Reviews

From CDs to detective stories, zines to toys, the objects remembered and analyzed in this volume presents the range of material that filled the childhoods of Ashkenazi Orthodox Jews growing up in the last decades of the twentieth century.

Jun 21, 2023

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

Berdichevsky’s Yiddish writing focused on the world he had left behind, and frankly struggled with his ambivalence about these communities.

May 22, 2023

Apr 11, 2023

In this study of Jewish grassroots thinkers, Kenneth B. Moss offers an account of Jewish thought, culture, and choices in interwar Poland.

Apr 11, 2023

In this study of the Jewish press in Poland, Anne-Christin Klotz identifies Polish Jewry, and specifically local Yiddish writers and journalists, as central to understanding the Nazi threat in the 1930s.

Mar 21, 2023

In this recently-published study, Senderovich challenges this fixed notion of the Soviet Jew, and recounts a complex prehistory of the Soviet Jew in the immediate context of interwar Soviet culture.

Feb 27, 2023