Reviews
Review
Review of The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature by Benjamin Schreier
The Rise and Fall makes strikingly clear claims about all that is wrong with the field, from its insiderism to its uncritical reliance on “culture” and “ethnicity.”
May 09, 2021
Review
Review of Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry by Adriana X. Jacobs
Jacobs (who, in addition to being a scholar of modern Hebrew literature, is also an accomplished translator and poet) offers a rethinking of the modern Hebrew canon as fundamentally shaped by what she calls a “translational poetics.”
May 03, 2021
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.
May 02, 2021
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.
Mar 30, 2021
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.
Mar 15, 2021
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.
Feb 28, 2021
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.
Jan 12, 2021
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.
Jan 12, 2021
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 (1704−1772).
Oct 28, 2020
