The existence of a substantial body of Hebrew literature written on American shores is one of the best-kept secrets of Jewish American cultural history. In 1927, there were 110 Hebrew authors living in the United States, according to Daniel Persky, a columnist for the Hebrew-language newspaper Hadoar, which had been published in New York since 1922. Among this large number were at least a dozen Hebrew poets with serious bodies of published work and a smaller yet still substantial number of major prose writers, dramatists, and essayists. There were Hebrew publishing houses, Hebrew literary clubs and writers associations, and many Hebrew periodicals and literary journals that appeared over the course of the twentieth century. Hebrew belles-lettres were allied to a cultural and educational movement that established a network of Hebrew colleges and Hebrew summer camps and exerted enormous influence on the development of Jewish education in America.

There are many obvious reasons why Hebrew culture failed to thrive in America, but the reasons why its struggles and achievements have been forgotten are less obvious. This question, which is essentially a question about cultural memory, is entangled with the sad fate of Yiddish in America and the brilliant success of Hebrew in Israel. In contrast to Hebrew, Yiddish had a firm basis in the Jewish immigrant masses – in the music halls and the tabloids, at home and in the streets. When Yiddish declined under the force of galloping Americanization, it was the remembrance of popular culture that became the substance of nostalgia during the last quarter of the twentieth century.