Reviews

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

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

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

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

In new translations by Daniel Kennedy, Hersh Dovid Nomberg’s Warsaw Stories (White Goat Press) and Zalman Shneour’s A Death: Notes of a Suicide (Wakefield Press) can rightfully be labeled “classic”; they reach across time and space to name an eternal — and unromantic — facet of human experience.

Apr 29, 2020

In this groundbreaking study, Lachs draws upon often ignored documents of popular culture (conventionally written off as shund by her predecessors) in order to paint a vivid picture of working class immigrant London at the turn of the 20th century.

Nov 04, 2019

Sienna’s book attempts to set the record straight (as it were) by bringing together and deeply annotating 120 diverse Jewish texts that each shed some light on Jewish LGBTQ lives, Jewish histories of same-sex eroticism, and Jewish experiences of gender transgression.

Oct 28, 2019

Oct 24, 2019

Oct 21, 2019

Jul 08, 2019