Edited by Avraham Rosen and Jillian Davidson, this collection of essays in honor of David Roskies considers the resonances between Jewish speech and Jewish texts. Drawing upon sources stretching across the time and space of Jewish writing and speech, these essays consider how uttered sound makes itself heard within written Jewish texts.
Introduction: There’s a Jewish Way of Saying Things
Rosen introduces There’s a Jewish Way of Saying Things: Essays In Honor of David Roskies by reflecting on how Jewish speech—the spoken word, the vibrating resonance of uttered sound—finds its way back into text.
Jun 16, 2020
Torah and Talmud — the bedrock texts of Jewish tradition — model Jewish ways of speaking, while speaking with their own inimitable voice.
Translating As Saying
Can Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig’s translation of the Hebrew Bible be considered a form of Jewish speech? When and how does translation become a Jewish way of talking?
Jun 16, 2020
The Choir and the Orchestra: Two Kinds of Divine Praise
When read together, Psalms 148 and 150 instruct the reader to constantly shift between the universal and the particular, between praying for the welfare of the world and focusing on the people of Israel.
Jun 16, 2020
Talmud Talk and Jewish Talk
What are the parallels between “Jewish conversation” and Talmudic discourse? Is there something inherently Talmudic about Jewish speech?
Jun 16, 2020
Critical Discourse as a Jewish Thing and Its Beginnings in the Bible
The Biblical record provides a set of powerful models for critical discourse, creating narratives, laws, and prophetic modes that emphasize the practice of verbal critique.
Jun 16, 2020
Modern Yiddish literature often begins from the attempt to capture Jewish speech, confronting depths of emotional expression, the bonds of interfamilial communication, and the constraints and possibilities of tradition and innovation.
Der Alter Tevye Lebt!: Speech and Communication
Sholem Aleichem and Tevye depend on one another—for Wisse, their conversations form a miniature Jewish territory where together they reassert moral control.
Jun 23, 2020
Viva Voce: Vicissitudes of the Spoken Word in Hebrew Literature
Why does the Hebrew novel have a problem with speech? Alan Mintz on the non-dialogical and the monological in modern Hebrew literature.
Jun 23, 2020
Sholem Aleichem’s Stempenyu: Speaking through Song
How does one write about romance in Yiddish? Sholem Aleichem’s 1888 novel Stempenyu poses this question through an examination of the gendered limitations on Jewish literary love.
Jun 23, 2020
Raysn: The Belarusian Frontier of Yiddish Modernism
On the eve of World War I, poets Leyb Naydus, Moyshe Kulbak, and Elkhonen Vogler developed a sensitivity to nature in an attempt to reclaim the imaginary Jewish territories of Lite and Raysn.
Jun 23, 2020
Badkhones in Life and Cinema: A Reading of the Marshalik in the 1937 Dybbuk Film
The wedding bard of The Dybbuk is a paradoxical figure: a professional outsider who speaks into being the layered complexity of S. An-ski’s artistic project.
Jun 23, 2020
Hertz Grosbard’s Jewspeak: The Lost Art of Word Concerts
Hertz Grosbard’s “word concerts” were an embodiment of “Jewspeak,” performances that sought to give life to the Yiddish literary tradition.
Jun 23, 2020
Nit dos dorf, nit di kretshme: Speaking About Jewish Taverns in the Works of Sholem Aleichem
The tavern is a fixture of the shtetl universe—but it also exists on the margins, where, for Sholem Aleichem, you can also find the chaos of modernity.
Jun 23, 2020
How can one maintain “a Jewish way of saying things” in the face of disaster?
Orphaned Words: Yiddish, English, and Child Speech in Postwar Cinema
Is there a Jewish way of not saying things? In facing crises in language during the immediate post-Holocaust years, filmmakers in English and Yiddish made choices about how to balance repair and critique.
Jun 30, 2020
The Fourth Child
The author reflects on his own experiences encountering David Roskies in the 1960s and collaborating with him in Holocaust remembrance at a very different time than our present context for the memory and commemoration of the Holocaust.
Jun 30, 2020
Double or Nothing: Jewish Speech and Silence in Georges Perec’s *W ou le souvenir d’enfance”
This article considers the phantom traces of Yiddish in Georges Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance (1975).
Jun 30, 2020
Letters Without Addresses: Abraham Sutzkever’s Late Style
Abraham Sutzkever’s poetry is often read within the confines of “Holocaust literature”. This essays reads a selection of Sutzkever’s poetry against the Holocaust, against the apocalypse, and against the horizons of meaning that the label of “Holocaust literature” might impose.
Jun 30, 2020
Split Identity: Jewish Scholarship in the Vilna Ghetto
In this essay, David Fishman draws a comparison between yidishe visnshaft, or Jewish studies scholarship, and Judenforschung, the Nazi field of antisemitic Jewish studies used to justify the persecution and extermination of Jews in scientific terms.
Jun 30, 2020
Speaking Jewish can create a zone of identity that mastery of English threatens to efface. Anglo-Jewish writers both reflect and challenge this state of affairs — including devising a new slanted and multidirectional way of speaking.
Breaking Ground, Broken English: Abraham Cahan’s The Imported Bridegroom
Cahan’s characters speak in broken languages, and in so doing find themselves unable to find stable ground in America.
Jul 07, 2020
Cod Yiddish From Across the Pond: Howard Jacobson’s Finklerspeak
Howard Jacobson tests the limits and contours of a Jewish way of speaking, presenting an Anglo-Jewish dialogue with post-imperial culture.
Jul 07, 2020
Shylock’s Jewish Way of Speaking
What if Shylock spoke Yiddish? One experimental production of Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” did just that.
Jul 07, 2020