Rebecca (Rivke) Margolis is Professor and Pratt Foundation Chair of Jewish Civilisation at the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation at Monash University. Her research focuses on Yiddish transmission and culture and she is the author of four books: Jewish Roots, Canadian Soil: Yiddish Culture in Montreal, 1905-1945 [mqup.ca], Basic Yiddish: A Survey and a Grammar [routledge.com], Yiddish Lives On: Strategies of Language Transmission [mqup.ca], and The Yiddish Supernatural on Screen: Dybbuks, Demons and Haunted Jewish Pasts [rowman.com]. As part of her ongoing research on fiction film and television with Yiddish dialogue, she is currently working on a study called Laughter Through Yiddish: Language and Humor on Screen. Her research on that subject recently appeared in “Oy with the Poodles Already!': Yiddishisms and Non-Jewish Characters on American Sitcoms" [brill.com] and in a short article in AJS Perspectives [associationforjewishstudies.org] (p. 46-47). As part of her research on Yiddish in Australia, she recently published "Shabbes in Ek Velt: Yiddish Rap Music in Melbourne. [aajs.org.au]”
CONTRIBUTOR
Rebecca Margolis
Monash University
RELATED ARTICLES
Review
Reflections on A Taytsh Manifesto
Rebecca Margolis
A Taytsh Manifesto offers fresh analysis of the translational underpinnings of Yiddish across diverse cultural contexts. However, I question the utility of proposing “taytsh” as a paradigm shift for a field—and wider Jewish world—that finds itself in a state of profound upheaval.
Jan 08, 2025
Pedagogy
The Sung, Spoken and Written Yiddish Word: Student Projects from the 2024 Steiner Summer Yiddish Program’s Intermediate Class
Rebecca Margolis
Students represent their voices, viewpoints and Yiddishes, through their final projects.
Aug 27, 2024
Review
Review of Jonah Corne and Monika Vrečar’s Yiddish Cinema: The Drama of Troubled Communication
Rebecca Margolis
Yiddish Cinema: The Drama of Troubled Communication suggests innovative and fruitful ways that scholarship in media studies can be applied to Yiddish cinema.
Apr 25, 2024
Pedagogy
Yiddish Learning by New Learners: Two Zines and Two Games Student Projects from the Steiner Program’s Intermediate Class
Rebecca Margolis
Examples of project-based learning in the intermediate Yiddish classroom, from the fabulous students of Rivke Margolis’s Intermediate Yiddish Class at the Steiner Program of the Yiddish Book Center, summer 2023.
Dec 12, 2023
Interview
An Interview with Simon Starr of YID! on their new album, ZETS!
Rebecca Margolis
ZETS! is the second album of the Melbourne-based band, YID!
Dec 14, 2022
Pedagogy
Yiddish Film Activities for the Language Classroom: Teaching with Mamele
Rebecca Margolis
Using a short scene from the 1938 film Mamele (dir. Joseph Green, Konrad Tom), Rebecca Margolis demonstrates how short excerpts of Yiddish films can be used to address specific aspects of Yiddish dialect, grammar and idiom, and translation in the Yiddish language classroom.
Sep 24, 2018
Article
New Yiddish Film and the Transvernacular
Rebecca Margolis
The study of Yiddish cinema gets updated for the twenty-first century, Margolis explores how the language is being used in film in the last decade.
Dec 18, 2016