The Delightful Radicalism of an early 20th c. Yiddish Advice Column

The other day I stumbled on a gem on my shelves that I haven't seen in a while:

A Bintel Brief ("A Bundle of Letters") was a Yiddish-language advice column run by Der Forverts, (eventually to become the Jewish Daily Forward) beginning in 1906. It was iconic, a huge part of Jewish immigrant– and then second-gen– culture; for a long time answered by Abraham "Abe" Cahan, a Lithuanian-born socialist who helped found the Forverts in 1897 and served as its Editor-in-Chief all the way until 1946.

Before Dear Abby and Miss Manners, there was the Bintel Brief, and it was an amazing look into Jewish immigrant life and culture– and Cahan's responses, read avidly by the community in a way that no longer exists in the post-TV, post-Internet era, are often a fascinating window on the (Ashkenazi) Jewish culture of the time.

And Cahan's own refreshing radicalism– far ahead of his time on so many issues of the day– are a reminder to us, perhaps, to reach out of the constraints of our own social conventions to reach towards a more just vision of what can be.