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
Miriam Udel’s Never Better! The Modern Jewish Picaresque
Miriam Udel’s new book travels with the genre of the picaresque from the shtetl to the USA to the USSR and brings it into the twentieth century.
Oct 19, 2016
Review
Strangers in Berlin by Rachel Seelig
Seelig’s new book explores the city of Berlin during the Weimar period as a “transit station” for Jewish literature written in German, Yiddish, and Hebrew.
Apr 26, 2017
Review
Review of A Rich Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture by Shachar M. Pinsker
Shachar M. Pinsker’s latest work is a lively examination of the role of cafés as meeting grounds for Jewish writers and thinkers in the modern period of transnational migration, from 1848 – 1939.
Sep 16, 2018
Article
The Shtik Kabole Niger Couldn’t Digest: Poetry, Messianism, and Literatoyre in Aaron Zeitlin’s Keter
This study presents a translation and analysis of Aaron Zeitlin’s (1898−1973) poem “Keter: Fragmenten fun a rapsodye,” published in 1923, at the height of the Warsaw expressionist explosion of the early twenties.
Nov 29, 2018
Article
Louis Zukofsky: Building a Poetics of Translation
How the poet Louis Zukofsky constructed his English-language American modernism by citing, translating, and adapting the Yiddish poetry of Yehoash.
Dec 16, 2019
Article
Hertz Grosbard’s Jewspeak: The Lost Art of Word Concerts
Hertz Grosbard’s “word concerts” were an embodiment of “Jewspeak,” performances that sought to give life to the Yiddish literary tradition.
Jun 23, 2020
Article
The Image of Streetwalkers in Itzik Manger’s and Debora Vogel’s Ballads
By considering the image of the streetwalker in Manger’s and Vogel’s work, this article deepens the understanding of Yiddish creativity as ultimately multimodal and interconnected.
Dec 02, 2020
Review
Review of Der Nister’s Soviet Years: Yiddish Writer as Witness to the People by Mikhail Krutikov.
Krutikov’s philological skillset and meticulous archival research shine throughout this book, a landmark study of both Der Nister and Yiddish literature under Stalin.
Jan 12, 2021
Review
Review of A Permanent Beginning: R. Nachman of Braslav and Jewish Literary Modernity by Yitzhak Lewis
Yitzhak Lewis shows how Reb Nachman initiated a new era of Jewish literature that shaped nineteenth- and twentieth-century Yiddish and Hebrew writing.
Mar 30, 2021