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
Viva Voce: Vicissitudes of the Spoken Word in Hebrew Literature
Why does the Hebrew novel have a problem with speech? Alan Mintz on the non-dialogical and the monological in modern Hebrew literature.
Jun 23, 2020
Article
Critical Discourse as a Jewish Thing and Its Beginnings in the Bible
The Biblical record provides a set of powerful models for critical discourse, creating narratives, laws, and prophetic modes that emphasize the practice of verbal critique.
Jun 16, 2020
Article
Introduction: There’s a Jewish Way of Saying Things
Rosen introduces There’s a Jewish Way of Saying Things: Essays In Honor of David Roskies by reflecting on how Jewish speech — the spoken word, the vibrating resonance of uttered sound — finds its way back into text.
Jun 16, 2020
Article
Talmud Talk and Jewish Talk
What are the parallels between “Jewish conversation” and Talmudic discourse? Is there something inherently Talmudic about Jewish speech?
Jun 16, 2020
Article
Translating As Saying
Can Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig’s translation of the Hebrew Bible be considered a form of Jewish speech? When and how does translation become a Jewish way of talking?
Jun 16, 2020
Article
The Choir and the Orchestra: Two Kinds of Divine Praise
When read together, Psalms 148 and 150 instruct the reader to constantly shift between the universal and the particular, between praying for the welfare of the world and focusing on the people of Israel.
Jun 16, 2020
Review
Review of: Benny Mer, Smocza: A Biography of a Jewish Street in Warsaw
The history of Smocza, a Jewish Street in Warsaw, is not the story of the world-renowned figures, but rather of every person who ever lived or died there, including those who are lost to our collective memory.
Jun 07, 2020
Review
Review of Seeds in the Desert by Mendel Mann, translated and with an introduction by Heather Valencia
These stories take place in Israeli cities, towns, and villages, in the post-war Soviet Union, and in Poland of the interwar period. However, it is often very difficult to tell where the stories actually take place, because they express an experience of dislocation and total disorientation.
May 20, 2020
Review
A Double Dose of Early Twentieth-Century Yiddish Talush-hood: Two New Translations by Daniel Kennedy
In new translations by Daniel Kennedy, Hersh Dovid Nomberg’s Warsaw Stories (White Goat Press) and Zalman Shneour’s A Death: Notes of a Suicide (Wakefield Press) can rightfully be labeled “classic”; they reach across time and space to name an eternal — and unromantic — facet of human experience.
Apr 29, 2020
Review
The post-Holocaust Parisian “Phalanstery” of 9 rue Guy Patin and its Legacies. Review of Rachel Ertel, Mémoire du yiddish
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