From the Pages of Yedies

by ROBERTA NEWMAN

In April 1946, Yedies reported on the publication of Isaac Rivkind’s Der kamf kegn azartshpiln bay Yidn (The fight against gambling in Jewish literature). The Yiddish version of the article is more detailed, providing a list of topics covered by the book:

Old Yiddish gambling songs
Gambling and Yiddish folksongs
Modern Jewish gambling songs
Gambling jargon

The illustration is from the title page of an 1802 book by Shloyme Doykler, Es shpihl bazuhkh.

Isaac Rivkind (1895-1968) was born in Lodz and studied at the yeshivot of Volozhin and Ponevezh. He was an activist with the Mizrahi Zionist organization and a member of the Provisional Jewish National Council in Poland after World War I. He came to the U.S. in the early 1920s and became a librarian at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Rivkind was also a co-founder of American YIVO and a member of the executive of the Hebrew P.E.N. Club of the United States. Among his other books was the 1959 Yidishe gelt (Jewish money), a study of money in Jewish linguistic usage, cultural history, and folklore.