Articles

Rachel Ertel has been one of the most prolific translators from Yiddish to French. In Mémoire du yiddish: Transmettre une langue assassinée [A Memory of Yiddish: Transmitting an Assassinated Language], an interview with the French journalist Stéphane Bou published as a book in 2019, Rachel Ertel, who was born in July 1939, looks back chronologically on her life’s journey.

Feb 06, 2020

The contributions of this special issue showcase the performative dimension of translation: Musicians and poets (when reading their texts) draw attention to the interactions between languages, phonetic experiences, rhythm, rhyme, and the productive use of misunderstandings. Critical reflections on their own translations, and the role performed by agents such as editors (e.g. of selection and design), engender the question of what it meant historically and what it means today to be a writer or reader in multilingual settings.

Dec 16, 2019

How the poet Louis Zukofsky constructed his English-language American modernism by citing, translating, and adapting the Yiddish poetry of Yehoash.

Dec 16, 2019

Radosav discusses her experiences as a translator of Yiddish poetry into Romanian and her evaluation of certain translations from other languages into Romanian or from Romanian into Yiddish. The essay outlines a strategy of “translation-recreation,” in which the translator balances a sense of fidelity to the source text with the attempt to creatively reproduce its internal mechanism.

Dec 16, 2019

Mishory examines the collaborative work of art historian Rachel Wischnitzer (1885-1989), and Jewish-German designer and typographer Franzisca Baruch (1901-1989), demonstrating that Baruch’s revival of medieval Hebrew letterforms in her work on Rimon/Milgroym and her use of fragmentation as a strategy for visual, textual, and cultural revival was in conversation with Wischnitzer’s scholarship.

Dec 10, 2019

In her work on images of the Lower East Side, Blair spotlights the paradoxes of the neighborhood’s dynamic status as site of memory and of artistic experimentation and highlights stories and voices often left out of American collective memory.

Dec 09, 2019

The Rise of the Modern Yiddish Stage is a monumental work that tells the story of Avrom Goldfaden, Yiddish theater’s most central, confounding, and enigmatic figure while also situating it in the context of Yiddish theater’s initial development.

Nov 25, 2019

Kremer reviews two new volumes dealing with Yiddish poetry, both published in Poland in 2018, which focus on the work of women poets.

Nov 17, 2019

In this groundbreaking study, Lachs draws upon often ignored documents of popular culture (conventionally written off as shund by her predecessors) in order to paint a vivid picture of working class immigrant London at the turn of the 20th century.

Nov 04, 2019

Sienna’s book attempts to set the record straight (as it were) by bringing together and deeply annotating 120 diverse Jewish texts that each shed some light on Jewish LGBTQ lives, Jewish histories of same-sex eroticism, and Jewish experiences of gender transgression.

Oct 28, 2019