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

Review of Nick Underwood's Yiddish Paris: Staging Nation and Community in Interwar France

Today’s Yid­dishists can find his­tor­i­cal mod­els for polit­i­cal­ly-engaged cul­tur­al activism in Nick Under­wood’s account of inter­war Paris.

Article

Kol Nidre and the Making of the Jewish Theatre Audience

Focus­ing on Abra­ham M. Sharkansky’s 1896 play Kol nidre, oder di geheyme yidn in madrid (Kol Nidre, or the Secret Jews of Madrid), this arti­cle exam­ines how, on both sides of the Atlantic, the Kol Nidre prayer per­formed in the Yid­dish the­atre reflect­ed pro­found mod­ern and migra­to­ry cul­tur­al trans­gres­sions, between cat­e­gories such as high and low, reli­gion and enter­tain­ment, the holy and the theatrical.

Article

Musical Comedy as Compromise Formation: Judío and Judía (1926), by Ivo Pelay

Ivo Pelay’s 1926 plays Judío and Judía, Jew” and Jew­ess,” the­ma­tize anx­i­ety not only about the Argen­tine­ity of Jews, but also about the Jew­ish­ness of Argenti­na: the promise of assim­i­la­tion and the threat of subversion.

Article

Shylock’s Jewish Way of Speaking

What if Shy­lock spoke Yid­dish? One exper­i­men­tal pro­duc­tion of Shake­speare’s The Mer­chant of Venice” did just that.

Review

Review of The Rise of the Modern Yiddish Stage by Alyssa Quint

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. 

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