Eddy Portnoy is an expert on Jewish popular culture."Eddy Portnoy"
@

Jewish Book Council The Jewish Book Council (Hebrew: ), founded in 1943, is an American organization encouraging and contributing to Jewish literature. The goal of the council, as stated on its website, is "to promote the reading, writing and publishing of quali ...

Gallery Chat: Eddy Portnoy on "Ink is not just for writing Yiddish novels: Jews and Tattoos"
April 8, 2019 Portnoy earned an MA in Yiddish Studies from

Columbia University Columbia University in the City of New York, commonly referred to as Columbia University, is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Churc ...

and a PhD in Jewish History from the

Jewish Theological Seminary of America The Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) is a Conservative Jewish education organization in New York City, New York. It is one of the academic and spiritual centers of Conservative Judaism as well as a hub for academic scholarship in Jewish studies ...

, and currently holds the position of Senior Researcher and Exhibition Curator at

YIVO YIVO (, , short for ) is an organization that preserves, studies, and teaches the cultural history of Jewish life throughout Eastern Europe, Germany, and Russia as well as orthography, lexicography, and other studies related to Yiddish. Estab ...

, as well as YIVO’s Academic Advisor for the Max Weinreich Center. Exhibitions he has created have been praised in major media outlets, and his articles on Jewish popular culture have been published in The Drama Review, Polin, and The International Journal of Comic Art. Portnoy is also a contributing editor of The Forward and Tablet Magazine. Portnoy is the author of the bestselling book ''Bad Rabbi And Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press'' (2017,

Stanford University Press Stanford University Press (SUP) is the publishing house of Stanford University. It is one of the oldest academic presses in the United States and the first university press to be established on the West Coast. It is currently a member of the Ass ...

).A review of ''Bad Rabbi''
/ref>''Bad Rabbi''
@ Stanford University Press 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 As Jack Fischel writes in his review, "He ortnoy 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." The book is based on Portnoy's Ph.D. on cartoons in the early Yiddish press. The New York Times praised ''Bad Rabbi'' as "The Good Kind of

Schmaltz Schmaltz (also spelled schmalz or shmalz) is rendered (clarified) chicken or goose fat. It is an integral part of traditional Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine, where it has been used for centuries in a wide array of dishes, such as chicken soup, l ...

," adding that the book contains "a succession of outlandish misadventures, a wild panorama populated by an astonishing array of characters."

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Portnoy, Eddy Year of birth missing (living people) Living people 21st-century American Jews 21st-century American male writers 21st-century American non-fiction writers American male non-fiction writers Columbia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni Jewish American non-fiction writers Jewish culture YIVO people Jewish Theological Seminary of America alumni