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Yiddish culture shared mainstream racist stereotypes of the 1920s, new book shows
This article initially appeared in Yiddish and can be read here.
America held many surprises for Jewish immigrants arriving at its shores over 150 years ago but one of the most significant was meeting African Americans, something that was very unfamiliar, even alien to them.
Sholem Aleichem conveyed this feeling in his series of stories Motl, Pesye the Cantor’s Son. In one memorable episode, its protagonist Motl, aged about nine, gets on the New York subway for the first time and sees a Black couple on the train. Stunned, he describes them in terms that would shock today’s readers: “Crude creatures. Horribly thick lips. Large white teeth and white nails.”
Critics would naturally focus on the racist stereotypes in this passage. But who’s to blame here: the author or the character?
In his latest book, Gil Ribak (University of Arizona) tackles this very question, putting Motl’s words right in the title: “Crude Creatures: Confronting Representations of Black People in Yiddish Culture.” Hillel Halkin’s English translation of these Sholem Aleichem stories, Ribak notes, omits the phrase, in a sign of modern discomfort around racist language.
Ribak isn’t the first scholar to take on this complicated, sensitive topic. However, until recently, scholars tended to tread carefully around attitudes toward African Americans as reflected in Yiddish literature; positive stories were amplified, and any negative elements kept quiet. Racist stereotypes didn’t figure in conversation, although they had existed all along. Even the Yiddish leftist literati, who openly sympathized with the hardships of Black people, made use of such expressions.
And as Ribak argues in his thoroughly researched study, we must keep in mind that the terms and images that sound so offensive today didn’t have the same meaning for readers a hundred years ago.
The stereotype of Black people as “wild animals” emerged in Hebrew and Yiddish when Ashkenazi Jews were still living in Eastern Europe, where most people had never seen an African person. European culture in general played a major role in transmitting this image, but it also reached Jewish communities through traditional Yiddish books. One example: The popular Yiddish Bible adaptation, Tsenerene, explains that the children of Noah’s son Ham, as punishment for their father’s sin, would be made “dark” and “black.”
When American Yiddish journalists set out to explain the American race problem to their readers, they viewed the South through an Eastern European lens, likening the African Americans to Russian peasants. Yiddish socialists claimed that the bitter experiences of slavery had made both the African Americans and the Russian peasants “slow,” “coarse” and “lazy.” The comparison was bolstered by the fact that Russian serfs and African American slaves had both been emancipated around the same time, in the 1860s.
In the United States, Ribak notes, the African American became a kind of Russian peasant incarnate in the American Jewish imagination. Ab Cahan, the editor-in-chief of the Forverts, drew a parallel for his readers between the Southern whites in America and Polish nobles back in Eastern Europe: hospitable and civil with their own, but when it came to those they considered their inferiors — the slave and the serf — they treated them as less than human.
Even as they protested anti-Black violence in the South, progressive Yiddish journalists and activists like Baruch Vladek and Ab Cahan still used racist stereotypes. Reporting for the Forverts on the Leo Frank trial in Atlanta in 1914, Cahan observed that “the streets were full of Negroes, mostly filthy and ragged.” To see how widespread these stereotypes were, one need look no further than the numerous caricatures by Jewish cartoonists that appeared in the popular satirical weekly Der Groyser Kundes (The Big Prankster).
Sometimes Jews and African Americans found themselves residing side by side in America’s urban centers. As Ribak notes, in Harlem, New York, in the early 20th century, Jews were practically the only white residents living among the majority Black population. But the two groups didn’t mix much, and by 1930, nearly all the Jews had left the neighborhood.
To be sure, Yiddish socialists upheld racial equality as an important principle, recognizing that Black people were the victims of discrimination and oppression. In practice, however, they had little direct contact with African Americans and often perceived them as “weaker and younger brothers.”
This ambivalence also plays out in the works of other American Yiddish writers like Sholem Asch, Joseph Opatoshu and Boruch Glazman. They all opposed racism, but their fictional portrayals of African Americans consistently drew on racist stereotypes, most visibly so in their descriptions of Black physicality, of faces and gestures. Opatoshu’s well-known story, A Lynching, is a telling example.
Ribak concludes that the authors’ negative, aesthetic representations in these literary works were at odds with their progressive, ethical worldviews. In other words, these writers were internally conflicted by their own diametrically opposed attitudes.
Ribak’s book is packed with vivid details from thousands of Yiddish, Hebrew and English sources. Unlike most Yiddish scholars today, he doesn’t limit his analysis to well-worn samplings of “high” culture and progressive journalism, but also cites examples in low-brow Yiddish popular culture.
Ribak’s wide-ranging approach allows him to reveal a series of complicated and sometimes contradictory positions that Eastern European immigrants held on the American race issue in the first othree decades of the twentieth century.
The many examples in this book support Ribak’s argument that Jewish immigrants were far from bias-free when it came to race. There’s a bit of implicit polemic here, too, against the tendency in the field of Yiddish Studies today, to focus exclusively on the progressive, anti-racist elements of American Yiddish culture.
It’s fair to say that by appropriating racist clichés, Jewish immigrants were hoping to take one step further on the path toward Americanization. It made them feel like truly “white” Americans, a very real matter at a time when American society was intensely xenophobic and antisemitic. But things would change. By the 1930s, leftist Jews began to see Black people as potential partners in the struggle for social and economic justice.
The post Yiddish culture shared mainstream racist stereotypes of the 1920s, new book shows appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump Safe After Being Rushed from White House Correspondents Dinner, Shooter in Custody
U.S. President Donald Trump is escorted out as a shooter opens fire during the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 25, 2026, in this screen capture from video. REUTERS/Bo Erickson
President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump were rushed out of the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner by Secret Service agents on Saturday night after a man armed with a shotgun tried to breach security, officials said.
A man armed with a shotgun fired at a Secret Service agent, an FBI official told Reuters. The agent was hit in an area covered by protective gear and not harmed, the official said.
All federal officials, including Trump, were safe. About an hour after Trump was rushed from the event, he posted on Truth Social that a “shooter had been apprehended.”
“Quite an evening in D.C. Secret Service and Law Enforcement did a fantastic job,” Trump added.
Shortly afterwards, he posted, “The First Lady, plus the Vice President, and all Cabinet members, are in perfect condition.” He said he would be holding a White House press conference on Saturday night.
Anthony Guglielmi, a Secret Service spokesman, said the service was investigating a shooting near the main screening area at the entrance to the event.
After the sound of shots, dinner attendees immediately stopped talking and people started screaming “Get down, get down!”
Hundreds of guests dove under the tables as Secret Service officers in combat gear ran into the dining room. Trump and the first lady had bent down behind the dais before being hustled out by Secret Service officers.
Many of the 2,600 attendees took cover while waiters fled to the front of the dining hall.
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Trump Cancels Envoys’ Pakistan Trip, in Blow to Hopes for Iran War Breakthrough
US President Donald Trump speaks on the day he honors reigning Major League Soccer (MLS) champion Inter Miami CF players and team officials with an event in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, US, March 5, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
President Donald Trump canceled a trip by two US envoys to Iran war mediator Pakistan on Saturday, dealing a new setback to peace prospects after Iran’s foreign minister departed Islamabad after speaking only to Pakistani officials.
While peace talks failed to materialize Saturday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered his troops to “forcefully” attack Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, his office said, further testing a three-week ceasefire.
Trump told reporters in Florida that he decided to call off the planned visit by US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner because the talks in Islamabad involved too much travel and expense, and Iran’s latest peace offer was not good enough for him.
Before boarding Air Force One on Saturday for a return flight to Washington, Trump said Iran had improved an offer to resolve the conflict after he canceled the visit, “but not enough.”
In a social media post, Trump also wrote there was “tremendous infighting and confusion” within Iran’s leadership.
“Nobody knows who is in charge, including them. Also, we have all the cards, they have none! If they want to talk, all they have to do is call!!!” he posted on Truth Social.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi earlier left the Pakistani capital without any sign of a breakthrough in talks with Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and other senior officials.
Araqchi later described his visit to Pakistan as “very fruitful,” adding in a social media post that he had “shared Iran’s position concerning (a) workable framework to permanently end the war on Iran. Have yet to see if the U.S. is truly serious about diplomacy”.
Iranian media reported that Araqchi had flown to Oman’s capital Muscat, saying he will meet with senior officials to “discuss and exchange views on bilateral relations and regional developments”.
Sharif wrote in a post on X that he spoke with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian about the regional security situation and told him that Pakistan was committed to serving “as an honest and sincere facilitator — working tirelessly to advance durable peace and lasting stability.”
Tehran has ruled out a new round of direct talks with the United States and an Iranian diplomatic source said his country would not accept Washington’s “maximalist demands.”
IRAN AND US AT AN IMPASSE
Washington and Tehran are at an impasse as Iran has largely closed the Strait of Hormuz, which normally carries one-fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas shipments, while the US blocks Iran’s oil exports.
The conflict, in which a ceasefire is in force, began with US-Israeli airstrikes on Iran on February 28. Iran has since carried out strikes against Israel, US bases and Gulf states, and the war has pushed up energy prices to multi-year highs, stoking inflation and darkening global growth prospects.
Araqchi “explained our country’s principled positions regarding the latest developments related to the ceasefire and the complete end of the imposed war against Iran,” said a statement on the minister’s official Telegram account.
Asked about Tehran’s reservations over US positions in the talks, an Iranian diplomatic source in Islamabad told Reuters: “Principally, Iranian side will not accept maximalist demands.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt had said the US had seen some progress from the Iranian side in recent days and hoped more would come over the weekend, while Vice President JD Vance was ready to travel to Pakistan as well.
Vance led a first round of unsuccessful talks with Iran in Islamabad earlier this month.
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Hezbollah Says Ceasefire ‘Meaningless’ as Fighting Continues in South
Israeli military vehicles and soldiers in a village in southern Lebanon as the Israeli army operates in it as seen from the Israeli side of the border, April 23, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Ayal Margolin
Lebanon’s Hezbollah said a US-mediated ceasefire in the war with Israel was meaningless a day after it was extended for three weeks, as Lebanese authorities reported two people killed by an Israeli strike and Hezbollah downed an Israeli drone.
US President Donald Trump announced the three-week extension on Thursday after hosting Israeli and Lebanese ambassadors at the White House. The ceasefire agreement between the governments of Lebanon and Israel had been due to expire on Sunday.
While the ceasefire has led to a significant reduction in hostilities, Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah have continued to trade blows in southern Lebanon, where Israel has kept soldiers in a self-declared “buffer zone.”
Responding to the extension, Hezbollah lawmaker Ali Fayyad said “it is essential to point out that the ceasefire is meaningless in light of Israel’s insistence on hostile acts, including assassinations, shelling, and gunfire” and its demolition of villages and towns in the south.
“Every Israeli attack… gives the resistance the right to a proportionate response,” he added.
Hezbollah is not a party to the ceasefire agreement, and has strongly objected to Lebanon’s face-to-face contacts with Israel.
BUFFER ZONE
The April 16 agreement does not require Israeli troops to withdraw from the belt of southern Lebanon seized during the war. The zone extends 5 to 10 km (3 to 6 miles) into Lebanon.
Israel says the buffer zone aims to protect northern Israel from attacks by Hezbollah, which fired hundreds of rockets at Israel during the war.
Hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel reignited on March 2, when the group opened fire in support of Iran in the regional war. The ceasefire in Lebanon emerged separately from Washington’s efforts to resolve its conflict with Tehran, though Iran had called for Lebanon to be included in any broader truce.
Nearly 2,500 people have been killed in Lebanon since March 2, the Lebanese health ministry says.
ISRAELI MILITARY WARNS RESIDENTS TO LEAVE TOWN
Lebanon’s health ministry said an Israeli airstrike killed two people in the southern village of Touline on Friday.
Hezbollah shot down an Israeli drone, the group and the Israeli military said. Hezbollah identified it as a Hermes 450 and said it had downed it with a surface-to-air missile.
An Israeli drone was heard circling above Beirut throughout the day on Friday, Reuters reporters said.
The Israeli military warned residents of the southern town of Deir Aames to leave their homes immediately, saying it planned to act against “Hezbollah activities” there.
Deir Aames is located north of the area occupied by Israeli forces, and it was the first time Israel had issued such a warning since the ceasefire came into force on April 16. Posted on social media, the Israeli warning gave no details of the activities it said Hezbollah was conducting in the town.
The Israeli military also said it had intercepted a drone prior to its crossing into Israeli territory, and that sirens were sounded in line with protocol.
WAR-WEARY RESIDENTS SEEK END TO FIGHTING
The continued fighting has angered war-weary Lebanese, who say they want to see a genuine ceasefire put a full halt to violence.
“What’s this? Is this called a ceasefire? Or is this mocking (people’s) intelligence?” said Naem Saleh, a 73-year-old owner of a newsstand in Beirut.
Residents of northern Israel had mostly returned to daily life, but expressed pessimism about the longevity of the ceasefire with Lebanon.
“I believe that the ceasefire is so fragile, and unfortunately it won’t stand long, in my opinion,” said Eliad Eini, a resident of Nahariya, which lies just 10 km (6 miles) from the border with Lebanon.
On Wednesday, Israeli strikes killed at least five people in the south, including a journalist.
Israel’s Ambassador to Washington Yechiel Leiter, in his opening remarks at Thursday’s talks, said “Lebanon should acknowledge the temporary presence of the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) and the right of Israel to defend itself from a hostile force that is firing on the population.”
Lebanon’s Ambassador to the United States Nada Moawad, in a written statement sent to Reuters, called for the ceasefire to be fully respected and said it would allow the necessary conditions for meaningful negotiations.
Lebanon has said it aims to secure the full withdrawal of Israeli troops from its territory in broader talks with Israel at a later stage.
Trump said on Thursday that he looked forward to hosting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Lebanese President Joseph Aoun in the near future, and said there was “a great chance” the two countries would reach a peace agreement this year.
Hezbollah attacks killed two civilians in Israel after March 2, while 15 Israeli soldiers have died in Lebanon since then, Israel says.