Some Reflections from an American Jewish Studies Vantage Point

In my remarks at our roundtable at the Association for Jewish Studies conference this December, titled “Yiddish Studies in the Digital Age: Reflecting on 10 Years of In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies,” I spoke from my vantage point as a researcher in Jewish Studies and American literary studies, and as a former editor of the peer review section of the journal. I focused on some examples of excellent U.S.-focused scholarship on the site, with a little attention to the contributions of In geveb in terms of open access, relatively quick turnarounds, and the centering of junior scholars' work. 

So! There’s some great American Jewish Studies scholarship on In geveb. The first piece I ever read on the site, I think, was David Roskies’s review of Avraham Novershtern’s Kan gar ha’am hayehudi, his massive history of American Yiddish literature, back in 2015 (maybe the third day the site was public?). Right away this review made In geveb stand out as a place that could connect American scholars to work in other places and languages and decenter our sometimes parochial scholarship.

In geveb has remained one of the best places for long, substantial reviews of American Jewish literary scholarship, sometimes even when those books have only a chapter or two with anything to say about Yiddish (like, say, Ben Schreier’s The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature). This extends the conversation in Yiddish Studies beyond scholarship that falls strictly within the bounds of the field, and it also pushes other fields to take Yiddish into consideration.

Many of the translations are extraordinary texts drawn from American Yiddish literature, like I. J. Singer’s reportage on Harlem, or a translation of Katle Kanye’s polemic about secular education in contemporary Hasidic schools, or excerpts from a 1936 anthology, published in Moscow, containing Yiddish translations of African American women’s poetry. For scholars of American Jewish literature or history who can’t read Yiddish, having access to these materials can expand the scope of research and teaching. These texts defy boundaries we sometimes see in how the subject of Yiddish is taught and approached in American Jewish literary studies: in these translations, Yiddish writing isn’t only about Jews, and it isn’t only a thing of the past.

And, in terms of peer-reviewed articles, the site has a smaller number (not insubstantial over its ten years, but small compared to the number of translations, reviews, and blog posts), among which have appeared some extremely important works. Eli Bromberg’s “We Need to Talk About Shmuel Charney” (2019) models the application of American antiracist approaches in Yiddish Studies, and Rachel Rubinstein’s “The Yiddish Columbus” (2022), as Rubinstein puts it, presents “a new geography for American Jewish literature that exceeds the boundaries of what we understand the Americas and Jewishness to be.”  

In part, there’s a lot of American Jewish Studies scholarship on In geveb because the U.S. is both the site of a lot of important Yiddish activity, both historically and contemporarily, and a center (maybe the center?) of Yiddish Studies scholarship, at least during the couple of decades I’ve been active as a scholar. It’s also the place where In geveb was founded, and although its contributors, editorial board, and editors are international, the majority of them are based in the U.S.

But much of this work is also the result of a powerful development in scholarly standards and institutional development that characterizes my generation of American Jewish Studies scholars. In short (and generalizing about it a bit more than I’m comfortable), whereas in the previous two generations of scholars, learning Yiddish, or already knowing it, was a valuable credential and skill for historians and literary scholars interested in American Jewish topics, it was hardly assumed that such scholars would have Yiddish language skills, or that their projects would cite Yiddish sources. I don’t want to call out specific scholars or canonical works that cite zero Yiddish sources or make mistakes about basic Yiddish grammar in quotations—that feels mean-spirited—but my feeling is that it’s pretty easy to find examples among the most important works of American Jewish literary studies and history published in the 1980s and 1990s. There are certainly some counterexamples in my own generation, and among the graduate students and junior scholars rising in the field, but my sense is that on the whole, it feels like just about any graduate student working on American Jewish literature or history in recent years has at least taken a course or two in Yiddish language, and has thus been drawn into the orbit of In geveb. 

In addition to the warm sociality that In geveb cultivates, there are a couple of other reasons that so many junior scholars easily find their way to it. One is that it’s an open-access journal, which doesn’t require a library subscription to access. This makes it attractive as a place where scholars can share their work with an audience that reaches beyond the academy, and with those peripatetic scholars who may not always have library privileges. Another is that in emphasizing online publication, it moves quicker than many comparable peer-reviewed journals, which is especially important for junior scholars who need publications to show to hiring or tenure committees. And finally, junior scholars, from all subfields, are drawn to In geveb because its chief editor Jessica Kirzane, alongside the rest of the editorship, has always in my experience been remarkably and admirably committed to emphasizing their voices in reviews, in articles, and on the staff. The result has been a journal that is less invested in perpetuating hierarchies within the academy, and more committed to research and criticism, for their own sakes. In all these ways, In geveb has been a model of what a journal can be.