Blog

Bilingual reflections compiled by Zackary Sholem Berger and authored by Berger, Sara Feldman, and Anthony Russell, Jewish activists who took part in recent Black Lives Matter protests.

Jun 19, 2020

Meyer Weinshel and Asya Vaisman Schulman speak about developing Vaisman Schulman’s new Yiddish textbook, In eynem, coming from the Yiddish Book Center this summer.

Jun 16, 2020

Marina Mayorski talks with Sarah Bunin Benor about her work recording, preserving, and teaching about Jewish languages.

Jun 12, 2020

Heskes explores the contents of a slim, blue-leathered notebook he found in his parents’ garage. The notebook belonged to his grandmother’s mother, the Yiddish writer Dora Schulner.

May 28, 2020

Moyshe Klaynman’s remarkable 1943 manuscript relates his ten-month imprisonment at the Treblinka II extermination camp, his escape during the August 2, 1943 prisoner revolt, and much more. There is only one other known survivor source written so early, and there are no other known Treblinka survivor memoirs available only in the original Yiddish.

May 22, 2020

We are seeking submissions for a special issue on Yiddish popular theater.

May 18, 2020

Yiddish poet and translator Yehoash lived at the famous Hotel Klibitsky in Rehovot for almost four months in 1914; the hotel featured frequently in his published travelogue. This note in the hotel’s guestbook, now in the city archive, marks his stay.

May 15, 2020

The Jewish Labor Bund was a major force in Russian Jewish life, expanding the political arena to be more democratic in nature and driving the creation of a new political and economic discourse in Yiddish. So I was shocked to learn that in 1910, the Bund had a mere 609 members—down from approximately 35,000 five years earlier. The speed with which the Bund and other Jewish political parties in the Russian Empire could rise, fall, and rise again reflects the pressures the community was under, resulting in both sober caution and daring, desperate dreams.

May 06, 2020

An annotated bibliography of Yiddish Studies scholarship published in Russia between 2014 and 2019.

May 05, 2020

Rachelle Grossman digs up a revealing clerical mix-up in the distribution of Shmuel Rollansky’s 100-volume Musterverk series — a moment both funny and tragic at the end of the series’ long run.

Apr 17, 2020