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 Marina Mogilner’s A Race for the Future: Scientific Visions of Modern Russian Jewishness

With a focus on Russ­ian Jew­ish race sci­en­tists, Mogilner traces how biol­o­gy informed notions of Jew­ish dif­fer­ence mobi­lized by com­mu­nal orga­ni­za­tions and polit­i­cal activists in impe­r­i­al Rus­sia and the ear­ly Sovi­et period.

Review

Review of From a Distant Relation by Mikhah Yosef Berdichevsky, edited and translated by James Adam Redfield

Berdichevsky’s Yid­dish writ­ing focused on the world he had left behind, and frankly strug­gled with his ambiva­lence about these communities.

Article

“An altogether unusual love and understanding”: The Shomer Sisters and the Gender Politics of Shund Theatre

Exam­in­ing Rose Shomer Bache­lis and Miri­am Shomer Zunser in the con­text of their famous shund-writ­ing fam­i­ly, this arti­cle argues that their operetta Der liebes tants” — a love tri­an­gle with an Apache dance motif — should be read against the grain to empha­size the impor­tance of sisterhood.

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

My Mom Drank Ink: The “Little Negro” and the Performance of Race in Yente Telebende’s Stage Productions

The case study of Yente Telebende is mere­ly one exam­ple of pop­u­lar Yid­dish cul­ture — the­ater, pulp fic­tion, and news­pa­pers — that strove for com­mer­cial suc­cess by appeal­ing to the tastes of its audi­ence, shaped by Amer­i­can cul­ture’s vocab­u­lary and images of Blackness.

Article

'Di Yidn Kumen!': Israeli and Multicultural Identities in Israeli Yiddish Light Entertainment Shows

While Hebrew cul­tur­al dis­course tend­ed to treat Yid­dish the­atre as a kind of out­side” cul­ture, light enter­tain­ment shows in Yid­dish reveal close engage­ment with the cen­tral icons and themes of Israeli society.

Article

Murder, Lust, and Laughter, or, Shund Theatre: A Special Issue of In geveb

As the open­ing of the spe­cial issue on shund the­ater, this intro­duc­tion sit­u­ates the four arti­cles and two trans­la­tions in the his­to­ry of the study of shund.

Review

Review of Kenneth B. Moss’s An Unchosen People

In this study of Jew­ish grass­roots thinkers, Ken­neth B. Moss offers an account of Jew­ish thought, cul­ture, and choic­es in inter­war Poland.

Review

Review of Anne-Christin Klotz's Gemeinsam gegen Deutschland

In this study of the Jew­ish press in Poland, Anne-Christin Klotz iden­ti­fies Pol­ish Jew­ry, and specif­i­cal­ly local Yid­dish writ­ers and jour­nal­ists, as cen­tral to under­stand­ing the Nazi threat in the 1930s.

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