This talk explores the vibrant culture of print?newspapers, novels, Americanization manuals, popular science books?that not only flowered among Yiddish-speaking immigrants to nineteenth- and twentieth-century America, but also influenced the shaping of Jewish culture in eastern Europe and beyond. Although these artifacts of mass media are usually consigned to the margins of Jewish cultural history, Goldstein argues that they are key to understanding how immigrants understood the promise of American life and how the shaping of an elite Yiddish culture in Europe and America was in many ways a response to the democratic potential that they threatened to unleash.