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

A Yiddish Studies to Come: In Conversation with Adam Zachary Newton’s Jewish Studies as Counterlife

Newton’s book pro­vides a stir­ring call for a Jew­ish Stud­ies to come, a pro­pos­al for new forms of affil­i­a­tion, both with­in the loose bound­aries of Jew­ish Stud­ies and extend­ing out­ward to the whole of the Human­i­ties and to the uni­ver­si­ty as an insti­tu­tion. What might it mean for Yid­dish Stud­ies to par­tic­i­pate in this com­ing community?

Article

Shylock’s Jewish Way of Speaking

What if Shy­lock spoke Yid­dish? One exper­i­men­tal pro­duc­tion of Shake­speare’s The Mer­chant of Venice” did just that.

Article

Breaking Ground, Broken English: Abraham Cahan’s The Imported Bridegroom

Cahan’s char­ac­ters speak in bro­ken lan­guages, and in so doing find them­selves unable to find sta­ble ground in America.

Article

Cod Yiddish From Across the Pond: Howard Jacobson’s Finklerspeak

Howard Jacob­son tests the lim­its and con­tours of a Jew­ish way of speak­ing, pre­sent­ing an Anglo-Jew­ish dia­logue with post-impe­r­i­al culture.

Article

The Fourth Child

The author reflects on his own expe­ri­ences encoun­ter­ing David Roskies in the 1960s and col­lab­o­rat­ing with him in Holo­caust remem­brance at a very dif­fer­ent time than our present con­text for the mem­o­ry and com­mem­o­ra­tion of the Holocaust.

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).

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.

Article

Letters Without Addresses: Abraham Sutzkever’s Late Style

Abra­ham Sutzkev­er’s poet­ry is often read with­in the con­fines of Holo­caust lit­er­a­ture”. This essays reads a selec­tion of Sutzkever’s poet­ry against the Holo­caust, against the apoc­a­lypse, and against the hori­zons of mean­ing that the label of Holo­caust lit­er­a­ture” might impose.

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.

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.

SIGN UP FOR OUR MONTHLY NEWSLETTER