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 20^th 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