Articles

Essays and peer-reviewed scholarship in Yiddish Studies, an interdisciplinary field that engages all aspects of Yiddish cultural production, especially in its relationship to other cultures and languages.

Click here for a separate listing of open-access, peer-reviewed articles.

Article

Af der shvel un in der fremd: A feuilleton on Yiddish, Race, and the American Literary Imagination

Adam Zachary New­ton exam­ines the Amer­i­can Jew­ish lit­er­ary impulse to claim both white­ness and alien­ation while iden­ti­fy­ing with Black Americans. 

Article

Beyond the Color Line: Jews, Blacks, and the American Racial Imagination

NYU Doc­tor­al Can­di­date Jen­nifer Young explores the com­pli­cat­ed ways in which Amer­i­can Jews claimed white­ness while exam­in­ing and often iden­ti­fy­ing with Black Amer­i­can struggles.

Review

Review of Convergence, an Album of Multi-Diasporic Musical Longing by Anthony Russell and Veretski Pass

Antho­ny Rus­sell, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Verets­ki Pass (Joshua Horowitz on piano, Cook­ie Segel­stein on fid­dle, and Stu­art Brot­man on cel­lo), inter­twines Jew­ish East­ern Europe folk music and African Amer­i­can spir­i­tu­al traditions. 

Article

My Mom Drank Ink: The “Little Negro” and the Performance of Race in Yente Telebende’s Stage Productions

The case study of Yente Telebende is mere­ly one exam­ple of pop­u­lar Yid­dish cul­ture — the­ater, pulp fic­tion, and news­pa­pers — that strove for com­mer­cial suc­cess by appeal­ing to the tastes of its audi­ence, shaped by Amer­i­can cul­ture’s vocab­u­lary and images of Blackness.

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