Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Forverts in English

Go behind the scenes with the Forward’s legendary advice column Bintel Brief

The Museum of Jewish Heritage in Lower Manhattan is hosting ‘Bintel: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow’ as part of an all-day festival

Have you ever read a letter in an advice column and thought to yourself, “I could answer that better than the columnist!” Well, here’s your chance.

This Sunday, May 21, the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Lower Manhattan is hosting an event called Bintel Brief: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, about the Forward‘s legendary advice column. Bintel Brief, which is Yiddish for a “bundle of letters,” originated 120 years ago in the Yiddish Forverts, and Forward archivist Chana Pollack will talk about the column’s history. She’ll be joined by Bintel columnist Beth Harpaz, who will talk about the letters sent in today and offer a behind-the-scenes look at how the staff goes about answering them.

They also hope to read a few letters from the current Bintel inbox and ask the audience to help come up with responses. Feel free  to bring your own questions about love, family, work, friends and religion to the program as well, and we’ll try to offer guidance on the spot.

When the Bintel column was first published, letters were mostly from poor immigrants who needed advice on day-to-day survival in America. Bintel told readers about their rights in this new and confusing country, and sometimes even asked readers to help a destitute letter-writer who had nowhere else to turn. Today, Bintel is more likely to be offering advice on marital strife, wedding costs, estranged siblings or finding community. Bintel remains a beloved and vibrant part of how the Forward connects with readers.

The program is free, from 3:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m., and it’s part of the museum’s Mishpachah Festival taking place all day Sunday at 36 Battery Place. Advance registration is recommended, but you can also sign up as you walk in. The festival will also be livestreamed for those who can’t come in person.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rukhl Schaechter, Yiddish Editor

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.