Blog
Essays, interviews, listicles, podcasts, and much more, covering all aspects of Yiddish culture.
Blog
Race Uprooted: Foreign Observation, American Racism, and Yiddish Journalism through I.J. Singer’s 1932 “Harlem Cabaret”
In “What I.J. Singer Saw in the Black Cabarets in Harlem” (1932), Singer offers an intricate—and often highly unsettling and, at times, overtly racist—glimpse into how eastern European Jews imagined Black people and “Blackness” in America.
May 22, 2024
Blog
Reckoning with American Racism and Racist Violence, af Yiddish
In this updated version of our special issue on Race, af Yiddish, we offer a range of texts about local and international Yiddish representations of early twentieth century American racist violence.
Jun 25, 2021
Blog
“The Most Awful Scenes”: The Tulsa Massacre and Racist Violence in the Yiddish Press
Uri Schreter traces attitudes about race in the United States evident in Yiddish newspapers’ coverage of the Tulsa massacre — often simultaneously denouncing the violence and propagating racist ideas.
Jun 25, 2021
Blog
The Skotsboro Boys in Soviet Minsk
Andrew Sloin guides us through a Soviet Yiddish pamphlet about the Scottsboro trial in the United States to reveal how this incident “became a prism to refract the long history of racial and class domination in the United States and a rallying cry to cultivate the spirit of internationalist socialist solidarity among Soviet readers.”
Jun 25, 2021
Blog
Voices from Black Lives Matter Protests: קולות פֿון בלעק לײַװס מעטער פּראָטעסטן
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
Blog
The Yiddishist Vote: Responses to Trump
A round-up of responses to the election of Donald Trump by scholars of Yiddish.
Dec 22, 2016