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  • Beyond the Women's Section:Rosa Lebensboym, Female Journalists, and the American Yiddish Press
  • Ayelet Brinn (bio)

In 1915, Rosa Lebensboym—a columnist and sometimes-editor for the "women's section" of the Yiddish daily Der tog (The Day)—wrote an article criticizing anglophone American newspapers for their treatment of female journalists.1 "[A] strange thing about the local press," she wrote, "[is that] it seems to be open to women, and that they occupy an important niche." But in reality, she asserted, women "are able to write frankly and freely about only two things: clothing and love." Moreover, "there are no women in American newspapers who are city editors, managers, or editorial writers." Again, Lebensboym blamed this imbalance on the fact that "women are only allowed to write about love. And even about that they must write banally, because originality is the quickest way to the waste-basket."2

Although this article did not offer an explicit critique of gender dynamics within the Yiddish press, it is likely that Lebensboym indirectly wanted to highlight similar problems in Der tog and other Yiddish newspapers as well. Throughout her over forty-year writing career, Lebensboym was not shy about her disdain for Yiddish journalism, and the roles that women were allowed to perform in its production and reception. In her view, "women's columns" often humiliated both those who read them and those who wrote them.3 [End Page 347]

In many ways, Lebensboym's views reflected broader constraints that women faced when they attempted to forge careers as writers for the Yiddish press. As was true of many female journalists at this time, most of the articles Lebensboym published under her own name fell into the category of "women's features," a category encompassing the types of articles publishers and editors thought would be most effective at attracting female readers, and the most fitting columns to assign to female writers. This classification included various genres, including women's columns, advice columns, human interest pieces, poetry, and short stories.4

However, Lebensboym's criticisms also masked the full complexity of her columns, as well as the variety of other work that she and other women writers contributed to the Yiddish press in the first decades of the twentieth century. Like other women, Lebensboym also contributed to these publications in ways that would not necessarily have been visible to readers. She published other types of articles, including foreign correspondence, anonymously or under assumed names. She also worked behind the scenes at different publications as a secretary, editor, and translator. Furthermore, though Lebensboym expressed ambivalence about her journalism, she also used her columns to question the boundaries of women's writing, to explore political issues, to question stereotypes about inherent female traits, and to argue that writing by or for women should not be seen as inherently frivolous.

This article will explore the life and career of Rosa Lebensboym, and what they reveal about the experiences of women who worked for the American Yiddish press at the turn of the twentieth century. Lebensboym is more well known by her pseudonym, Anna Margolin, under which she published poetry between 1920 and 1932. Though she only published one volume of poems, she has come to be seen in retrospect as one of the most important Yiddish poets. Because of this, most of the scholarship related to Lebensboym centers on this aspect of her work.5 But for [End Page 348] most of her life, she made her living as a journalist—writing, editing, and translating articles for a variety of newspapers.

In the early twentieth century, editors of American Yiddish dailies touted the inclusion of articles by female writers as a sign of their publications' progressiveness, commercial viability, and popular appeal. William Edlin, the long-time editor of Der tog, for example, noted with pride that the publication was "the first Yiddish newspaper to include women as members of the editorial staff."6 In contrast, women writers often expressed a more conflicted relationship with the Yiddish press. Many felt constrained by editors' assumptions about what types of writing female journalists were most suited for. And behind the scenes, these writers performed a variety of roles...

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