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 Sandra Fox's The Jews of Summer
Summer may end, but summer camp and its legacies continue. Sandra Fox’s book looks to summer camps to explore what kinds of culture and community embraced by young Jews in postwar America.
Sep 27, 2023
Review
Review of Diego Rotman's The Yiddish Stage as a Temporary Home
In this study of Shimen Dzigan and Yisroel Schumacher, Diego Rotman presents a study of the subversive power of Yiddish comedy in the twentieth century.
Sep 18, 2023
Review
Review of Lisa Richter’s Nautilus and Bone; An Auto/biography in Poems
As a reader of Margolin’s poetry in its original Yiddish, and a translator of her work into English, I approached this collection with both interest and skepticism.
Jul 05, 2023
Review
Review of Artifacts of Orthodox Jewish Childhoods, edited by Dainy Bernstein
From CDs to detective stories, zines to toys, the objects remembered and analyzed in this volume presents the range of material that filled the childhoods of Ashkenazi Orthodox Jews growing up in the last decades of the twentieth century.
Jun 21, 2023
Review
Back to the Ghetto
What might Yiddish studies stand to gain from recent books seeking to contextualize how the meaning and uses of term “ghetto” have changed over centuries?
Jun 13, 2023
Review
Review of Annegret Oehme's The Knight without Boundaries: Yiddish and German Arthurian Wingalois Adaptations
Tracing the retellings of the Wigalois/Viduvilt tradition in Yiddish works across three centuries, Annegret Oehme’s recent work offers an example of the value of adaptation theory for Jewish literature and Jewish history.
Jun 12, 2023
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
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.
Jun 02, 2023
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.
May 22, 2023
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