Articles

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.

Apr 21, 2023

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.

Apr 21, 2023

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.

Apr 21, 2023

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.

Mar 14, 2023

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.

Nov 09, 2022

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.

Nov 01, 2022

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.

Oct 17, 2022

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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May 23, 2022

This special issue invites you to walk with Debora Vogel as she maps the spaces of Jewish life through avant-garde forms. We bring together new perspectives on Vogel through poetry, visual art, translation, and scholarship, all in an attempt to follow the many lines of creative and critical inquiry that emerge from Vogel’s work.

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Oct 26, 2021

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.

Oct 26, 2021