Shachar Pinsker is a scholar, editor, and translator of Jewish literature, and a professor of Judaic Studies and Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of the award-winning Literary Passports: The Making of Modernist Hebrew Fiction in Europe (Stanford University Press, 2011), and A Rich Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture (NYU Press, 2018), and the editor of three books, including Where the Sky and the Sea Meet: Israeli Yiddish Stories (Magnes Press, 2023). He is the co-director of The Feuilleton Project. He was a long-term Fordham-New York Public Library fellow (2023-2024), and a translation fellow at the Yiddish Book Center (2024-2025), where he co-translated with Yael Chaver the novel Jebeliya by Yitzchok Perlov. in 2025-2026, he serves as the co-head fellow of the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, where the annual theme is Jews and Media. He is an editor of the peer review section of In geveb.
CONTRIBUTOR
Shachar Pinsker
University of Michigan
RELATED ARTICLES
Review
The Vanguard of Their Peoples: Reflections following Gali Drucker Bar-Am, I Am Your Dust: Representations of the Israeli Experience in Yiddish Prose, 1948-1967, translated by Natalie Melzer
Shachar Pinsker
We are discovering that the story of Yiddish in Palestine/Israel is vast, complex, and utterly fascinating, and it’s being written not (yet) by a novelist or filmmaker, but by a group of scholars, librarians, archivists, and translators who stitch the narrative together like a patchwork. Gali Drucker Bar-Am’s book—published in Hebrew in 2021 and in English translation in 2024—adds an important chapter to the story.
Jun 26, 2025
Texts & Translation
פֿאַרגעס נישט
Don’t Forget
Avrom Karpinovitsh
Translation by Shachar Pinsker
Shachar Pinsker translates a harrowing story of a Jewish Holocaust survivor and Palmach soldier’s confrontation with a Palestinian Arab.
Nov 05, 2023
Pedagogy
Resources for Teaching about Israel/Palestine
Jessica Kirzane and Shachar Pinsker
As the war in Israel/Palestine continues to unfold, we aim to support our readers, many of whom are teachers and students of Yiddish, as they look for ways to learn about and discuss these events in mame-loshn.
Oct 25, 2023
Review
Review of Seeds in the Desert by Mendel Mann, translated and with an introduction by Heather Valencia
Shachar Pinsker
These stories take place in Israeli cities, towns, and villages, in the post-war Soviet Union, and in Poland of the interwar period. However, it is often very difficult to tell where the stories actually take place, because they express an experience of dislocation and total disorientation.
May 20, 2020
Review
Translingualism Today: A Review of Naomi Brenner’s Lingering Bilingualism
Shachar Pinsker and Yaakov Herskovitz
Naomi Brenner’s new book complicates the story of the Hebrew-Yiddish “language wars” and argues that Jewish translingualism continues well into the 20th century.
Sep 18, 2016
Blog
How to Build Bridges to People? Benjamin Harshav and Yiddish
Shachar Pinsker
An essay on the late Benjamin Harshav, one of the most important literary scholars of the last decades, and how in his work Yiddish served as a bridge between Europe, Israel, and North America, between poetry, translation, and scholarship.
Aug 26, 2015