Apr 15, 2026
INTRODUCTION
As we celebrate the tenth anniversary of In geveb, we are also excited to celebrate ten years of the peer-review section, which has, rather remarkably, published ten special issues and over sixty articles, with more on the way. This section of the journal is also responsible for reviews of recent academic books, and it has published over one hundred such reviews, spanning the full range of Yiddish studies, including history, literary studies, linguistics, religious studies, musicology, anthropology, and beyond. The inaugural peer-reviewed articles—oneby Chana Kronfeld and Robert Adler Peckerar and the other by Elazar Elhanan—provided revelatory readings of the interplay of Yiddish and Hebrew in modernist poetry, and subsequent articles have addressed topics ranging from an Old Yiddish translation of a Protestant hymn to I. L. Peretz as a “social protest writer” to the Yiddish theater in Buenos Aires to contemporary Yiddish-language film. Notably, the peer-review section has published original scholarship not only by senior or established scholars but also by junior scholars, graduate students, and independent scholars. We are proud that we have published many scholars’ first articles or their first article written in English.
While In geveb as a whole has become a major platform for scholarship in Yiddish studies—and to be sure, numerous blog posts, translations, and pedagogy pieces have constituted important and research-based contributions to the field—peer-reviewed articles and special issues, by and large, tend to be longer and require a more intensive editorial process. The section would not have been as successful as it’s been without the bold and foundational work of Sunny Yudkoff, Saul Noam Zaritt, and Mindl Cohen. Subsequent editors and editorial associates have built on this foundation: Jessica Kirzane, Sandy Fox, LeiAnna Hamel, Josh Lambert, Elena Hoffenberg, Aya Elyada, Tamar Aizenberg, Sarah Zarrow, and Shachar Pinsker. Their work has been further buttressed by the time and labor of numerous anonymous peer reviewers, as well as by the work of copy editors and several others behind the scenes.
As a new, online journal, In geveb had a daunting task as it worked to establish the rigor and reputation of its peer-review section. In a reflective piece that will be published alongside this one, Saul Zaritt notes that he “often found [himself] plagued by the problem of the detail.” He recounts the challenge of getting “the details absolutely right” while also not losing sight of “the larger arc of an article’s argument” or of “the question that still animates the journal: What does this article have to say about Yiddish studies and its adjacent fields?” Even if we have not always gotten this balance right, it is, we believe, safe to say that the peer-reviewed articles and special issues that In geveb has published in the last decade have expanded the scope of Yiddish studies and, in turn, have made Yiddish studies more accessible to other fields and to a broader readership. The section has, we hope, lived up to the goal articulated by Sunny Yudkoff when she introduced the section a decade ago—namely, “to establish this digital platform as a meeting point for all those whose work falls along the broad spectrum of Yiddish Studies, including those who self-identify as Yiddishists and those who boast no such affiliation.”
Being an online journal also has certain affordances, not least the ability to incorporate visual (and sometimes audiovisual) features—something that Elena Hoffenberg and Jessica Kirzane highlight in their reflections below. Many peer-reviewed articles also include quotations in Yiddish (in the Yiddish alphabet) alongside translations into English, which sets us apart from most other journals in the English-speaking world. In geveb’s articles further exist in a rich ecosystem and are sometimes published alongside academic essays, translations, blog posts, or teaching guides. Sarah Zarrow’s reflection below calls attention to this ecosystem and points to the important scholarly contributions made alongside the peer-review section. In geveb has become, moreover, a central platform for the dissemination of scholarly resources. For example, Isaac Bleaman’s “Guidelines for Yiddish in Bibliographies: A Supplement to YIVO Transliteration,” which was published in the pedagogy section of the website, is an invaluable resource for any scholar—or, indeed, anyone—who wants to cite Yiddish-language sources in their writing.
To celebrate the tenth anniversary of the peer-review section, we asked a few current and former editors and editorial associates to choose an article that struck them as particularly significant or memorable and to write a brief account of it—their selections are presented below. Saul Zaritt has also written a longer reflection on the “stunning questions” embedded in an article by Alan Mintz—a reflection that we are publishing separately but simultaneously with this piece. We hope readers will revisit not only the articles spotlighted here but all of the remarkable articles and special issues that the peer-review section has published so far. (A full list can be found here.) We also encourage scholars—junior and senior, based in the United States or elsewhere—to submit (or continue submitting) work for us to consider!
—Matthew Johnson, Peer-Review Editorial Team, In geveb
Sunny Yudkoff
“Women Wrote: Glikl in Context” does something that many great articles do: It deflates and delights. “Women wrote,” Rachel L. Greenblatt emphatically declares. We should know this by now! In every era and every genre! Greenblatt teaches us here that both the form and content of Glikl’s seven little books echo the wider literary practices and interests of other women writing in Yiddish in her time. Glikl’s work is in dialogue with the ethical wills of her peers, and it interweaves biblical narratives toward similarly instructive ends. Yet still, Glikl’s work dazzles—in length, scope, and rhetorical texture. It seems impossible to be a student of Yiddish and not be enamored by Glikl. But her greatness is brought into greatest relief, as Greenblatt asserts, when we read “Glikl in context.”
Josh Lambert
I remember first hearing the pseudonym of the critic Shmuel Charney at some point in the very first class I took on Yiddish literature, back in college in the late 1990s. Even with the casual and structural racism that had been accepted in the communities I grew up in, this struck me as bizarre. How, on earth, I thought, could this word—which certainly looks and sounds a whole lot like the most hateful American anti-Black epithet—be the chosen name of a Yiddish essayist? I never got an answer, really, until Eli Bromberg’s article “We Need to Talk About Shmuel Charney” appeared in In geveb in October 2019. By that point, I had already learned a lot from Bromberg, whose dissertation committee I served on, about the racism informing lots of Jewish studies scholarship, but the article on Charney—who, not incidentally, was Bromberg’s great-great-uncle—struck me as a powerful model of how to bring rigor and thoughtfulness to an interrogation of previous generations’ scholarly patterns, habits, and arguments.
Elena Hoffenberg
In “Holocaust Literature and Autorevision: Shaye Shpigl’s Ghetto Stories Written In, and Rewritten After, the Lodz Ghetto,” Sven-Erik Rose traces a process of “autorevision” that offers something valuable to Yiddish studies just as it demonstrates what Yiddish studies can contribute to other fields. This article complicates existing understandings – of Holocaust literature, Holocaust literature in translation, and Holocaust literature in Yiddish—largely based on the model of Elie Wiesel’s Un di velt hot geshvign (later revised and translated as La nuit and Night)—all without sacrificing the importance of Yiddish. Rose’s close study of these writings before and after the Holocaust reminds those of us working in Yiddish studies that considering translation can be relevant even when the language of composition remains the same, emphasizing through the example of Shpigl’s autorevision “how profoundly different contexts inflect what has been sayable about the Holocaust even where the contexts and audiences involved remain Yiddish and thus, needless to say, thoroughly Jewish.” Rather than reinforcing Shpigl’s exceptional position to justify the focus on a single author, Rose also generously gestures towards other paths forward for research by placing Shpigl alongside other writers like Leyb Roykhman and Avrom Sutzkever, whose own revisions of material written during the Holocaust but published afterwards merit further examination.
This was one of the articles I worked on as a peer-review editorial associate. Although this article had already gone through revisions and editing before it landed in my inbox to prepare for publication, the task remained to identify images to accompany the digital publication, as is often the case with In geveb articles. This gave me an opportunity to step into the archive, so to speak, and follow Rose’s research path in tracking down visually interesting elements of the sources cited. Although the focus in the article lies more on the content of Shpigl’s ghetto writings than their materiality, seeing a reproduction of a manuscript page from a postwar publication gave me—and I hope readers of the online version of the article—a glimpse into Rose’s methods and Shpigl’s own process.
Sarah Zarrow
Jennifer Young’s “Beyond the Color Line: Jews, Blacks, and the American Racial Imagination” is the academic essay I come back to most frequently. Although not a peer-reviewed article, this essay was part of the 2016 “Race in America” series, which included peer-reviewed articles, essays, and translations (in 2021 we updated the series with a second installment of essays and translations in partnership with YIVO). Young’s essay articulates how Jews worked through ideas about race—and their own place in America’s racial system—in Yiddish. Writing about W. E. B. Du Bois, she notes, “Since Du Bois reconceived the color line’s boundaries, he now saw racism and oppression as relational principles, rather than fixed social categories.” I have found that this essay helps my students think through their own often-entrenched thinking about race and about where Ashkenazi Jews fit into racial categories. Much like Joshua Meyers’s essay “The Bund by the Numbers: The Ebbs and Flows of a Jewish Radical Party” (May 6, 2020), which I also assign, Young’s essay directly addresses something on students’ minds—race and leftism—but doesn’t deliver precisely what they think they’re going to get.
Jessica Kirzane
One piece I found particularly memorable was Jeremiah Lockwood’s “Prayer and Crime: Cantor Elias Zaludkovsky’s Concert Performance Season in 1924 Poland,” which adeptly accomplishes the delicate task of explaining the nuances of an individual’s position of principled ambivalence and negotiation within shifting cultural terrain. Lockwood closely reads the details of an apparently narrow subject—Cantor Elias Zaludkovsy’s 1924 concert performance season—and extrapolates outward to illuminate some of the most pressing issues of interwar Polish Jewish culture, such as the dynamic relationship between religious traditions and modern European influences, negotiations between popular audiences and high culture, and the changes brought about by new technologies and media. Without losing sight of the details on which he builds his argument, Lockwood addresses questions that have much broader relevance within the field of Yiddish studies and beyond.
Another piece I’d like to highlight here is Rebecca Margolis’s “New Yiddish Film and the Transvernacular,” which was an early opportunity for us to explore the possibilities of our born-digital journal. Margolis’s analysis of “transvernacular” language use in film—how recent films rely on fluently spoken Yiddish derived from translations of English or Hebrew scripts, to various ends—is supported by evidence in the form of embedded YouTube film clips that serve to clarify the argument and also to allow readers to draw their own conclusions by interacting with the evidence themselves.
Matthew Johnson
Melissa Weininger’s “A Poetic Paradox: Gender and Self in Anna Margolin’s Mary Cycle” offers an incisive reading of one of the most complex and rewarding but still understudied figures of Yiddish modernism: Anna Margolin. By comparing Margolin’s representation of Mary in her book Lider (1929) with the evocation of the figure of Jesus by (predominantly male) Yiddish poets of the same period—and, in turn, by juxtaposing the inflated role of the poetic “I” in the work of those male poets, notably the introspectivists, with Margolin’s poetic “I,” which is “often hidden or absent”—Weininger demonstrates how Margolin’s work embodies “a modernist Yiddish poetics that subtly undermines the dominant masculine poetic norms of the time.” While Weininger’s article stands on its own, it also speaks to the rich corpus of scholarship on Yiddish poetry, ranging from the early modern period to the present, that In geveb has published in the last decade. In addition to other peer-reviewed articles, a reader inspired by Weininger’s piece might also click over to a special issue published in the translation section of In geveb on “Gendered Literary Debates in Yiddish,” where one can find a range of sources, translated by Faith Jones, Anita Norich, and David Mazower, that expand and complicate the kinds of questions that Weininger’s article raises.
