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.

Review

Treating Emotions in a Tempest: Review of Amy Simon’s Emotions in Yiddish Ghetto Diaries

Amy Simon deploys empath­ic read­ing to inter­pret the range of emo­tions con­tained in Yid­dish diaries writ­ten in the ghet­tos of War­saw, Lodz, and Vilna.

Review

Review of Anne-Christin Klotz's Gemeinsam gegen Deutschland

In this study of the Jew­ish press in Poland, Anne-Christin Klotz iden­ti­fies Pol­ish Jew­ry, and specif­i­cal­ly local Yid­dish writ­ers and jour­nal­ists, as cen­tral to under­stand­ing the Nazi threat in the 1930s.

Article

Holocaust Literature and Autorevision: Shaye Shpigl’s Ghetto Stories Written in, and Rewritten after, the Lodz Ghetto

Shpigl’s Yid­dish-Yid­dish autore­vi­sions pow­er­ful­ly exem­pli­fy an author’s felt com­pul­sion to rewrite wartime writ­ings from a post­war per­spec­tive even when no change of lan­guage — no lit­er­al trans­la­tion — was involved.

Article

The Fourth Child

The author reflects on his own expe­ri­ences encoun­ter­ing David Roskies in the 1960s and col­lab­o­rat­ing with him in Holo­caust remem­brance at a very dif­fer­ent time than our present con­text for the mem­o­ry and com­mem­o­ra­tion of the Holocaust.

Article

Double or Nothing: Jewish Speech and Silence in Georges Perec’s *W ou le souvenir d’enfance"

This arti­cle con­sid­ers the phan­tom traces of Yid­dish in Georges Perec’s W ou le sou­venir d’enfance (1975).

Article

Orphaned Words: Yiddish, English, and Child Speech in Postwar Cinema

Is there a Jew­ish way of not say­ing things? In fac­ing crises in lan­guage dur­ing the imme­di­ate post-Holo­caust years, film­mak­ers in Eng­lish and Yid­dish made choic­es about how to bal­ance repair and critique.

Article

Letters Without Addresses: Abraham Sutzkever’s Late Style

Abra­ham Sutzkev­er’s poet­ry is often read with­in the con­fines of Holo­caust lit­er­a­ture”. This essays reads a selec­tion of Sutzkever’s poet­ry against the Holo­caust, against the apoc­a­lypse, and against the hori­zons of mean­ing that the label of Holo­caust lit­er­a­ture” might impose.

Article

Split Identity: Jewish Scholarship in the Vilna Ghetto

In this essay, David Fish­man draws a com­par­i­son between yidishe visnshaft, or Jew­ish stud­ies schol­ar­ship, and Juden­forschung, the Nazi field of anti­se­mit­ic Jew­ish stud­ies used to jus­ti­fy the per­se­cu­tion and exter­mi­na­tion of Jews in sci­en­tif­ic terms.

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