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
Treating Emotions in a Tempest: Review of Amy Simon’s Emotions in Yiddish Ghetto Diaries
Amy Simon deploys empathic reading to interpret the range of emotions contained in Yiddish diaries written in the ghettos of Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna.
Dec 04, 2023
Review
Review of Underworld Trilogy (god of vengeance, Motke Thief, The Dead Man) by Sholem Asch, trans. Caraid O’Brien
Nov 20, 2023
Review
Review of Marat Grinberg's The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf
Reading “between the lines,” specifically for submerged “Jewish knowledge” in the context of the Soviet state’s suppression of the full scope of Jewish tradition and history, is for Grinberg the key attribute of Soviet Jewish identity.
Nov 16, 2023
Review
Review of Sandra Fox's The Jews of Summer
Summer may end, but summer camp and its legacies continue. Sandra Fox’s book looks to summer camps to explore what kinds of culture and community embraced by young Jews in postwar America.
Sep 27, 2023
Review
Review of Diego Rotman's The Yiddish Stage as a Temporary Home
In this study of Shimen Dzigan and Yisroel Schumacher, Diego Rotman presents a study of the subversive power of Yiddish comedy in the twentieth century.
Sep 18, 2023
Review
Review of Lisa Richter’s Nautilus and Bone; An Auto/biography in Poems
As a reader of Margolin’s poetry in its original Yiddish, and a translator of her work into English, I approached this collection with both interest and skepticism.
Jul 05, 2023
Review
Review of Artifacts of Orthodox Jewish Childhoods, edited by Dainy Bernstein
From CDs to detective stories, zines to toys, the objects remembered and analyzed in this volume presents the range of material that filled the childhoods of Ashkenazi Orthodox Jews growing up in the last decades of the twentieth century.
Jun 21, 2023
Review
Back to the Ghetto
What might Yiddish studies stand to gain from recent books seeking to contextualize how the meaning and uses of term “ghetto” have changed over centuries?
Jun 13, 2023
Review
Review of Annegret Oehme's The Knight without Boundaries: Yiddish and German Arthurian Wingalois Adaptations
Tracing the retellings of the Wigalois/Viduvilt tradition in Yiddish works across three centuries, Annegret Oehme’s recent work offers an example of the value of adaptation theory for Jewish literature and Jewish history.
Jun 12, 2023