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Abstract
Jews are often summoned as the model diasporic group in the academy, but few understand how the concept of diaspora actually informed Jewish immigrant identity in early-twentieth-century America. Both popular folklore and scholarship portray Jewish life, culture, and identity as shaped exclusively by Jews' diasporic mentality rooted in their dispersal from the Land of Israel. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, the mass migration of Jews from Eastern Europe reshaped Jews' understanding of exile and diaspora. Using a transnational lens, this article examines the newspapers created by one group of East European Jewish immigrants, all of whom hailed from the city of Bialystok in northeastern Poland, focusing on immigrants' depictions of Eastern Europe and their imagined relationship to it. Through a close reading of the pages of the Bialystoker Stimme (The Voice of Bialystok), a newspaper launched in New York in 1921 and read throughout the world, I argue that the depictions contained in these Yiddish newspapers belie the standard, static view of Jewish diasporic identity in America. Some East European Jews saw America as exile and themselves as still anchored in the crucible of Eastern Europe-fundamentally challenging long-standing notions of how Jews conceptualized the state of being in exile prevalent in scholarship in Diaspora studies and American Jewish history.
Keywords: diaspora, Bialystok, landsmanshaft, Yiddish press
"We Jewish immigrants from Bialystok suffer from an acute homesickness," laments Chaim Horowitz in the 1921 premier issue of the Bialystoker Stimme (The Voice of Bialystok), a Yiddish quarterly published in New York for the 40,000 former residents of this Polish city who had immigrated to the United States in the previous decades.1 "As Bialystoker Jews wander [navenad] throughout America," he continues, they discover "it is impossible to feel at home in the United States" and find that "only dreaming and writing about their beloved former home" provides them "any solace" in their immense suffering.2 Written at a time about which American Jewish historians have claimed that East European Jewish immigrants were ostensibly beginning to feel "at home in America," the tone of Horowitz's piece testifies to his passionate connection to his former home as well as his deep sense of alienation from his new one.3 Summoning the biblical phrase navenad, used to describe...