Reviews
Review
What Were Our Children Reading? Review of Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children’s Literature by Miriam Udel
In a word, Yiddish children’s literature, per Udel, has a long history, a series of stormy futures past, and a fraught yet fruitful and ongoing aftermath. Throughout the book, Udel maintains the necessary critical distance without losing sight of the vitality present in printed matter for children, the institutions pursuing this work, to say the least of the debates surrounding this highly contested work which suffused each epoch.
May 31, 2026
Review
Just the Two of Us?: A Review of Celia Dropkin's Desires
Dropkin charts the competing ways of desire—for sex, for a child, for security—that swirled within any woman poised between tradition and modern life in America.
Jan 29, 2026
Review
Review of Karen Underhill's Bruno Schulz and Galician Jewish Modernity
Instead of bringing Schulz to us... Underhill engages in the far more laborious, courageous, and gratifying task of bringing us to Schulz.
Feb 14, 2025
Review
Review of Horizons Blossom, Borders Vanish: Anarchism and Yiddish Literature by Anna Elena Torres
Oct 10, 2024
Review
Review of Adi Mahalel's The Radical Isaac: I. L. Peretz and the Rise of Jewish Socialism
Reading Peretz as a political thinker, Adi Mahalel offers a case for writing socialism into the center of the rise of modern Yiddish literature.
Jan 29, 2024
Review
Review of From a Distant Relation by Mikhah Yosef Berdichevsky, edited and translated by James Adam Redfield
Berdichevsky’s Yiddish writing focused on the world he had left behind, and frankly struggled with his ambivalence about these communities.
May 22, 2023
Review
Review of Sasha Senderovich's How the Soviet Jew Was Made
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
Review
Review of Samuel J. Spinner's Jewish Primitivism
With his elegant new study, Jewish Primitivism, Samuel J. Spinner offers a new approach to the relationship between German and East European Jewish culture while also considering to what degree and in which ways differences among Jewish cultures reflect differences and interactions with the non-Jewish culture(s) around them.
Jan 10, 2023
Review
Review of Women Writing Jewish Modernity by Allison Schachter
Schachter calls us to think beyond the androcentric, to imagine and create an understanding of modern Jewish literature that places women at its center.
Feb 02, 2022