Bundles of Pain, Bound by Gender: Himpathy and Misogyny in A Bintel Brief

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“I have a grievous wound in my heart and maybe through the “Bintel Brief” I will find relief” (Letter-writer, 1906).^[1]

Just as “Ask Amy,” “Ann Landers” and more recently “Hello Hayes” aim to help people (usually young and often female) work through problems in a seemingly private and starkly public space, A Bintel Brief (literally meaning “a bundle of letters”) provided a non-physical space for vulnerability among Jewish immigrants in the early twentieth century. A Bintel Brief was a featured column in Der Forverts (The Forward), a newspaper founded in 1867 by Yiddish-speaking socialists who aimed to elevate Yiddish to a political language. Der Forverts editor Abraham Cahan created the Bintel Brief column in 1906 to reveal “the interesting nooks of people’s souls.”^[2] From letters about the aesthetic appearances of couples – one letter-writer complained he is too tall and the girl he liked was too short – to early twentieth-century “trauma dumps,” Bintel Brief editor Abraham Cahan responded to a variety of concerns from Jewish immigrants with varying levels of sympathy. Far from being a neutral space, Bintel Brief functioned as a conversation where norms were actively negotiated.

Cahan provided a medium for immigrants to ask difficult questions, discuss their futures, and decide on important aspects of their lives. Letter-writers often asked political or religious questions arising from their personal experiences, revealing a middle ground between the private and public. For example, one letter-writer asked who they should marry as a “freethinker” in a sea of Orthodox families. Through Bintel Brief, Cahan answered men and women with gendered responses, providing sympathy for men who expressed frustration with women while leaving little room for women who acted outside of the status quo.

Scholars of Jewish immigrant life have, in fact, identified many of the same gendered tensions that emerge in these letters, though not always through the specific lens of “himpathy.” Historians such as Hasia Diner, Jenna Weissman Joselit, and Paula Hyman have explored how Eastern European Jewish immigrants negotiated shifting expectations around marriage, labor, and gender roles in the United States. Diner emphasizes the economic centrality of women’s wage labor alongside persistent expectations of domestic responsibility, while Hyman highlights the tensions between traditional family structures and emerging models of American womanhood. Joselit, similarly, demonstrates how advice literature and popular media – including newspapers like Der Forverts – served as key sites where these norms were debated and enforced.^[3] Yet, while this scholarship acknowledges the presence of gendered double standards, it has not fully accounted for the asymmetrical distribution of sympathy evident in advice columns like Bintel Brief. By applying Kate Manne’s concept of “himpathy,” this essay builds on and extends existing historiography, offering a more precise framework for understanding how emotional validation itself functioned as a mechanism of gendered power. Through the following illustrative examples, we can see how Bintel Brief, while being a space for vulnerability and openness, reinforced misogyny amongst early twentieth-century Jews.^[4]

In one 1906 letter, a letter-writer described being overworked, with a wife who was ill at home. He returned home from a long day at work, frustrated with their economic position, his wife’s woes, and her “ behavior.” He wrote, “[m]y wife’s singing and talking drove me insane. Like a madman I ran to the door and locked it. I leaped to the gas jet, opened the valve, then lay down in the bed near my wife and embraced her. In a few minutes I was nearer death than she.” The letter writer then described how his wife cried out for water. He changed his mind, got up, and took his wife to the hospital, where she recovered for two weeks. The letter-writer struggled with whether he should tell his wife and referred to his murder-suicide attempt as “what almost happened to us.”^[5] Cahan responded to the man sympathetically, or “himpathetically,” to use Kate Manne’s terminology from her groundbreaking work Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny.

Manne argues that misogyny is not individual hatred but a social reinforcement tool to put women who move outside their assigned gender roles back into their places. Within this logic of misogyny, Manne identifies “himpathy” as the disproportionate sympathy towards men who harm women.^[6] The columnist responded to the letter-writer himpathetically, claiming “this letter depicting the sad life of the worker is more powerful than any protest against the inequality between rich and poor.” Cahan advised that he should not tell his wife that he almost ended both their lives. Cahan writes, “this secret may be withheld from his beloved wife, since it is clear he keeps it from her out of love.” Here, the columnist displays a disproportionate amount of sympathy for a man who attempted to kill his wife and himself, because he believes that the man loves his wife.

The columnist shifts his tone when responding to female letter-writers. Also in 1906, a woman described how after losing her husband, whom she “loved in every sense of the word,” her late-husband’s best friend kissed her in the carriage leaving her late-husband’s funeral and proclaimed his own love for her. She felt guilty but “succumbed to temptation.”^[7] When recounting the story to her friends, her girlfriend suggested she marry this friend, as he would be a good husband and father to her daughter. Confused, she wrote to Bintel Brief, desperate for advice and conflicted over her feelings of passion and grief.

Compared to the letter-writer’s friends, the columnist was not so sympathetic. He wrote that

[t]he woman’s excuse that she was unable to protest against the passionate advances of her husband’s friend is a weak one. Better if she had opened the carriage door and asked him to get out. There is no excuse for the disgusting behavior of the young man. He should not have acted so shamefully after his friend’s death. It is possible the widow is making a mistake in deciding to marry him, because it is doubtful whether she can be happy with such a man.^[8]

The columnist shows a lack of empathy for the woman in terms of the kiss and how this man took advantage of their proximity during mourning time, claiming she should have rejected the approaches of her late husband’s best friend. But, this response fails to take into account the emotions the letter-writer includes: the confusion of grief and love manifesting simultaneously, the societal pressures to remarry, and the empathy of her friends that she must make this decision so soon after the death of her husband.

Taken together, these letters and responses reveal that Bintel Brief was not simply a benevolent advice column or an immigrant confessional but a moral forum in which power, gender, and ideology were actively negotiated. While columnist and editor Abraham Cahan envisioned the column as a window into “the interesting nooks of people’s souls,” those nooks were filtered through deeply gendered assumptions about responsibility, desire, and suffering.^[9] Men’s anguish was met with expansive sympathy, even when that anguish culminated in violence. Women’s vulnerability, by contrast, was narrowed into questions of self-control, propriety, and moral failure, leaving little room for grief, coercion, or emotional complexity. This analysis is not based on isolated examples alone. A broader reading of Bintel Brief letters from the early twentieth century reveals a recurring pattern: male letter-writers are frequently granted interpretive generosity, even when describing harmful behavior, while female correspondents are more often judged against rigid moral expectations. These two cases, then, are not anomalies but rather represent a wider discursive tendency within the column, underscoring how consistently gender shaped the boundaries of empathy in immigrant public culture.

Ultimately, Bintel Brief functioned as a liminal space between the private and the public, where immigrants tested the limits of confession, modernity, and moral authority. The letters expose not only the psychic toll of migration and labor but also the uneven distribution of empathy that structured communal life. The columnist tended to legitimize men’s pain and, by contrast, discipline women’s suffering. By paying attention to these subtle discrepancies, we can better understand how power operated within even the most seemingly compassionate corners of the immigrant press. Gender can serve as a tool for historical analysis by illuminating social hierarchies built around unspoken and internalized beliefs about masculine and feminine behavioral norms.^[10]

Notes

1. Reprinted and translated from the original letter in Issac Metzker, “A Bintel Brief: Sixty Years of Letters from the Lower East Side to the Jewish Daily Forward,” (Doubleday, New York: 1971), 45. ↑
2. Andy Carvin, “How ‘a bundle of letters’ became a cornerstone of life advice for American Jews,” (The Forward: 2026). ↑
3. Hasia Diner, Lower East Side Memories: A Jewish Place in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Paula Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representation of Women (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995); Jenna Weissman Joselit, The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture, 1880–1950 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994). ↑
4. Please note that I am using the term ‘misogyny’ from Kate Manne’s Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, (Oxford University Press, 2019). She argues misogyny is not individual hatred but rather a social reinforcement tool, meant to keep women in established roles in society. Misogyny in this argument seeks to restore the ‘status quo’ when women step outside of their gendered roles. I am not arguing that Abraham Cahan’s own misogyny fueled hatred towards women; rather, he, like many others, took part in misogyny as a social reinforcement tool. ↑
5. Issac Metzker, “A Bintel Brief: Sixty Years of Letters from the Lower East Side to the Jewish Daily Forward,” (Doubleday, New York: 1971), 54. ↑
6. Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, (Oxford University Press, 2019). ↑
7. She does not specify in the letter exactly what this means. ↑
8. Issac Metzker, “A Bintel Brief: Sixty Years of Letters from the Lower East Side to the Jewish Daily Forward,” (Doubleday, New York: 1971), 46. ↑
9. Andy Carvin, “How ‘a bundle of letters’ became a cornerstone of life advice for American Jews,” (The Forward: 2026). ↑
10. See Joan Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” The American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (1986): 1053–75, for a further discussion of how gender is a tool that reveals how power works. ↑

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Featured image caption: A man reads Der Forverts (The Forward), a Yiddish newspaper, in 1946. (Courtesy Wikimedia)