S hachar P insker . A Rich Brew

In Shachar Pinsker’s colorful narrative about Jewish café life, one scene in particular stands out. Annoyed by the perceived intolerance of Warsaw Jewish intellectuals, the Yiddish actor Shimen Dzigan and his friends decide to dress themselves in Hasidic garb and besiege one of their cafés. When asked politely by the owner to leave, the actors depart and then return wearing their modern European clothes, joyfully revealing their prank to the relieved customers. The café’s status as a center of “modern Jewish creativity” that formed part of a “silk road of transnational, diasporic modern Jewish culture” is seemingly restored. Throughout A Rich Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture, Pinsker tries to avoid romanticizing cafés, noting that they were composed largely of male Jewish intellectuals who lamentably never shed “the Talmudic culture of intellectual debate and homosocial camaraderie that characterized the traditional Jewish ‘house of study.’” Some patrons, like the...

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Clothing · Creativity · Haskalah · Jewish culture · Jewish studies · Judaism · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Sociology · Yiddish · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Soviet and Russian History