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

Review of Shira Gorshman's Meant to Be, translated by Faith Jones

This is the first book-length col­lec­tion of Gorshman’s work to be trans­lat­ed into Eng­lish, with only a hand­ful of sto­ries elsewhere.

Review

Review of Seth Stern's Speaking Yiddish to Chickens

This account of Yid­dish-speak­ing farm­ers offers a mod­el for engag­ing with oral his­to­ry and the mem­o­ry of com­mu­ni­ties that have since disappeared.

Review

Review of Miriam Karpilove's A Provincial Newspaper and Other Stories, translated by Jessica Kirzane

The women in A Provin­cial News­pa­per and Oth­er Sto­ries are com­plex, mul­ti­fac­eted char­ac­ters, and they do not uni­form­ly fix­ate on love.

Review

Review of Nick Underwood's Yiddish Paris: Staging Nation and Community in Interwar France

Today’s Yid­dishists can find his­tor­i­cal mod­els for polit­i­cal­ly-engaged cul­tur­al activism in Nick Under­wood’s account of inter­war Paris.

Review

Review of Adi Mahalel's The Radical Isaac: I. L. Peretz and the Rise of Jewish Socialism

Read­ing Peretz as a polit­i­cal thinker, Adi Mahalel offers a case for writ­ing social­ism into the cen­ter of the rise of mod­ern Yid­dish literature.

Review

Review of Barry Trachtenberg's The Holocaust and the Exile of Yiddish: A History of the Algemeyne Entsiklopedye

The three decades of the Alge­meyne Entsik­lope­dye trace the fate of Yid­dish dias­po­ra nation­al­ism before and after the Sec­ond World War and the geno­cide of Europe’s Jews.

Review

Review of Lea Schäfer's Syntax and Morphology of Yiddish Dialects

Lea Schäfer demon­strates what can be learned about vari­a­tions in pre-Holo­caust Yid­dish from the mate­ri­als of the Lan­guage and Cul­tur­al Archive of Ashke­naz­ic Jewry.

Review

Review of Polish Jewish Culture Beyond the Capital, edited by Halina Goldberg and Nancy Sinkoff with Natalia Aleksiun

War­saw casts a long shad­ow on oth­er cities and the provinces in this account of Jew­ish cul­ture through­out the Pol­ish lands.

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.

SIGN UP FOR OUR MONTHLY NEWSLETTER