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
Review of Yiddish: A Biography of a Language by Jeffrey Shandler
Shandler’s biography can be read as a chronicle of expanding notions of folkstimlekhkayt, from the old vos far a yid redt nisht ken yidish (what kind of [Ashkenazi] Jew doesn’t speak Yiddish) standard to the Yiddish being used and developed by cohorts of non-native speakers.
May 21, 2021
Review
Review of Honey on the Page: A Treasury of Yiddish Children’s Literature, by Miriam Udel
Review of Honey on the Page: A Treasury of Yiddish Children’s Literature, edited and translated by Miriam Udel.
May 19, 2021
Review
The Place of German in the History of Jewish Nationalism: Review of German as a Jewish Problem by Marc Volovici
German as a Jewish Language challenges the distinctions made between “Jewish” and “non-Jewish” languages and concurrently emphasizes the permeability between disciplinary boundaries.
May 18, 2021
Review
Review of The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature by Benjamin Schreier
The Rise and Fall makes strikingly clear claims about all that is wrong with the field, from its insiderism to its uncritical reliance on “culture” and “ethnicity.”
May 09, 2021
Review
Review of Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry by Adriana X. Jacobs
Jacobs (who, in addition to being a scholar of modern Hebrew literature, is also an accomplished translator and poet) offers a rethinking of the modern Hebrew canon as fundamentally shaped by what she calls a “translational poetics.”
May 03, 2021
Article
The Goldenberg Variations: The International “Star System” and the Yiddish Theater of Buenos Aires in 1930
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.
May 02, 2021
Article
On Yiddish Nuances: Yiddishkayt as Listening Key in the Music of Osvaldo Golijov
This paper approaches Osvaldo Golijov’s music from the intersection of musicology and Yiddish studies.
May 02, 2021
Article
Musical Comedy as Compromise Formation: Judío and Judía (1926), by Ivo Pelay
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.
May 02, 2021
Article
Introduction: Yiddish and the Transnational in Latin America
In studying Latin American (and indeed American continental) Yiddish culture, we need to appreciate the effects of encounter and interaction between these two well established transnational languages.
May 02, 2021
Review
Review of Una historia del libro judío by Alejandro Dujovne
Tracing the development of editorial Jewish presses in Argentina from their infancy in 1910 through their postwar decline in the mid-1960s and 1970s, Dujovne uses book history as a lens to tell the story of Ashkenazi Jews in Argentina.
May 02, 2021