This research project studies the growth of the Yiddish press internationally in the years 1890-1920 and the extent of its capacity to articulate, mediate, contribute to, and delimit modern Jewish politics and culture. Building on existing scholarship that has predominantly focussed on the Yiddish press in individual nation states, this work aims to look comparatively at how Yiddish newspapers internationally tried to intervene in processes that stretched across borders: the growth of antisemitism, the white slave trade, and the formulation of transnational Jewish creative and political ideologies. This research will also explore the journalists who themselves crossed national and continental borders, carrying expertise and resources with them, as well as the industrial and technological innovations that characterised the Yiddish press. In doing so it aims to reassess the growth of the Yiddish press as a dynamic response to processes whose transnational trajectories were emblematic of modern Jewish experience.
Contact: William Pimlott, Holocaust Research Institute, Royal Holloway, University of London. William began this project while an Early Career Fellow at the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism.
