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 Marina Mogilner’s A Race for the Future: Scientific Visions of Modern Russian Jewishness
With a focus on Russian Jewish race scientists, Mogilner traces how biology informed notions of Jewish difference mobilized by communal organizations and political activists in imperial Russia and the early Soviet period.
Jun 02, 2023
Review
Review of From a Distant Relation by Mikhah Yosef Berdichevsky, edited and translated by James Adam Redfield
Berdichevsky’s Yiddish writing focused on the world he had left behind, and frankly struggled with his ambivalence about these communities.
May 22, 2023
Article
“An altogether unusual love and understanding”: The Shomer Sisters and the Gender Politics of Shund Theatre
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.
Apr 21, 2023
Article
Kol Nidre and the Making of the Jewish Theatre Audience
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
Article
My Mom Drank Ink: The “Little Negro” and the Performance of Race in Yente Telebende’s Stage Productions
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
Article
'Di Yidn Kumen!': Israeli and Multicultural Identities in Israeli Yiddish Light Entertainment Shows
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
Article
Murder, Lust, and Laughter, or, Shund Theatre: A Special Issue of In geveb
As the opening of the special issue on shund theater, this introduction situates the four articles and two translations in the history of the study of shund.
Apr 21, 2023
Review
Review of Fear and Other Stories by Chana Blankshteyn, translated by Anita Norich
Apr 11, 2023
Review
Review of Kenneth B. Moss’s An Unchosen People
In this study of Jewish grassroots thinkers, Kenneth B. Moss offers an account of Jewish thought, culture, and choices in interwar Poland.
Apr 11, 2023
Review
Review of Anne-Christin Klotz's Gemeinsam gegen Deutschland
In this study of the Jewish press in Poland, Anne-Christin Klotz identifies Polish Jewry, and specifically local Yiddish writers and journalists, as central to understanding the Nazi threat in the 1930s.
Mar 21, 2023