Blog

What is the role of men writ­ers in the devel­op­ment of Yid­dish lit­er­a­ture? For too long, men writ­ers have been neglect­ed by lit­er­ary crit­ics, schol­ars, and cul­tur­al institutions.

Mar 16, 2022

Ezekiel Lif­schutz’s diary from his time as YIVO chief archivist in the 1960s offers strik­ing evi­dence of the institute’s impor­tance in the wider Jew­ish world. In these pas­sages, we see the per­son­al­i­ties of three giants of mod­ern Jew­ish lit­er­a­ture — Yid­dish poet Abra­ham Sutzkev­er, Eng­lish nov­el­ist Saul Bel­low, and Hebrew writer Shai Agnon — and their rela­tion­ships to the Yid­dish language.

Mar 09, 2022

Arele Viswanath shares the chal­lenges and inno­va­tions of trans­lat­ing Har­ry Pot­ter into Yiddish.

Feb 16, 2022

Mama­li­ga’s debut album is an excit­ing, sub­tle, and intri­cate addi­tion to Boston’s klezmer offerings.

Feb 09, 2022

A roundup of trans­la­tions pub­lished in 2021. 

Jan 13, 2022

We’re (belat­ed­ly) tak­ing a win­ter pub­lish­ing break. There’s plen­ty to read while we’re away.

Dec 24, 2021

Yid­dish Chanukah Car­ols ris­es above the lev­el of spoof because of its com­mit­ted engage­ment with both the orig­i­nal and new mate­ri­als. Each track so that it set­tles com­fort­ably between Desser’s new Chanukah lyrics and the rec­og­niz­able Christ­mas original.

Dec 24, 2021

As Yid­dish and klezmer events moved online over the past two years, some Yid­dishists doubt­ed whether they could trans­late to a screen. But it is struc­tured spaces, not phys­i­cal encoun­ters, that facil­i­tate oppor­tu­ni­ties for con­nec­tion — which I and many oth­ers found a way to repli­cate online.

Dec 23, 2021

The pre­served pages of the guest book of Lublin’s renowned yeshi­va tell us about the remark­able range of cyclists, Esper­an­tists, local rab­bini­cal stu­dents, Catholic sem­i­nary stu­dents, Hasidic rab­bis, and Revi­sion­ist Zion­ists who all came to vis­it in the 1930s.

Dec 17, 2021

Ned Katz’s sen­si­tive new biog­ra­phy of Eve Adams high­g­lights the chal­lenges faced by LGBTQ peo­ple in ear­ly 20^th-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca and rais­es lin­ger­ing ques­tions about the role that Judaism and the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty played in Adams’ life. In response, Noam Sien­na asks some ques­tions that per­haps only Adams could answer.

Dec 13, 2021