Der Tog: The Intelligent New York Yiddish Daily

On Sunday, December 7, 2014, YIVO’s Max Weinreich Center for Advanced Jewish Studies and NYU’s Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies held a symposium for scholars on Der Tog (The Day), the Yiddish daily that began publishing in New York in 1914, and then, after a merger with another newspaper in 1953, continued on as The Day-Morning Journal until 1971.

The symposium was chaired by YIVO’s first Albert B. Ratner Visiting Scholar in East European Jewish Literature, Gennady Estraikh. Professor Estraikh is the Clinical Associate Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies and Rauch Associate Professor of Yiddish Studies at New York University and an internationally recognized authority on Yiddish language and literature and East European Jewish history. During his tenure at YIVO this past fall, he taught a course on modernism and the Yiddish imagination and gave two lectures, one on “Taras Shevchenko: Ukrainian Nationalism, Poetry and the Jews” and another on Howard Fast and Soviet Yiddish writers. He also mentored graduate students and conducted research in the YIVO Archives and Library on the American Yiddish press and its relationship with the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union.

The full-day panel included presentations by Professor Estraikh, Ellen Kellman (Brandeis University), Yaelle Frohlich (NYU), Jessica Kirzane (Columbia), Faith Jones ( University of British Columbia), Ayelet Brinn (University of Pennsylvania), Amanda Miryem-Khaye Seigel (New York Public Library), Debra Caplan (CUNY Baruch), Mikhail Krutikov (University of Michigan), Saul Zaritt (JTS), and Agnieszka Legutko (Columbia), and covered different aspects of the history of the newspaper, including its role in fostering Yiddish literature and disseminating the work of writers, poets, and playwrights to the general public.

Professor Estraikh announced that NYU plans to digitize the entire run of Der Tog in the near future, and that this will open up a new resource for scholars of American Jewish history. He noted that Der Tog encompassed a broad range of viewpoints within its pages, and that unlike other Jewish newspapers with more ideological slants, saw its target readership as the entire Jewish nation.

“This is a perfect example of how we hope having visiting scholars will help bring together YIVO’s rich library and archival collections with scholarship,” noted Jennifer Young, YIVO Director of Education. “And then to take the next step of bringing together those scholars to exchange information and ideas.” Important archival collections related to Der Tog at YIVO include (RG 639) Records of Der Tog-Morning Journal, and (RG 1334) Papers of Herman Morgenstern, a reporter and editor for the paper from 1938-1971.

Eventually, Young says, the work of the scholars who participated in the symposium will go out to a broader audience: they will continue to meet over the next year and will write journal articles based on their work, which will eventually be compiled into a volume and published by Oxford University Press.