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 Rebecca Margolis's Yiddish Lives On: Strategies of Language Transmission
Rebecca Margolis’ Yidish Lebt: Yiddish Lives On: Strategies of Language Transmission explores how a diverse range of native, heritage, and new speakers have ensured not only the continuity of a minority language widely thought to be endangered, but evolved Yiddish into a site of creative renewal in the Jewish world.
Jun 08, 2023
Review
Review of Marina Mogilner’s A Race for the Future: Scientific Visions of Modern Russian Jewishness
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.
Apr 21, 2023
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.
Apr 21, 2023
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.
Apr 21, 2023
Article
'Di Yidn Kumen!': Israeli and Multicultural Identities in Israeli Yiddish Light Entertainment Shows