journalists, many of whom felt the press functioned as a kind of commercial department of Yiddish literature—something over which they felt they should have more control.

Most of the battles within the Yiddish journalistic world never left the perimeter of the editor’s desks. But on occasion, these spats leapt out of the editorial offices and onto the pages of the papers, making for some of the juiciest Yiddish snark this side of Pinsk.

When, for instance, famed columnist Hillel Zeitlin jumped ship in late 1910 from Warsaw’s daily Haynt to a new competitor, Moment, his editor, Shmuel Yatskan, was furious but temporarily held his tongue.

Zeitlin had been one of Haynt’s most popular columnists. Born into a family of Lubavitcher Hasidim, he strayed from his yeshiva studies after discovering Spinoza, Nietszche,and a slew of other Western thinkers. Like any shtetl kid in the process of ridding himself of tradition, he moved to the city—Warsaw, in this case—and involved himself in Jewish political matters and journalism. But Zeitlin never completely gave up his traditional ways, and an interest in Kabbalah eventually brought him back, not only to full religious observance, but to a promotion of Jewish tradition in his newspaper columns.

Zeitlin’s former editor, Yatskan, was also a Litvak plying journalism in Warsaw. An ordained rabbi from the highly regarded Ponevezh Yeshiva, Yatskan was a major figure in the Yiddish press, having founded some of Warsaw’s early Jewish dailies, including Haynt, which became the best-selling Yiddish paper in Poland.

With an understanding that a popular newspaper should have a broad mandate,