Reviews

Review

Review of Yiddish: A Biography of a Language by Jeffrey Shandler

Shandler’s biog­ra­phy can be read as a chron­i­cle of expand­ing notions of folk­stim­lekhkayt, from the old vos far a yid redt nisht ken yidish (what kind of [Ashke­nazi] Jew doesn’t speak Yid­dish) stan­dard to the Yid­dish being used and devel­oped by cohorts of non-native speakers.

Review

Review of Honey on the Page: A Treasury of Yiddish Children’s Literature, by Miriam Udel

Review of Hon­ey on the Page: A Trea­sury of Yid­dish Children’s Lit­er­a­ture, edit­ed and trans­lat­ed by Miri­am Udel.

Review

The Place of German in the History of Jewish Nationalism: Review of German as a Jewish Problem by Marc Volovici

Ger­man as a Jew­ish Lan­guage chal­lenges the dis­tinc­tions made between Jew­ish” and non-Jew­ish” lan­guages and con­cur­rent­ly empha­sizes the per­me­abil­i­ty between dis­ci­pli­nary boundaries.

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.”

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.”

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.

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