DER SOYNE: Shmuel Charney and the Development of a Religious Secular Yiddishkayt in the Yiddish Press

• In Event: Remaking it New: Yiddish Socio-Political Thought

Abstract

In inter-war America, the secular Yiddish school systems were small in attendance but had an ideologically vital task. After Jewish immigration was halted in 1924, these schools had to develop a new Yiddishist identity in response to the linguistic and cultural acculturation happening around them. Though these school systems ranged in political ideology from communist to socialist-zionist, they united around a need to provide justification for why Yiddish-speaking parents should enroll their children in a Yiddish school rather than in a religious school or solely in the public schools. Shmuel Charney, a renowned literary critic, frequent contributor to DER TOG, and president of the Sholem Aleichem Schools, looked towards the popular Yiddish press to publicize the secular Yiddish schools and debate their ideological underpinnings. Charney’s writings in Der Tog became part of a debate with the left-wing newspapers, the MORGN FRAYHAYT and FRAYE ARBETER SHTIME, over the “religiousness” of both Charney’s emerging Yiddishist ideology and the secular Yiddish schools in general.

This paper uses both advertisements and articles within these newspapers to examine the Yiddish press as a crucible for the formation of a new religious-secular Yiddishist ideology between 1927 and 1939, centering around Shmuel Charney and the Yiddish school systems. Amidst the acculturation into English-speaking society in America and rising anti-semitism in Europe, discussions in the American Yiddish press concerning these schools helped to draw out new beliefs in the public sphere. Charney’s developing ideology was often in conversation with Chaim Zhitlowsky, being non-territorial and rooted in language, literature, socialism and the wide world where Yiddish was being spoken. On the other side, Charney was often explicitly developing his ideological line against what he saw as pitfalls of the far-left school systems and movements. Importantly, over time this ideology became open to spiritual elements that had previously been dismissed, blurring the definition of secularity within the self-described secular schools. This openness to religiosity set up the wider Yiddishist world towards the development of a not-quite-national identity for Jews that was to be a counter to nation-state violence.

Author

• Jason Rosenblum, Indiana University