Eddy Portnoy, author of bestselling book Bad Rabbi, joins us live from New York in conversation with David Slucki from Monash University’s ACJC. Be shocked, amused and entertained as YIVO’s Academic Adviser and Head of Exhibitions introduces us to a generation of Jews behaving badly – the drunks, thieves, murderers, wrestlers, poets and beauty queens whose misadventures were immortalized in the pages of the Yiddish press.
An underground history of downwardly mobile Jews, Bad Rabbi exposes the seamy underbelly of New York and Warsaw, the two major centres of pre-WWII Yiddish culture. There’s the Polish rabbi blackmailed by an American widow, mass brawls at weddings and funerals, a psychic who specialized in locating missing husbands, and violent gangs of Jewish mothers on the prowl. One part Isaac Bashevis Singer, one part Jerry Springer, this irreverent, unvarnished, and frequently hilarious compendium of stories provides a window into an unknown Yiddish world that was.