Tevye's rendition of “If I Were a Rich Man,” quaint figures in long, black coats and fedora: When you think of Eastern European Jewry before World War II, you think of the shtetl. Jewish literature – from Isaac Bashevis Singer to Sholom Aleichem to Saul Bellow – would be unthinkable without it.

But, as Eddy Portnoy shows in this interactive essay, “Jewish Freaks and Geeks,” fishmongers and roof fiddlers aren’t the half of it. By the early twentieth century, Eastern European Jews lived in cities like Warsaw and Lodz, where they created a seedy Jewish pop culture that would influence later generations of American vaudevillians, from Florenz Ziegfeld to Harry Houdini. The reigning attractions of this culture were circus sideshow performers who swallowed live mice, strongmen who hand-hammered nails through wooden planks, and professional wrestlers who undermined the stereotype of the bookish luftmensch Jew.