Articles

Is there a Jew­ish way of not say­ing things? In fac­ing crises in lan­guage dur­ing the imme­di­ate post-Holo­caust years, film­mak­ers in Eng­lish and Yid­dish made choic­es about how to bal­ance repair and critique.

Jun 30, 2020

Abra­ham Sutzkev­er’s poet­ry is often read with­in the con­fines of ​“Holo­caust lit­er­a­ture”. This essays reads a selec­tion of Sutzkever’s poet­ry against the Holo­caust, against the apoc­a­lypse, and against the hori­zons of mean­ing that the label of ​“Holo­caust lit­er­a­ture” might impose.

Jun 30, 2020

In this essay, David Fish­man draws a com­par­i­son between yidishe visnshaft, or Jew­ish stud­ies schol­ar­ship, and Juden­forschung, the Nazi field of anti­se­mit­ic Jew­ish stud­ies used to jus­ti­fy the per­se­cu­tion and exter­mi­na­tion of Jews in sci­en­tif­ic terms.

Jun 30, 2020

Sholem Ale­ichem and Tevye depend on one anoth­er — for Wisse, their con­ver­sa­tions form a minia­ture Jew­ish ter­ri­to­ry where togeth­er they reassert moral control.

Jun 23, 2020

The tav­ern is a fix­ture of the shtetl uni­verse — but it also exists on the mar­gins, where, for Sholem Ale­ichem, you can also find the chaos of modernity.

Jun 23, 2020

On the eve of World War I, poets Leyb Nay­dus, Moyshe Kul­bak, and Elkho­nen Vogler devel­oped a sen­si­tiv­i­ty to nature in an attempt to reclaim the imag­i­nary Jew­ish ter­ri­to­ries of Lite and Raysn.

Jun 23, 2020

How does one write about romance in Yid­dish? Sholem Aleichem’s 1888 nov­el Stem­penyu pos­es this ques­tion through an exam­i­na­tion of the gen­dered lim­i­ta­tions on Jew­ish lit­er­ary love.

Jun 23, 2020

The wed­ding bard of The Dyb­buk is a para­dox­i­cal fig­ure: a pro­fes­sion­al out­sider who speaks into being the lay­ered com­plex­i­ty of S. An-ski’s artis­tic project.

Jun 23, 2020

Hertz Gros­bard’s ​“word con­certs” were an embod­i­ment of ​“Jew­speak,” per­for­mances that sought to give life to the Yid­dish lit­er­ary tradition.

Jun 23, 2020

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