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Was Yiddish literature of the early modern period an outlet for the voices of women, or did it participate in their suppression, like the iron tongue of the Rothenburg Schandmaske?

Iris Idelson-Shein is the Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the Martin Buber Professur für Jüdische Religionsphilosophie, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main.

Cecile E. Kuznitz is Associate Professor of History and Patricia Ross Weis ’52 Chair in Jewish History and Culture at Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY). She is the author of YIVO and The Making of Modern Jewish Culture: Scholarship for the Yiddish Nation (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

The “spatial turn” in the humanities has opened up new kinds of thinking about Jews’ relationship to place. Yet how can this approach—which focuses on the physically concrete—be applied to the field of Yiddish studies, which after all is defined by the intangible factor of language?