Eddy Portnoy is an expert on Jewish popular culture.[1][2] Portnoy earned an MA in Yiddish Studies fromColumbia University and a PhD in Jewish History from theJewish Theological Seminary of America,[1][2] and currently holds the position of Senior Researcher and Exhibition Curator atYIVO, as well as YIVO’s Academic Advisor for the Max Weinreich Center.[2]
Exhibitions he has created have been praised in major media outlets,[1][3] and his articles on Jewish popular culture have been published in The Drama Review, Polin, and The International Journal of Comic Art.[2] Portnoy is also a contributing editor of The Forward and Tablet Magazine.[4]
Portnoy is the author of the bestselling bookBad Rabbi And Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press (2017,Stanford University Press).[5][6] This book covers overlooked aspects of American and Polish Jewish society and culture, namely, the life of marginalized people, "the downwardly mobile Jews" based on the stories published in Yiddish newspapers of New York City and Warsaw[6][7] As Jack Fischel writes in his review, "He [Portnoy] admits that the stories are not representative of Jewry, but insists that in every society there is a group of people who are lowly, uncultured, uneducated, poor, and worthy of attention."[5] The book is based on Portnoy's Ph.D. on cartoons in the early Yiddish press.[8] The New York Times praisedBad Rabbi as "The Good Kind ofSchmaltz," adding that the book contains "a succession of outlandish misadventures, a wild panorama populated by an astonishing array of characters."[9]
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