In the penultimate chapter of A Revolution in Type: Gender and the Making of the American Yiddish Press, Ayelet Brinn begins with a story about a poem published in January 1921 in the anarchist Yiddish weekly Fraye arbiter shtime, a newspaper known for publishing cutting-edge modernist literature by up-and-coming writers. The byline was attributed to an “Anna Margolin.” Many readers, however, doubted that a woman could have written such a sophisticated piece; they were sure it was penned by a man using a female pseudonym. Yet this poem was not written by a man but by a woman: Rosa Lebensboym.

This anecdote gets to the heart of Brinn’s excellent and meticulously researched monograph, which explores the complicated ways gender shaped the Yiddish American press between 1880 and 1924. Brinn traces how Yiddish newspapers across the ideological spectrum increasingly targeted women readers in the era of mass migration—years that corresponded with progressivism, the passage of women’s suffrage, and the development of what contemporaries called the “New Woman,” a neologism coined to described more modern views of women’s roles and the heightened visibility of women in the public sphere. To attract women readers, Yiddish newspapers experimented with various forms of “popular” and commercial content. It was this so-called “women’s content,” ostensibly for a female audience but in fact read by men too, that catalyzed the growth of American Yiddish press, transforming a “handful of struggling publications,” Brinn argues, “into a successful, commercially viable publishing field with mass appeal and ideological potency” (7).

Building on scholars who have studied the American Yiddish press and its role in galvanizing a radical Jewish workers’ movement, Brinn upends the notion that a Yiddish language print culture simply migrated from Eastern Europe to the United States. The first Yiddish daily newspaper did not appear in Europe until 1903, twenty years after the founding of the first Yiddish daily in the United States. Religious and secular Jewish elites in Europe long scorned Yiddish as the language of the uneducated masses. Rabbis and religious leaders studied Talmudic texts in Hebrew while secular intellectuals read and wrote in German or Russian. Both saw Yiddish as feminized.

In the United States, however, Yiddish became the language that socialist intellectuals used to organize Jewish workers, and a distinct American Yiddishkeit culture emerged. Yiddish newspapers were at the center of these developments. Scholars have written at length about the relationship between the Yiddish press and the formation of American Jewish politics, especially leftist radicalism. To that end, they have combed through editorials and front-page news but have tended to bypass the “seemingly peripheral status of women’s columns and other newspaper features supposedly aimed at a female audience (but actually read by great interest by many Yiddish newspaper readers regardless of gender)” (7). Brinn, in contrast, makes this content her focal point, and she examines not just leftist newspapers like the socialist Forverts but papers ranging from the Orthodox Tagelbat (Jewish Daily News) to the nonpartisan Tog (The Day). Brinn argues that distinctions between these newspapers were somewhat “artificial” because writers and editors often worked simultaneously for multiple dailies (13).

Drawing from innovations in the mainstream American press, Yiddish editors experimented with content aimed at women readers: human-interest stories, entertainment news, fiction, poetry, and advice columns, the most famous of which was Forverts’ “Bintel brief,” introduced by long-time editor Abraham Cahan in 1906. By the interwar years, nearly every Yiddish newspaper had a distinct woman’s sections or page. By the 1920s, editors boasted about providing a hospitable home for women writers. “For some editors including articles by women became a method to signal their paper’s more modern, progressive approach than rival publications,” writes Brinn. “For others it constituted an attempt to boost circulation by attracting readers who assumed that writing for or by women was inherently more ‘popular,’ ‘juicy,’ or full of human interest” (182).

Many young male writers, especially those born in the United States or who had immigrated when they were quite young, concluded that “appealing to women, or writing as a woman” would enhance their own chances of getting published (183). As a result, they took on female pseudonyms, a practice with a long history in Yiddish literary culture. Jewish writers in Europe, however, employed female pseudonyms to hide their identities; they were ashamed of writing in the vernacular and feminized Yiddish. In contrast, male writers in the United States turned to female pseudonyms because they believed editors were less discerning when it came to writings by women. Female pseudonyms, moreover, enabled male authors to experiment with modern forms and styles of writing, Brinn argues, without risk to their reputations.

Brinn is careful to delineate between perception and reality. While Yiddish newspapers bragged about the number of women writers they employed, only a handful of women wrote for the Yiddish press. Tasked with producing “women’s content,” they employed pseudonyms, too. Some did so to leave the impression that women contributed to women’s pages more than they really did. Women writers also published anonymously, which enabled them to move beyond the constraints imposed by “woman’s” or “popular” content. Thus “writing as a woman,” Brinn argues, was more advantageous for men than women. Women writers also worked behind the scenes doing task like translations, for which they received no attribution. “At the very moment that editors actively solicited women readers and writers,” Brinn writes, “they also obscured the variety and extent of the work certain women performed in allowing the Yiddish newspaper market to function” (129).

There is not much to quibble with in this well-researched and well-written book. I did find myself, however, wishing that Brinn analyzed in more detail how these binary and essentialized views of writings developed, how they compared to the American literary landscape beyond just newspapers, and how women writers challenged traditional Jewish gender roles, which deemed intellectual work masculine, even while being constrained by gender assumptions of the times. Literary historian Ann Douglas famously argued that American literary life became femininized in the nineteenth century. Douglas pointed to the rise of female sentimental novelists, the feminization of the teaching profession, and the emergence of commercially minded women’s magazines. Undoubtedly, the Yiddish press was shaped by these assumptions. But Douglas also argued that the 1920s witnessed a full-scale assault on this feminization of American literary life. Modernism became a way for some authors to assert a literary masculinity.Footnote ¹ Yet for Yiddish male writers, female pseudonyms freed them to explore modernist forms of literature, including poetry. Readers were convinced that the poem by “Anna Margolin” in Fraye arbiter shtime was written by a man. Yet the author was Rosa Lebensboym. Lebensboym was never proud of her journalistic output in newspapers because she felt constrained by the style and content expected of women writers. Yet she also used a female pseudonym to publish her poetry. Yiddish literary critics regarded poetry as “inherently more confessional or emotion driven” and thus a more “suitable genre for women than literary criticism or editorials, which relied on erudition over sentiment” (190–191). But as the Margolin example illustrates, writing like a woman—or a man for that matter—was far from clear-cut. Scholars of American print culture would do well to take up some of the questions Brinn has left unanswered.