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

Back to the Ghetto

What might Yid­dish stud­ies stand to gain from recent books seek­ing to con­tex­tu­al­ize how the mean­ing and uses of term ghet­to” have changed over centuries?

Review

Review of Marina Mogilner’s A Race for the Future: Scientific Visions of Modern Russian Jewishness

With a focus on Russ­ian Jew­ish race sci­en­tists, Mogilner traces how biol­o­gy informed notions of Jew­ish dif­fer­ence mobi­lized by com­mu­nal orga­ni­za­tions and polit­i­cal activists in impe­r­i­al Rus­sia and the ear­ly Sovi­et period.

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.

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.

Article

Yiddish Exceptionalism: Lynching, Race, and Racism in Opatoshu’s “Lintsheray”

How can Yid­dish describe the scene of a lynch­ing of a black man? Marc Caplan exam­ines the lan­guage strate­gies of Opatoshu’s Lintsher­ay.”

Article

“This is How a Generation Grows”: Lynching as a Site of Ethical Loss in Opatoshu’s “Lintsheray”

What can Opatoshu’s con­tro­ver­sial sto­ry about a lynch­ing tell us about the com­plex Jew­ish encounter with Amer­i­can cul­ture and the poten­tial loss of an eth­i­cal tradition.

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