Articles

Mel Konner’s com­pelling trans­la­tion of Helfandn bay Nakht (1950) takes the read­er through Sutzkever’s Nesiye iber Afri­ka, evok­ing sto­ries of wise African kings, masked hunters, shape-shift­ing prey, lovers divid­ed by croc­o­dile rivers, and the cre­ation of man begin­ning with ele­phant tusks.

Mar 03, 2025

Paula Ansaldo’s book brings about a long-await­ed return of Yid­dish and the IFT to their right­ful place in Argen­tine the­ater his­to­ry and Jew­ish the­ater history.

Feb 26, 2025

There is a well-known Yid­dish proverb that argues Vert­er zol men vegn un nit tseyln (Words should be weighed and not count­ed). But when one pays atten­tion to the weight of words in the way Han­nah Pollin-Galay does, every word counts.

Feb 18, 2025

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

Kutsher’s mem­oir is not just a mem­oir of his life but a mem­oir of a city long gone. Writ­ten orig­i­nal­ly in Yid­dish in 1955 after Kut­sher sur­vived the Holo­caust and left Poland, it reads more like a yizkor book than a per­son­al memoir.

Jan 13, 2025

A Taytsh Man­i­festo offers fresh analy­sis of the trans­la­tion­al under­pin­nings of Yid­dish across diverse cul­tur­al con­texts. How­ev­er, I ques­tion the util­i­ty of propos­ing ​“taytsh” as a par­a­digm shift for a field — and wider Jew­ish world — that finds itself in a state of pro­found upheaval.

Jan 08, 2025

Zaritt calls for schol­ar­ship that starts from the premise not of the fun­da­men­tal integri­ty of the lan­guage and cul­ture, but rather from the assump­tion that what we have grown used to des­ig­nat­ing by the term ​“Yid­dish” more accu­rate­ly (though one might sug­gest in Zaritt’s spir­it, nev­er ​“prop­er­ly”) names a set of con­tin­gent inter­ac­tions, and that the con­sti­tu­tion of that set, even if always incom­plete, is the task of schol­ar­ship to come.

Jan 08, 2025

Saul Noam Zaritt’s A Taytsh Man­i­festo rethinks the crit­i­cal terms and cat­e­gories that Yid­dish Stud­ies has inher­it­ed in order to reor­ga­nize and re-pri­or­i­tize, in the hopes of cre­at­ing some­thing new out of the build­ing blocks of inher­it­ed Yid­dish Stud­ies scholarship.

Jan 08, 2025

Notwith­stand­ing its thought­ful ground­ing in recent work in the field, the force of Zaritt’s polemic is to call into ques­tion ideas that have been broad­ly accept­ed in Yid­dish Stud­ies since Max Weinreich’s time.

Jan 08, 2025

Rather than pro­vid­ing a phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal the­o­ry of taytsh, Zaritt’s pro­gram con­cen­trates on replac­ing what he jus­ti­fi­ably iden­ti­fies as a nor­mal­iz­ing par­a­digm of Yid­dish with a prob­lema­tized par­a­digm of taytsh.

Jan 08, 2025