Articles
Essays and peer-reviewed scholarship in Yiddish Studies, an interdisciplinary field that engages all aspects of Yiddish cultural production, especially in its relationship to other cultures and languages.
Click here for a separate listing of open-access, peer-reviewed articles.
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.
Jun 23, 2020
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.
Jun 23, 2020
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.
Jun 16, 2020
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.
Jun 16, 2020
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?
Jun 16, 2020
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?
Jun 16, 2020
Article
The Choir and the Orchestra: Two Kinds of Divine Praise
George Savran
When read together, Psalms 148 and 150 instruct the reader to constantly shift between the universal and the particular, between praying for the welfare of the world and focusing on the people of Israel.
Jun 16, 2020
Review
Review of: Benny Mer, Smocza: A Biography of a Jewish Street in Warsaw
Meirav Reuveny
The history of Smocza, a Jewish Street in Warsaw, is not the story of the world-renowned figures, but rather of every person who ever lived or died there, including those who are lost to our collective memory.
Jun 07, 2020
Review
Review of Seeds in the Desert by Mendel Mann, translated and with an introduction by Heather Valencia
Shachar Pinsker
These stories take place in Israeli cities, towns, and villages, in the post-war Soviet Union, and in Poland of the interwar period. However, it is often very difficult to tell where the stories actually take place, because they express an experience of dislocation and total disorientation.
May 20, 2020
Review
A Double Dose of Early Twentieth-Century Yiddish Talush-hood: Two New Translations by Daniel Kennedy
Ri J. Turner
In new translations by Daniel Kennedy, Hersh Dovid Nomberg’s Warsaw Stories (White Goat Press) and Zalman Shneour’s A Death: Notes of a Suicide (Wakefield Press) can rightfully be labeled “classic”; they reach across time and space to name an eternal — and unromantic — facet of human experience.
Apr 29, 2020