THE CONSERVATIVE JOURNALS
Yiddish journalism in New York began about thirty years ago, and continued in unimportant and unrepresentative newspapers until about twelve years ago, when the Tageblatt, the first daily newspaper, and the Arbeiterzeitung, an important Socialistic weekly, now defunct, but from which developed the present Socialist dailies, came into existence. The Tageblatt, which has maintained its general character from the beginning, is the most conservative, as well as the oldest, of the daily newspapers of the Ghetto. It is national and orthodox, and fights tooth and nail for whatever is distinctively Jewish in customs, literature, language, and religion. It hates the reform sects in religion and the Socialistic tendencies in politics and economics. It is called a "capitalist" paper by its opponents, and is so in the sense that it is more dependent upon its advertisements than the Socialistic papers, which are partly supported by frequent entertainments and balls, to which all their friends go. And yet how little capitalistic is even this paper is shown by the fact that while it takes a non-committal attitude towards strikes in the Ghetto it supports those which occur outside.
Sympathetic with workingmen and not antagonistic to the employers of the Ghetto, the Tageblatt conventionally unites all the Jewish interests it consistently can, and has admittedly the largest circulation of any daily paper in the Ghetto. The Socialists call it "bourgeois" as well as "capitalistic" (which is the most horrid of all words in the quarter). Some call it chauvinistic because of its strong Nationalist tendency, and fanatic because it upholds the religion of the Jews; the Jew who wants first of all to be an American and up-to-date hates the Tageblatt as tending to strengthen the distinction between Jew and Gentile. This paper goes so far in its conservatism that, according to its enemies, it condemns all rabbis who mention the name of Christ in their sermons, and holds to a strict interpretation of Talmudic law in regard to habits of life. "It is only the old-fashioned greenhorns," said the editor of one of the other papers, "coming from the old country, who will stand for it."