Nov 24, 2025
INTRODUCTION
What better way to celebrate In geveb’s 10th year than with an appearance at the Association for Jewish Studies (AJS) annual convention? Hosted this year in Washington D.C. from December 13-16, the conference will feature presentations across a wide range of topics in Jewish Studies, but we know what you want to hear about: Yiddish! Yiddish will take the nation’s capital by storm this year across panels, workshops, performances, and roundtables. We are proud to announce that In geveb will be sponsoring three roundtables: “Approaches to Yiddish Language Curriculum in the 21st Century,” “Yiddish Studies in the Digital Age: Reflecting on 10 years of In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies,” and “The Nuts and Bolts of Yiddish Studies Programs and Curricula in the United States Context.”
We’ve assembled this guide to make Yiddish as visible as possible at the conference and to highlight its interplay with other areas of Jewish Studies. We hope that using this guide, you’ll be able to navigate the conference with an eye towards emerging Yiddish scholarship.
We also invite you to celebrate with us on Dec. 13, the evening before the conference begins, at our party to celebrate our 10th anniversary. The party is generously co-sponsored by the Yiddish Book Center. Read below for details!
Most importantly, we urge you to connect with In geveb at this year’s conference! Many of the presenters, moderators, and discussants you’ll find below are involved with us in some capacity, whether that be as an editor, contributor, or friend-of-the-journal. Our goal is to remain at the frontier of Yiddish studies, so we’d like to meet any and all Yiddishists, established or burgeoning. If you would like to connect with our editors (to pitch us ideas, share feedback, or even just say hello), please write to [email protected] to schedule a time to chat with us at the conference.
Below, you’ll find information about In geveb’s party and our three sponsored roundtable discussions, followed by a comprehensive list of the events that involve Yiddish.
Join your favorite Yiddishists to celebrate 10 years of In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies
Saturday, December 13, 7:00-9:00 p.m.
Reserve a spot here!
Happy 10th Birthday In geveb!
In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies is celebrating its 10th birthday with a party moytse Shabes (Saturday evening) before the Association for Jewish Studies conference in Washington, DC. We are excited to celebrate together with Yiddish Book Center alumni attending AJS and in the DC area, and we hope to see many familiar faces from around the Yiddishist world - including your sheynem ponim!
Many thanks to the Yiddish Book Center for co-sponsoring this party.
Please RSVP by getting a ticket. The event is free, but donations to In geveb are encouraged! Event location will be emailed out to those who have a ticket.
The event will be held at an outdoor (but heated!) beer garden within walking distance from the Marriott Marquis hotel where the AJS takes place. Forshpayzn (hors d'oeuvres) will be provided and attendees can purchase their own beverages and additional food.
Please contact [email protected] with any questions, we look forward to sharing a lekhayim with you soon!
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In geveb is proud to sponsor the following round tables this year:
Approaches to Yiddish Language Curriculum in the 21st Century
Monday, December 15, 8:30-10:00 a.m.
Marriott Marquis Washington DC, M2, Marquis 4 (AV)
Yiddish pedagogy is rapidly developing and transforming, as more teachers are getting trained in language acquisition. New proficiency guidelines are being developed, and instruction tends to include a variety of sources starting from early stages of instruction. Yet, new questions and challenges arise. Students come to study Yiddish language with a range of expectations, that include a deeper understanding of cultural context, a desire for community consisting of both fellow Yiddish students and native Yiddish speakers, and an opportunity to reflect on the past, present and future of the Yiddish cultural legacy. These needs require the development of new curricula on all levels that include themes and projects that can build students’ motivation and develop a sense of belonging and ownership by engaging with the living Yiddish culture, community, and archival resources.
What is Yiddish cultural literacy and how to balance and connect conversations relevant to the student’s lives with various aspects of Yiddish culture? How to address the challenge of scarce intermediate/advanced materials that are engaging and relevant for today’s students? How to facilitate connections outside of the classroom? How to help the students to develop the habit of building Yiddish environment for themselves? Beatrice Lang will moderate a discussion on these topics.
Agi Legutko will discuss the joys and challenges of creating intermediate/advanced Yiddish course materials, utilizing existing textbooks, Yiddish literature and contemporary Yiddish culture. She will also share her insights on experiential learning outside of the classroom, and collaborative projects with fellow Yiddish teachers.
Elena Luchina will discuss her experience teaching mixed-level content-based classes, such as an intermediate/advanced course based on Yentl Yeshiva Boy and a course on Yiddish cultural centers.
Asya Vaisman Schulman will discuss strategies for scaffolding Yiddish authentic texts to maximize student engagement and language acquisition. Drawing on a literacies approach to language education, she will share frameworks that can help students interpret and transform target language texts.
Adrien Smith will discuss strategies for using peer-to-peer oral history interviews in the context of a Global Virtual Exchange to promote language proficiency and equip students with real-world research skills.
Yiddish Studies in the Digital Age: Reflecting on 10 years of In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies
Monday, December 15, 10:30 a.m.-12:00 p.m.
Marriott Marquis Washington DC, M3, Judiciary Square
In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies published its first articles, essays, translations, and teacher resources in August of 2015. In the intervening decade it has to a large degree achieved its founding goal, to become “a central address for the study of all things Yiddish.” A generation of students, culture producers, and emerging scholars of Yiddish have now come of age with In geveb as a place to publish, a place to keep abreast of current research around the world, a place to find new translations to teach and reviews of everything from the latest scholarly publications to new Yiddish music, theater, and film. This roundtable brings together a group of scholars who have all been involved with In geveb to reflect on what this “born digital” journal has contributed to Yiddish studies, and more broadly on the state of the field over the past decade. We will also ask what the next 10 years will hold for our field, and how spaces like In geveb can be ready to serve a changing scholarly and cultural landscape.
Zachary Baker, member of the board of directors, will present a librarian’s and bibliographer’s perspective on the impact of In geveb’s work, including resources like its annual lists of publications in the field. Jessica Kirzane, chief editor of In geveb since 2018, will discuss how the journal has grown and changed over time, with particular attention to new initiatives. Josh Lambert will share his experiences as co-editor of the peer review section, as well as his understanding of the impact of In geveb in the field of American Jewish Studies. Dalia Wolfson will discuss the translation section, the experience of connecting with emerging and established scholars as a graduate student, and the opportunities for building digital community. Sarah Ellen Zarrow will focus on her role in the founding group of editorial staff and coming back to the journal's staff as Peer Review editor after serving on the editorial board. The roundtable will be moderated by Madeleine Cohen, president of In geveb’s Board of Directors since 2019 and a former chief editor.
The Nuts and Bolts of Yiddish Studies Programs and Curricula in the United States Context
Tuesday, December 16, 1:30-3:00 p.m.
Marriott Marquis Washington DC, M3, LeDroit Park
Yiddish Studies occurs in many places and forms in universities in the United States, in courses taught alongside Germanic or Slavic languages, Jewish Studies, Comparative Literature, History, and Linguistics. It can be found in courses during the academic year, winter sessions and extracurricular programs, and is taught by graduate students, non-tenure track instructors, and not-yet tenured and tenured faculty, at large research universities and small liberal arts schools. Faculty organizing Yiddish Studies programs and courses often have obligations outside of strictly Yiddish Studies, and they are often called upon to organize Yiddish events as the sole representative of Yiddish, or as one of only a handful of individuals working in the field. This can lead to flexibility and creativity, but can also be quite isolating. In this conversation, individuals cultivating Yiddish Studies in the United States will discuss the challenges they face; describe the practicalities of their teaching, curriculum, and program development; and think together about how we can better communicate, collaborate, and support one another to make this work less isolating and enrich each of our own communities. Participants (Jessica Kirzane, Sunny Yudkoff, Elena Luchina, Samuel J. Spinner) will discuss the intellectual aims and priorities of their programs: depth of study versus accessibility; connecting teaching to research versus following student interests; the importance of building global student cohorts versus the pull of local scholarly communities and collaboration with other language-literature programs. This conversation builds on last year’s internationally-oriented conversation “What is a Yiddish Studies Field of Study?” to focus more locally on the United States context for Yiddish Studies.
Yiddish at the AJS Conference
Every event we’ve chosen to include involves Yiddish in a substantial way, whether it be through at least one presentation in a panel event, or the subject of a workshop. There are 45 such events. For panels, we’ve included the names of the presenters and their papers that have a focus on Yiddish. In the case of panels that have Yiddish as their overarching theme, we’ve also included the names of the chairs and respondents. For roundtables and seminars, we’ve included the names of all participants. To find more details about each event, click on its title.
If you notice that there’s anything wrong or missing, email us!
December 14
8:30-10:00 a.m.
Adapting an “Abandoned” Culture: Translation into Yiddish (Panel)
Sandra Chiritescu - Chair
Jules Riegel, Translating Beethoven: Yiddish Children’s Literature and the European Canon in Interwar Poland
Pamela Brenner, “Reading the Bible with Gentile Spectacles”: Current Trends in Yiddish New Testament Translations
Cameron Bernstein, “May this Find (Jew) in Good Health: Seventh-day Adventist Yiddish Evangelism through ‘Der familyen doktor”
Sean Sidky, “Dort iz itst nokh an oysmol; nor mit bloyz en tekst”: Yiddish Translation Today
A How-To Guide for Hasidic Materials in the Yiddish Language Classroom (Workshop)
Sara Feldman - Discussant
Joshua Price - Discussant
Beatrice Lang - Discussant
Crossing Borders: Jewish Mobility and Belonging in Modern Europe (Panel)
Oskar Czendze, “On Holiday, Jewish Tourism in Interwar East Central Europe”
Gender & Sexuality: Texts and Contexts (Panel)
Hannah Wickham, “Words to Cry Over: Reading Tkhines Through Affect and Hybridity”
10:30 a.m.-12:00 p.m.
Digital Yiddish and the Universal Yiddish Library (Workshop)
Amber Clooney - Discussant
Lyudmila Sholokhova - Discussant
Roni Cohen, “A Book of Spells, a Hymn, and a Love Song: Two Yiddish Songs in a Magic Anthology”
Eastern Europe in Modern History (Panel)
Christa Patricia Whitney, “Yidishe poyerim? Jewish Farmers in the Heart of Lithuania
Rivaka Schiller, “Yisker Bikher: Springboards for Uncovering Authentic Voices and Marginalized Stories”
“Heritage Words” in Contemporary Jewish Language Practices (Roundtable)
Evelyn Deran-Olmsted - Moderator
Sarah Bunin Benor - Discussant
Gabriella Modan - Discussant
Cynthia Gabbay - Discussant
Ronald Shabtaev - Discussant
Rereading Hebrew Literature (Panel)
Ido Telem, “Degrading Translation: Berdichevsky, Fogel, Hendel”
Antisemitism and the Arts of Resistance (Panel)
Marilyn Miller, “Antisemitism and Allyship: The Shunning of the St. Louis and Fernando Ortiz’s “Cuban Defense Against Antisemitic Racism””
The Gendered and Sexualized Body in Medieval and Early Modern Jewish Thought (Panel)
Emilie Amar-Zifkin, “Shrouds that Bind and Shrouds that Free: Gender Dynamics and the Garments of Death in Medieval Ashkenaz”
1:30-3:00 p.m.
Lebedike tekstn: Yiddish Texts in Action (Roundtable)
Barbara Mann - Moderator
Maya Gonzalez - Discussant
Hannah Wickham - Discussant
Caleb Sher - Discussant
Sophia Elizabeth Shoulson - Discussant
Modern Fictions of the Sephardi Past: Intersections of History and Fiction (Roundtable)
Dina Banon - Moderator
Marina Mayorsky - Discussant
Shai Zamir - Discussant
Michael Hoberman - Discussant
Aviva Ben-Ur - Discussant
Matthew Creighton - Moderator
Asher Biemann - Discussant
Yemima Hadad - Discussant
Jeffrey Grossman - Discussant
Abigail Gillman - Discussant
Dramatizing Jewish Experiences: A Creative/Critical Reading (Lightning Session)
Jonathan Goldberg, Crafting and Creating Jewish Content in Digital Media Storytelling
What Can Jewish Music Do for You?: Pedagogical Strategies for Integrating Music into Jewish Studies Courses (Roundtable)
Mark Kligman - Moderator
Rosa Abrahams - Discussant
Samantha Cooper - Discussant
Josh Dolgin - Discussant
Amanda Stein - Discussant
Karen Uslin - Discussant
December 15
8:30-10:00 a.m.
Beyond ‘Fiddler’: Developing Contemporary Jewish Musical Theatre (Performance/Scholarship)
Debra Caplan, “Paper Brigade: A new English-Yiddish Musical”
Galvanizing Jewish Pasts and Current Politics Through Embodied Performance (Panel)
Hannah Schwadron, ““You will be equal with all people”: Dancing Yiddish Women’s Songs in Hamburg’s Jewish Quarter”
Black-Jewish Relations: Against Facile Generalizations (Panel)
David Junger - Discussant
Gil Ribak - Discussant
H. Susanah Heschel - Discussant
Laura Auketayeva - Discussant
Archival Layers: Neither Poetry Nor History are Stable (Roundtable)
Maeera Shreiber - Moderator
Rachel Kaufman - Discussant
Miriam Schwartz - Discussant
Joshua Gottlieb-Miller - Discussant
Testimonies of the Shoah: Literary Practices from Positions of Spatial and Moral Peripheries (Panel)
Eva Hueckmann, “Yizker-Bikher Na Venad: Flight Survivors’ Testimonial Strategies”
10:30 a.m.-12:00 p.m.
Forms and Bodies (Panel)
Sunny Yudkoff, “The Gender of Joy in Fradl Shtok”
Ofer Idels, “Sterile Prose, Revolutionary Bodies: Modern Sports and the Emotions of the Hebrew Revival”
Ghosts of the Past in Poetry and Prose (Panel)
Karolina Koprowska, “Specters and Afterimages in the Poetry of Avrom Sutzkever”
Sara Kimble, “Ruptures and Continuities: The Jewish Community from Kulszyn in Paris”
1:30-3:00 p.m
Yiddish Cultures of Representation (Panel)
Sonia Gollance - Chair
Lila Fabro, “Sketching Estrangement in Samuel Rollansky’s Yiddish Miniatures”
Sophia Elizabeth Shoulson, “The Eldest Singer’s Readers: Women and their books in Der sheydim-tants (1936)”
Gil Ribak, “”The Same Coarse Features on Their Faces”: The gap between Moral and Esthetical Aspects in Yiddish Authors’ Portrayal of Black Characters
Culture Post-Holocaust (Panel)
Anna Rozenfeld, "Rebuilding in Yiddish: The Role of Language in the Rehabilitation of Jewish Children in Otwock After the War”
Aleksandra Gluba, “(Re)built on Ashes: Yiddish Culture in Poland after March 1968 Antisemitic Campaign in Poland”
New Perspectives in Canadian Jewish Music (Panel)
Miriam Borden, ““How Do We Share It with the Generations?”: Investigating Ruth Rubin’s Lecture-Recitals at Montreal’s Jewish Public Library”
Nathan Friedman, ““The Nationalists Wish We Didn’t Exist”: The Diasporist Songs of Geoff Berner”
Yiddish and the Holocaust (Panel)
Christin Zuehlke - Chair
David Roskies - Respondent
Sven-Erik Rose, “Shaye Shpigl’s Jesus and the Question of Ethical Behavior in the Ghettos”
Samuel Spinner, “Counter the Counter-Movement: Yiddish Literature and Holocaust Monuments”
Jewish Political Agency in Revolutionary and Civil War Ukraine, 1917-1921 (Panel)
Olga Petrova, ““A Peaceful Life on Our Own Land”: Poalei Zion and the Challenge(s) of Jewish Politics in Revolutionary Ukraine”
3:15-4:45 p.m.
Narratives of Jews, Money, and Modernity (Panel)
Caleb Sher, “Rooting Twentieth Century Yiddish Education: Abraham Golumb’s Seyfer tevye and the New Jewish Textual Tradition”
The Old Left in a New Light: Lessons for Today from the Yiddish Old Left (Roundtable)
Tony E. Michels - Moderator
Jennifer Young - Discussant
Elissa Sampson - Discussant
Lauren Strauss - Discussant
December 16
8:30-10:00 a.m.
Religious Tradition in Transformative Contexts (Panel)
Jeremiah Lockwood, “Hefker khazones: Abandonment and the Abandoned in Cantorial Culture”
Writing After the Holocaust (Panel)
Käthe Zarah Erichsen, “Artifacts Lost, Artifacts Found: Study of a Multilingual WWII Displaced Persons Childhood Song-Journal”
What Will Be Left? Childhood, Youth Culture, and Modern Jewish Visions of Progress (Roundtable)
Miriam Udel - Moderator
Miriam Borden - Discussant
Sandra Fox - Discussant
Tamara Gleason Freidberg - Discussant
Golan Moskowitz - Discussant
Julia Mickenberg - Discussant
Jews and Christians (Panel)
Carolyn Beard, “The Virgin Mary: Mary and Sexual Invective in the Jewish-Christian Encounter”
10:30 a.m.-12:00 p.m.
Yiddish Women Writers: In the Press, On Stage, and In Translation (Panel)
Edward Portnoy - Chair
Ayelet Brinn, “Translation and Hidden Female Labor in the American Yiddish Press”
Sonia Gollance, “Staging Yiddish Playwright Pauline Segal Kobrin in New York and London”
Jonah Lubin, “Puah Rakovsky’s Translation Work”
Dalia Wolfson, “Yente Serdatsky’s Backstage Writings: On Theater and Translation”
Popular Forms of Jewish Experience (Panel)
Aleksandra Guja, “Visualizing Jewishness in Yiddish Cartoons: Negotiating Self-Stereotype and Agency”
Uri Schreter, “Mickey Katz, Postwar Yiddishism, and the Vulgar Postvernacular”
Literature Out of Place (Panel)
Miriam Schwartz, ““This man was a pariah”: S.L. Blank, a Hebrew Writer in America”
Betzalel Strauss, “Yiddishland: Imagining Indigeneity in Palestine in Yiddish”
Jewish Languages: Sound and Silence (Panel)
Dalit Assouline, “Gender and Language Change in Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish in Israel”
Transforming Bodies (Panel)
Joanna Spyra, “Getting Sick to Fit In: Inclusion in Sickness in Jewish Argentina, 1920s-1950s”
1:30-3:00 p.m.
Mediation of Jewish Identity in Theatre and Song (Panel)
Ezekiel Levine, ““Remembering Imperfectly: Yiddish-American Folk Song, Technology, and the “Sonic Yiddish Imaginary””
Yizker Bikher in a Digital Age: The Question of Materiality (Panel)
Tahel Goldsmith - Chair
Jennifer Rich, “The Materiality and Intention of Original Yizker Bikher”
Emily Klein, “The Remediation of Yizker Bikher in Reprints and Digital Editions”
Robert Ehrenreich, “Form, Function, and Intention of Easy-Access Yizker Bikher”
Silence, Erasure, and Censorship in Eastern European Post-Holocaust Representation (Panel)
LeiAnna Hamel, ““My House Has Fallen”; Silence, Space, and Memory in Shifra Holodenko’s Holocaust Poems”
Adam Cohn, “Translating Ashkenazi Literature in Early Twentieth-Century Spain”
Florencia Strajilevich Knoll, presenting on the use of multilingualism in the French context, where Yiddish emerges as a vibrant ingredient of Ashkenazi postmemory literature in 21st-century France through the case of Ivan Jablonka. She will delve into translation as a factual-investigative and fictional-imaginary procedure that cuts across narrative frames.
