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
Beyond the Color Line: Jews, Blacks, and the American Racial Imagination
NYU Doctoral Candidate Jennifer Young explores the complicated ways in which American Jews claimed whiteness while examining and often identifying with Black American struggles.
Jun 21, 2016
Article
Af der shvel un in der fremd: A feuilleton on Yiddish, Race, and the American Literary Imagination
Adam Zachary Newton examines the American Jewish literary impulse to claim both whiteness and alienation while identifying with Black Americans.
Jun 21, 2016
Review
A Yiddish Studies to Come: In Conversation with Adam Zachary Newton’s Jewish Studies as Counterlife
Newton’s book provides a stirring call for a Jewish Studies to come, a proposal for new forms of affiliation, both within the loose boundaries of Jewish Studies and extending outward to the whole of the Humanities and to the university as an institution. What might it mean for Yiddish Studies to participate in this coming community?
Oct 05, 2020
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 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