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
Orphaned Words: Yiddish, English, and Child Speech in Postwar Cinema
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
Article
Double or Nothing: Jewish Speech and Silence in Georges Perec’s *W ou le souvenir d’enfance"
This article considers the phantom traces of Yiddish in Georges Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance (1975).
Jun 30, 2020
Article
Split Identity: Jewish Scholarship in the Vilna Ghetto
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
Article
Der Alter Tevye Lebt!: Speech and Communication
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
Article
Nit dos dorf, nit di kretshme: Speaking About Jewish Taverns in the Works of Sholem Aleichem
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
Article
Sholem Aleichem's Stempenyu: Speaking through Song
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
Article
Raysn: The Belarusian Frontier of Yiddish Modernism
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
Article
Hertz Grosbard’s Jewspeak: The Lost Art of Word Concerts
Hertz Grosbard’s “word concerts” were an embodiment of “Jewspeak,” performances that sought to give life to the Yiddish literary tradition.
Jun 23, 2020
Article
Badkhones in Life and Cinema: A Reading of the Marshalik in the 1937 Dybbuk Film
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
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