“peer-review”

Article

“An altogether unusual love and understanding”: The Shomer Sisters and the Gender Politics of Shund Theatre

Sonia Gollance

Examining Rose Shomer Bachelis and Miriam Shomer Zunser in the context of their famous shund-writing family, this article argues that their operetta "Der liebes tants" -- a love triangle with an Apache dance motif -- should be read against the grain to emphasize the importance of sisterhood.

Article

'Di Yidn Kumen!': Israeli and Multicultural Identities in Israeli Yiddish Light Entertainment Shows

Roni Cohen and Olga Levitan

While Hebrew cultural discourse tended to treat Yiddish theatre as a kind of “outside” culture, light entertainment shows in Yiddish reveal close engagement with the central icons and themes of Israeli society.

Article

My Mom Drank Ink: The “Little Negro” and the Performance of Race in Yente Telebende’s Stage Productions

Gil Ribak

The case study of Yente Telebende is merely one example of popular Yiddish culture — theater, pulp fiction, and newspapers — that strove for commercial success by appealing to the tastes of its audience, shaped by American culture's vocabulary and images of Blackness.

Article

Kol Nidre and the Making of the Jewish Theatre Audience

Ruthie Abeliovich

Focusing on Abraham M. Sharkansky’s 1896 play Kol nidre, oder di geheyme yidn in madrid (Kol Nidre, or the Secret Jews of Madrid), this article examines how, on both sides of the Atlantic, the Kol Nidre prayer performed in the Yiddish theatre reflected profound modern and migratory cultural transgressions, between categories such as high and low, religion and entertainment, the holy and the theatrical.

Article

Holocaust Literature and Autorevision: Shaye Shpigl’s Ghetto Stories Written in, and Rewritten after, the Lodz Ghetto

Sven-Erik Rose

Shpigl’s Yiddish-Yiddish autorevisions powerfully exemplify an author’s felt compulsion to rewrite wartime writings from a postwar perspective even when no change of language—no literal translation—was involved.

Article

The Yiddish Columbus: Critical Counter-History and the Remapping of American Jewish Literature

Rachel Rubinstein

Glantz’s masterwork Kristobal Kolon offers a transnational vision of the Americas that insists—in Yiddish—on its Jewish, Muslim, indigenous and African origins, suggesting a new geography for American Jewish literature that exceeds the boundaries of what we understand the Americas and Jewishness to be, and challenging our expectations of what Yiddish literature can contain.

Article

‘Brother Jews of the Entire World!’ Bergelson, Hofshteyn, and Soviet-Yiddish in the Worldwide Jewish Family

Brett Winestock

This article looks at the wartime artistic and journalistic output of Dovid Bergelson and Dovid Hofshteyn to see how these writers appropriated Soviet terminology to paint Soviet Jews as the elder brothers in a worldwide Jewish family.

Article

A Yiddish Newspaper at War with Yiddish: Abraham Cahan and the 1931 Language Debate in the New York Forverts

Gennady Estraikh

This article describes the paradox of the negative attitude articulated by the Yiddish Forverts toward using Yiddish as the educational medium of instruction in American Jewish schools. 

Article

Prayer and Crime: Cantor Elias Zaludkovsky’s Concert Performance Season in 1924 Poland

Jeremiah Lockwood

In his concert career Zaludkovsky walked a fine line between performing the sacred identity of cantor and falling into the forms of cultural crime that he himself had identified as corrupting tradition through excessive commercialization and mediatization of sacred music.


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Article

Reading as the Shaping Force of Life: Debora Vogel’s Contributions to Education

Anna Maja Misiak

Translation by Matthew Johnson

The writer and educator Debora Vogel contended with questions raised by avant-garde art in the 1920s and 1930s and, throughout her writings, repeated the following question as a leitmotiv: What does “life” mean and which forms does it assume? This article considers how Vogel engaged with these questions about form in various essays and in her educational work at the Jewish orphanage at Zborowska 8 in Lwów.

Article

Musical Comedy as Compromise Formation: Judío and Judía (1926), by Ivo Pelay

Claire Solomon

Ivo Pelay's 1926 plays Judío and Judía, “Jew” and “Jewess,” thematize anxiety not only about the Argentineity of Jews, but also about the Jewishness of Argentina: the promise of assimilation and the threat of subversion.

Article

On Yiddish Nuances: Yiddishkayt as Listening Key in the Music of Osvaldo Golijov

Lila Fabro

This paper approaches Osvaldo Golijov’s music from the intersection of musicology and Yiddish studies.

Article

The Goldenberg Variations: The International “Star System” and the Yiddish Theater of Buenos Aires in 1930

Zachary M. Baker

From the 1920s until the 1950s, Yiddish Buenos Aires hosted a thriving theatrical landscape. Critics complained that the public's adoration of "stars" propelled a preponderance of shund at the expense of “better” (literary) plays.

Article

The Image of Streetwalkers in Itzik Manger’s and Debora Vogel’s Ballads

Ekaterina Kuznetsova and Anastasiya Lyubas

By considering the image of the streetwalker in Manger’s and Vogel’s work, this article deepens the understanding of Yiddish creativity as ultimately multimodal and interconnected.

Article

Shylock’s Jewish Way of Speaking

Nahma Sandrow

What if Shylock spoke Yiddish? One experimental production of Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice" did just that.

Article

Cod Yiddish From Across the Pond: Howard Jacobson’s Finklerspeak

Jillian Davidson

Howard Jacobson tests the limits and contours of a Jewish way of speaking, presenting an Anglo-Jewish dialogue with post-imperial culture.

Article

Breaking Ground, Broken English: Abraham Cahan’s The Imported Bridegroom

Hana Wirth-Nesher

Cahan's characters speak in broken languages, and in so doing find themselves unable to find stable ground in America.

Article

The Fourth Child

Hillel Schwartz

The author reflects on his own experiences encountering David Roskies in the 1960s and collaborating with him in Holocaust remembrance at a very different time than our present context for the memory and commemoration of the Holocaust.

Article

Double or Nothing: Jewish Speech and Silence in Georges Perec’s *W ou le souvenir d’enfance"

Marc Caplan

This article considers the phantom traces of Yiddish in Georges Perec's W ou le souvenir d’enfance (1975).

Article

Letters Without Addresses: Abraham Sutzkever’s Late Style

Saul Noam Zaritt

Abraham Sutzkever's poetry is often read within the confines of "Holocaust literature". This essays reads a selection of Sutzkever’s poetry against the Holocaust, against the apocalypse, and against the horizons of meaning that the label of "Holocaust literature" might impose.

Article

Orphaned Words: Yiddish, English, and Child Speech in Postwar Cinema

Hannah Pollin-Galay

Is there a Jewish way of not saying things? In facing crises in language during the immediate post-Holocaust years, filmmakers in English and Yiddish made choices about how to balance repair and critique.

Article

Split Identity: Jewish Scholarship in the Vilna Ghetto

David E. Fishman

In this essay, David Fishman draws a comparison between yidishe visnshaft, or Jewish studies scholarship, and Judenforschung, the Nazi field of antisemitic Jewish studies used to justify the persecution and extermination of Jews in scientific terms.

Article

Der Alter Tevye Lebt!: Speech and Communication

Ruth R. Wisse

Sholem Aleichem and Tevye depend on one another—for Wisse, their conversations form a miniature Jewish territory where together they reassert moral control.

Article

Nit dos dorf, nit di kretshme: Speaking About Jewish Taverns in the Works of Sholem Aleichem

Adi Mahalel

The tavern is a fixture of the shtetl universe—but it also exists on the margins, where, for Sholem Aleichem, you can also find the chaos of modernity.

Article

Raysn: The Belarusian Frontier of Yiddish Modernism

Mikhail Krutikov

On the eve of World War I, poets Leyb Naydus, Moyshe Kulbak, and Elkhonen Vogler developed a sensitivity to nature in an attempt to reclaim the imaginary Jewish territories of Lite and Raysn.

Article

Sholem Aleichem's Stempenyu: Speaking through Song

Avraham Novershtern

Translation by Avi Steinhart

How does one write about romance in Yiddish? Sholem Aleichem’s 1888 novel Stempenyu poses this question through an examination of the gendered limitations on Jewish literary love.

Article

Badkhones in Life and Cinema: A Reading of the Marshalik in the 1937 Dybbuk Film

Joel Rosenberg

The wedding bard of The Dybbuk is a paradoxical figure: a professional outsider who speaks into being the layered complexity of S. An-ski's artistic project.

Article

Hertz Grosbard’s Jewspeak: The Lost Art of Word Concerts

Agnieszka Legutko

Hertz Grosbard's “word concerts” were an embodiment of "Jewspeak," performances that sought to give life to the Yiddish literary tradition.

Article

Viva Voce: Vicissitudes of the Spoken Word in Hebrew Literature

Alan Mintz

Why does the Hebrew novel have a problem with speech? Alan Mintz on the non-dialogical and the monological in modern Hebrew literature.

Article

Critical Discourse as a Jewish Thing and Its Beginnings in the Bible

Edward Greenstein

The Biblical record provides a set of powerful models for critical discourse, creating narratives, laws, and prophetic modes that emphasize the practice of verbal critique. 

Article

Introduction: There’s a Jewish Way of Saying Things

Avraham (Alan) Rosen

Rosen introduces There’s a Jewish Way of Saying Things: Essays In Honor of David Roskies by reflecting on how Jewish speech—the spoken word, the vibrating resonance of uttered sound—finds its way back into text.

Article

Talmud Talk and Jewish Talk

David Kraemer

What are the parallels between "Jewish conversation" and Talmudic discourse? Is there something inherently Talmudic about Jewish speech?

Article

Translating As Saying

Lawrence Rosenwald

Can Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig's translation of the Hebrew Bible be considered a form of Jewish speech? When and how does translation become a Jewish way of talking?

Article

Louis Zukofsky: Building a Poetics of Translation

Sarah Ponichtera

How the poet Louis Zukofsky constructed his English-language American modernism by citing, translating, and adapting the Yiddish poetry of Yehoash.

Article

The Anarchist Sage/Der Goen Anarkhist: Rabbi Yankev-Meir Zalkind and Religious Genealogies of Anarchism

Anna Elena Torres

How can a political philosophy of anarchism emerge from Talmud study? Yankev Meir Zalkind, early twentieth-century Yiddishist, shows our readers how. 

Article

Yokhed ve-tsiber: Individual Expression and Communal Responsibility in a Yiddish Droshe by Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik

Ariel Evan Mayse

Scholarship on Soloveitchik’s teachings has tended to focus exclusively on his Hebrew or English works rather than his Yiddish writings, but the present essay traces Soloveitchik’s style and exploring the nuances of intellectual legacy through the lens of an important Yiddish homily, a little-studied but critical essay called “Yokhed ve-tsiber” (“The Individual and the Collective”), an undated work was first delivered as a droshe (sermon) on his father’s yortsayt.

Article

A Guide to the Ze’enah U-Re’enah: Correcting Some Misconceptions

Morris Faierstein

The most popular Yiddish book ever published gets its story right. 

Article

A Linguistic Bridge Between Alienation and Intimacy: Chabad’s Theorization of Yiddish in Historical and Cultural Perspective

Eli Rubin

Yiddish has always been the oracular mainstay of Chabad's intellectual and spiritual trajectory.

Article

A Narrow Path: Language and Longing for a Holy Place that is Lost

Aviv Luban

For the nascent Polish Braslev Hasidic movement, the events of 1917 and their aftermath severed the group from its Holy Place: the grave of Reb Nakhmen in what is now Uman, Ukraine. This geopolitical reality elicited a unique literary and spiritual response in the form of an impassioned prayer, penned by Reb Yitskhok Brayter (c. 1886-1942), a leader of that community.

Article

Man, Woman, and Serpent: Kabbalah and High Modernity in the Early Writings of Aaron Zeitlin

Nathan Wolski

This study presents a translation and analysis of Aaron Zeitlin’s 1924 essay, “Man, froy un shlang,” published in Illustrirte vokh.

Article

The Shtik Kabole Niger Couldn’t Digest: Poetry, Messianism, and Literatoyre in Aaron Zeitlin’s Keter

Nathan Wolski

This study presents a translation and analysis of Aaron Zeitlin’s (1898-1973) poem “Keter: Fragmenten fun a rapsodye,” published in 1923, at the height of the Warsaw expressionist explosion of the early twenties. 

Article

Traveling and Traversing Chabad’s Literary Paths: From Likutei torah to Khayim gravitser and Beyond

Eli Rubin

This paper aims to complicate the neat chronology that bifurcates modern Jewish literature from its Hasidic roots, using Fishl Schneersohn's novel Khayim Gravitser and Avraham Shlonsky's Hebrew translation of the novel to demonstrate that these authors continued the Hasidic literary tradition of Chabad even as they embraced alternative literary forms in the cause of new aesthetic agendas.

Article

'Before the bow that was drawn': The Vilna Komitet and its documentation of the destruction of Polish Jewry, 1939–1940/41

Miriam Schulz

Translation by Joshua Price and Miriam Schulz

A translation of the introduction of Miriam Schulz's recent book, Der Beginn des Untergangs: Die Zerstörung der jüdischen Gemeinden in Polen und das Vermächtnis des Wilnaer Komitees ("Before the bow that was drawn": The Vilna Komitet and its documentation of the destruction of Polish Jewry).

Article

Translation, Cosmopolitanism and the Resilience of Yiddish: Wischnitzer’s Milgroym as a Pathway Towards the Global Museum

Susanne Marten-Finnis

Reading Rachel Wischnitzer's editorial vision for the journal Milgroym as a "global museum." 

Article

A Dance: Fradel Shtok Reconsidered

Sonia Gollance

Gollance reconsiders Fradel Shtok’s oeuvre and literary reception in the context of her translation of Shtok's short story “A tants” (A dance).

Article

A Poetic Paradox: Gender and Self in Anna Margolin’s Mary Cycle

Melissa Weininger

Weininger analyzes Anna Margolin's cycle of poems entitled "Mary," exploring her use of Christological themes and figures and the expression of identity and self-definition in the poems. 

Article

New Yiddish Film and the Transvernacular

Rebecca Margolis

The study of Yiddish cinema gets updated for the twenty-first century, Margolis explores how the language is being used in film in the last decade. 

Article

Rebellion and Creativity: Contextualizing Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Author’s Note” to The Penitent

David Stromberg

Bashevis Singer comments on his narrator commenting on his characters—and David Stromberg untangles the polyphony of the Nobel Prize winner's fictional world.

Article

The Small Talk of I. L. Peretz

David G. Roskies

In this peer-reviewed article, David Roskies explores Peretz's fondness for dialogue to discover the sound chamber of Polish Jewry.

Article

Weaving The Revolution: I. L. Peretz The Social Protest Writer

Adi Mahalel

In this peer-reviewed article, Adi Mahalel follows Peretz's search, through new literary styles, for new forms of revolutionary politics.

Article

“The Great Call of the Hour”: Hillel Zeitlin’s Yiddish Writings on Yavneh

Arthur Green and Ariel Evan Mayse

An introduction to the writings by Hillel Zeitlin on the intentional, neo-Hasidic community he tried to create in Warsaw in the 1920s. 

Article

The Price of Remorse: Yiddish and the Work of Mourning in Jacob Steinberg’s Hebrew Poetry

Elazar Elhanan

Jacob Steinberg's poetry between Hebrew and Yiddish, between mourning and melancholy.

Article

Tongue-Twisted: Itzik Manger between mame-loshn and loshn-koydesh

Chana Kronfeld and Robert Adler Peckerar

Avant-garde Yiddish poet Itzik Manger reinscribes traditional Yiddish cultural practices, such as iconoclastic and anachronistic rewritings of biblical texts, in a politically radical and poetically modernist context.