Reviews
Review
Translating Israeli Literature into Hebrew - Where Yiddish Meets the Land
The stories in this collection are an invitation to reexamine what Israeli literature is: to expand the category of Israeli literature beyond just the Hebrew language and in so doing to disrupt expectations about that literature.
Dec 12, 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 From the Jewish Provinces by Fradl Shtok, translated by Jordan D. Finkin and Allison Schachter
From the Jewish Provinces is a valuable and highly readable addition to Yiddish literature in translation.
Dec 15, 2022
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 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
A Double Dose of Early Twentieth-Century Yiddish Talush-hood: Two New Translations by Daniel Kennedy
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
Review
Translated and Improved: Ilan Stavans’ On Self-Translation: Meditations on Language
Oct 21, 2019
Review
Translingualism Today: A Review of Naomi Brenner’s Lingering Bilingualism
Naomi Brenner’s new book complicates the story of the Hebrew-Yiddish “language wars” and argues that Jewish translingualism continues well into the 20th century.
Sep 18, 2016