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.

Review

Translating Israeli Literature into Hebrew - Where Yiddish Meets the Land

The sto­ries in this col­lec­tion are an invi­ta­tion to reex­am­ine what Israeli lit­er­a­ture is: to expand the cat­e­go­ry of Israeli lit­er­a­ture beyond just the Hebrew lan­guage and in so doing to dis­rupt expec­ta­tions about that literature.

Review

Review of Ben Gold’s Your Comrade, Avreml Broide, A Worker’s Life Story, translated by Annie Sommer Kaufman

A valu­able fea­ture of Avreml Broide is the chance it offers to take a deep dive into the world of twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry rad­i­cal left activism to under­stand essen­tials of the CPUSA as an Amer­i­can subculture.

Review

Seidman's Freud

The con­sid­er­able achieve­ments of this book include its wide rang­ing sur­vey of the rela­tion­ship between Freud and Judaism, as well as Freud and Jew­ish lan­guages, and its detailed acquain­tance with the sec­ondary lit­er­a­ture that address­es this con­nec­tion. The work brims with ref­er­ences to fig­ures of impor­tance to Jew­ish cul­ture his­to­ry that might have been con­sid­ered sec­ondary, but high­light­ed in this con­text by their rela­tion­ship to Freud, as if illu­mi­nat­ed by a dif­fer­ent light or from the side, they emerge more ful­ly, in a Freudi­an dimension.

Review

Review of As the Dust of the Earth: The Literature of Abandonment in Revolutionary Russia and Ukraine by Harriet Murav

The sophis­ti­cat­ed method, the humane sub­ject mat­ter, the bold inter­pre­ta­tions and the care­ful his­tor­i­cal research all make Dust of the Earth a potent mod­el for con­tem­po­rary schol­ar­ship — in Yid­dish Stud­ies and beyond. In a moment when an increas­ing num­ber of peo­ple across the globe find them­selves in a polit­i­cal and social state of hefk­eris, up for grabs and aban­doned by their allies and lead­ers, Murav shows us that lit­er­a­ture offers one small, but pow­er­ful path back to humanity.

Review

Review of Glenn Dynner's The Light of Learning: Hasidism in Poland on the Eve of the Holocaust

Dyn­ner frames The Light of Learn­ings sweep­ing his­tor­i­cal nar­ra­tive with a cru­cial the­o­ret­i­cal inter­ven­tion. To think about inter­war Pol­ish Hasidism is also to think about the ongo­ing con­struc­tion of mod­ern Jew­ish iden­ti­ty, and the fraught inter­sec­tions of eman­ci­pa­tion, accul­tur­a­tion, assim­i­la­tion, and colonization.

Review

Review of So Many Warm Words by Rosa Nevadovska, trans. by Merle L. Bachman

Mer­le L. Bachman’s new trans­la­tion of a selec­tion of Nevadovska’s poems, most­ly from Lid­er Mayne, pub­lished by Ben Yehu­da Press, is an event to celebrate.

Article

The Writing Werewolf: Rabbinic Identity and Linguistic Understanding in the Old Yiddish Mayse-bukh (Book of Stories, 1602)

Lan­guage pol­i­tics are embod­ied by a rab­bi-turned-were­wolf in a mayse from one of the most influ­en­tial and pop­u­lar ear­ly mod­ern Yid­dish books.

Article

The Catalog of Thirty-One Kings: Thoughts in the Twenty-First Century on Old Yiddish Epic

Focus­ing on a retelling of Joshua 12:7 – 24, this study demon­strates the role of the epic in the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of bib­li­cal themes in Old Yid­dish literature.

Article

On Editing the Old Yiddish Arthurian Romance Viduvilt

A report on the process of cre­at­ing a schol­ar­ly edi­tion of the Old Yid­dish Arthuri­an romance Viduvilt.

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