Words to the Wives: The Yiddish Press, Immigrant Women, and Jewish-American Identity

​This book looks at how the Yiddish press sought to create Jewish-American identities for immigrant women. Shelby Shapiro focuses on two women’s magazines and the women’s pages in three daily newspapers, from 1913, when the first Yiddish women’s magazine appeared, until 1925, when the Immigration Act of 1924 took effect. Shapiro demonstrates how newspaper editors and publishers sought to shape identity in line with their own religious or political tendencies in this new environment, where immigrants faced a broad horizon of possibilities for shaping or reshaping their identities in the face of new possibilities and constraints. External constraints included the economic situation of the immigrants, varying degrees of antisemitism within American society, while internal constraints included the variable power of traditions and beliefs brought with them from the Old World. Words to the Wives studies how publications sought to shape the direction of Eastern European Jewish immigrant women’s acculturation.

Shelby Shapiro serves as General Editor of The Independent Scholar and the journal of the National Coalition of Independent Scholars. His interest areas include the Yiddish press, American history, Anarchism, the labor movement, print culture, jazz and blues. He served as Associate Editor of Connecticut State Records from 2012-2021.