Sunday Brunch Book talk with Dr. Ayelet Brinn about Gender and the Making of the American Yiddish Press

Join us for a conversation with Dr. Ayelet Brinn. In her new book, A Revolution in Type: Gender and the Making of the American Yiddish Press, Dr. Ayelet Brinn explains how women and gender were central to the emergence of the Yiddish press as a powerful, influential force in American Jewish culture. Through rhetorical debates about women readers and writers, the producers of the Yiddish press explored how to transform their newspapers to reach a large, diverse audience. The seemingly peripheral status of women’s columns and other newspaper features supposedly aimed at a female audience—but in reality, read with great interest by male and female readers alike—meant that editors and publishers often used these articles as testing grounds for the types of content their newspapers should encompass. The book explores the discovery of previously unknown work by female writers in the Yiddish press, whose contributions most often appeared without attribution; it also examines the work of men who wrote under women’s names in order to break into the press. Brinn shows that instead of framing issues of gender as marginal, we must view them as central to understanding how the American Yiddish press developed into the influential, complex, and diverse publication field it eventually became.

Ayelet Brinn is an Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies and History at the University of Hartford, where she holds the Philip D. Feltman Professorship in Modern Jewish History. Her first book, A Revolution in Type: Gender and the Making of the American Yiddish Press is now in available with New York University Press.

This hybrid event will take place in the Jewish Studies Center, Arnold Hall (Room 100) and via Zoom. Brunch will be served beginning at 9:00 AM. Copies of the book will be available for purchase after the event.