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

Holocaust Literature and Autorevision: Shaye Shpigl’s Ghetto Stories Written in, and Rewritten after, the Lodz Ghetto

Shpigl’s Yid­dish-Yid­dish autore­vi­sions pow­er­ful­ly exem­pli­fy an author’s felt com­pul­sion to rewrite wartime writ­ings from a post­war per­spec­tive even when no change of lan­guage — no lit­er­al trans­la­tion — was involved.

Review

Review of Sasha Senderovich's How the Soviet Jew Was Made

In this recent­ly-pub­lished study, Senderovich chal­lenges this fixed notion of the Sovi­et Jew, and recounts a com­plex pre­his­to­ry of the Sovi­et Jew in the imme­di­ate con­text of inter­war Sovi­et culture.

Review

Review of Samuel J. Spinner's Jewish Primitivism

With his ele­gant new study, Jew­ish Prim­i­tivism, Samuel J. Spin­ner offers a new approach to the rela­tion­ship between Ger­man and East Euro­pean Jew­ish cul­ture while also con­sid­er­ing to what degree and in which ways dif­fer­ences among Jew­ish cul­tures reflect dif­fer­ences and inter­ac­tions with the non-Jew­ish culture(s) around them.

Review

Review of From the Jewish Provinces by Fradl Shtok, translated by Jordan D. Finkin and Allison Schachter

From the Jew­ish Provinces is a valu­able and high­ly read­able addi­tion to Yid­dish lit­er­a­ture in translation.

Article

The Yiddish Columbus: Critical Counter-History and the Remapping of American Jewish Literature

Glantz’s mas­ter­work Kris­to­bal Kolon offers a transna­tion­al vision of the Amer­i­c­as that insists — in Yid­dish — on its Jew­ish, Mus­lim, indige­nous and African ori­gins, sug­gest­ing a new geog­ra­phy for Amer­i­can Jew­ish lit­er­a­ture that exceeds the bound­aries of what we under­stand the Amer­i­c­as and Jew­ish­ness to be, and chal­leng­ing our expec­ta­tions of what Yid­dish lit­er­a­ture can contain.

Article

‘Brother Jews of the Entire World!’ Bergelson, Hofshteyn, and Soviet-Yiddish in the Worldwide Jewish Family

This arti­cle looks at the wartime artis­tic and jour­nal­is­tic out­put of Dovid Bergel­son and Dovid Hof­shteyn to see how these writ­ers appro­pri­at­ed Sovi­et ter­mi­nol­o­gy to paint Sovi­et Jews as the elder broth­ers in a world­wide Jew­ish family.

Article

A Yiddish Newspaper at War with Yiddish: Abraham Cahan and the 1931 Language Debate in the New York Forverts

This arti­cle describes the para­dox of the neg­a­tive atti­tude artic­u­lat­ed by the Yid­dish Forverts toward using Yid­dish as the edu­ca­tion­al medi­um of instruc­tion in Amer­i­can Jew­ish schools. 

Review

Review of Utopia’s Discontents: Russian Emigres and the Quest for Freedom, 1830s—1930s by Faith Hillis

Cre­at­ed out of neces­si­ty as a response to Tsarist repres­sion, Hillis argues that cir­cles of Russ­ian émi­gré groups, or colonies,” rep­re­sent­ed a cru­cial space in the devel­op­ment of Russ­ian politics.

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