceived as reflections of the "reactionary" and "traitorous" leadership of the labor movement. In 1929, Freiheit, under the editorship of M. Elgin, renamed Morgen Freiheit. The period was one of ideological radicalization in the Soviet Union, which preached an