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

Introduction: Yiddish and the Transnational in Latin America

In study­ing Latin Amer­i­can (and indeed Amer­i­can con­ti­nen­tal) Yid­dish cul­ture, we need to appre­ci­ate the effects of encounter and inter­ac­tion between these two well estab­lished transna­tion­al languages.

Review

Review of Una historia del libro judío by Alejandro Dujovne

Trac­ing the devel­op­ment of edi­to­r­i­al Jew­ish press­es in Argenti­na from their infan­cy in 1910 through their post­war decline in the mid-1960s and 1970s, Dujovne uses book his­to­ry as a lens to tell the sto­ry of Ashke­nazi Jews in Argentina.

Review

Review of A Permanent Beginning: R. Nachman of Braslav and Jewish Literary Modernity by Yitzhak Lewis

Yitzhak Lewis shows how Reb Nach­man ini­ti­at­ed a new era of Jew­ish lit­er­a­ture that shaped nine­teenth- and twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry Yid­dish and Hebrew writing.

Review

Review of Jewish American Writing and World Literature: Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody by Saul Noam Zaritt

Replete with insight­ful close read­ings of key his­tor­i­cal and lit­er­ary texts, Jew­ish Amer­i­can Writ­ing and World Lit­er­a­ture com­pli­cates the lim­it­ing bina­ry of the national/​transnational models.

Review

Sewn with the Tiniest of Pearls

Murphy’s trans­la­tions of Perl’s sto­ries allow us to appre­ci­ate an ever more col­or­ful can­vas of mod­ern Yid­dish literature.

Review

Transformation or Distortion? Anthologizing Yiddish in a Postvernacular Age

How Yid­dish Changed Amer­i­ca and Amer­i­ca Changed Yid­dish is a high­ly enjoy­able col­lec­tion assem­bled with undis­guised love for Yid­dish cul­ture, which at the same time reflects that culture’s remark­able vital­i­ty and variety.

Review

Review of Der Nister’s Soviet Years: Yiddish Writer as Witness to the People by Mikhail Krutikov.

Krutikov’s philo­log­i­cal skillset and metic­u­lous archival research shine through­out this book, a land­mark study of both Der Nis­ter and Yid­dish lit­er­a­ture under Stalin.

Article

The Image of Streetwalkers in Itzik Manger’s and Debora Vogel’s Ballads

By con­sid­er­ing the image of the street­walk­er in Manger’s and Vogel’s work, this arti­cle deep­ens the under­stand­ing of Yid­dish cre­ativ­i­ty as ulti­mate­ly mul­ti­modal and interconnected.

Review

Review of Ariel Mayse's Speaking Infinities

In his recent metic­u­lous­ly-researched and sen­si­tive­ly-writ­ten work, Ariel Evan Mayse brings to the atten­tion of the con­tem­po­rary read­er a remark­able the­ol­o­gy of lan­guage to be found in the teach­ings of Dov Ber Fried­man, the Mag­gid of Mezritsh (17041772).

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