“Women”

I stumbled backwards into the topic of tkhines and almost accidentally ended up on a yearlong (or really, year-plus) study of Yiddish-language women’s prayers. It was only then, after I’d already submitted the paper and the art piece and the final reflection, that I decided it might be time to actually learn some of the language I’d been studying around for more than twelve months.

Feb 23, 2026

As Women on the Yiddish Stage makes clear, women were not peripheral figures but central players in the making of Yiddish cultural life. Their stories, whether told through archival fragments, recovered memoirs, or close readings of performance, call for a more inclusive and accurate understanding—one in which actresses are not merely remembered for their presence onstage, but recognized for their lasting cultural impact.

Jun 30, 2025

Jan 10, 2025

Through translation and creative writing - in the form of found poems - Dalia Wolfson explores the experiences of the women reciting tkhines in the Early Modern period.

Jul 12, 2024

Placing Glikl's writing alongside writings by other contemporary women in central Europe reveals what characterized their shared literary and cultural context.

Jul 12, 2024

These three wriers with lives unfolding in three different localities—Tsarist Russia, Poland, and the US—wrote plays that grapple with issues —such as the tragic fate of the agune (“chained wife”), motherhood, self-realization, sex work, financial independence, and reproductive autonomy— that unfortunately are still urgent a century later.

Jul 09, 2024

This is the first book-length collection of Gorshman’s work to be translated into English, with only a handful of stories elsewhere.

Feb 19, 2024

The women in A Provincial Newspaper and Other Stories are complex, multifaceted characters, and they do not uniformly fixate on love.

Feb 12, 2024

Yiddish Book Center fellows Charlotte Apter, Joseph Reisberg, and Caleb Sher, together with bibliographer David Mazower, unpacked a historic donation of the 500 or so titles that made up Norma Fain Pratt’s collection of women's writing in Yiddish.

Nov 12, 2023

The aim of this compendium is to make Yiddish originals for the stories in Found Treasures easily available and to preserve some of the materiality of the editor’s task of collecting these short stories.

Jun 19, 2023

An interview with a pioneering Yiddish feminist translator.

Jun 19, 2023

A lyrical essay on relationships between a translator and previous generations: Liba Augenfeld, a native Yiddish speaker who lived in Vilna before the Holocaust and could share linguistic and cultural knowledge she knew first hand, and the translator's own mother who had a conflicted relationship with Yiddish.

May 25, 2023

In this article Olive Benito-Myles and Naomi Piper-Pell reflect on their experience attending the conference "Di froyen" at the Yiddish Book Center.

Feb 09, 2023

Faith Jones’ analysis of the strategies used to suppress Yiddish women’s writing (based on Joanna Russ’s 1983 essay) help us understand the ways that Tea Arciszewska’s male contemporaries all too often belittled and dismissed her contributions.

Jun 02, 2022

Joanna Russ' 1983 schematic of strategies and dynamics that suppress women's writing — along with some additions specific to modern Yiddish culture — helps explain both the historical suppression of Yiddish women writers and more recent challenges to feminist scholarship on women's Yiddish writing. Faith Jones guides us to make the Yiddish future together, and to make our place in it.

May 31, 2022

Schachter calls us to think beyond the androcentric, to imagine and create an understanding of modern Jewish literature that places women at its center.

Feb 02, 2022

Murphy’s translations of Perl’s stories allow us to appreciate an ever more colorful canvas of modern Yiddish literature.

Feb 28, 2021

Oct 11, 2020

This cartoon was created as a final project for Justin Cammy’s 2019 course on Yiddish Literature and Culture at Smith College. 

Feb 28, 2020

Kremer reviews two new volumes dealing with Yiddish poetry, both published in Poland in 2018, which focus on the work of women poets. 

Nov 17, 2019

Oct 06, 2019

Eisenberg reviews Shtoltse Lider, a multimedia stage show, with songs in Yiddish and English, and explanations and evocations in Swedish, from Swedish duo Ida and Louise. 

Jun 25, 2019

Jun 24, 2019

Jun 13, 2019

An interview with Naomi Seidman, Chancellor Jackman Professor of the Humanities at the University of Toronto, and Basya Schechter, musician and founder of Pharoah’s Daughter, who are working on their compelling project called The Bais Yaakov project.

Jun 05, 2019

May 27, 2019

A short story from Leon Kobrin's 1903 collection Geto dramen.

May 30, 2018

Writing Yiddish poems and resisting assimilation in the Dallas Arbeter Ring 

Dec 13, 2017

Gollance reconsiders Fradel Shtok’s oeuvre and literary reception in the context of her translation of Shtok's short story “A tants” (A dance).

Dec 03, 2017

Weininger analyzes Anna Margolin's cycle of poems entitled "Mary," exploring her use of Christological themes and figures and the expression of identity and self-definition in the poems. 

May 18, 2017

Anna Elena Torres shares her reflections about, and syllabus for, the course "Gender and the Body in Yiddish Literature." 

Jun 02, 2016

Zackary Sholem Berger reflects upon the roundtable discussion at AJS last December that inspired this series, and on his own motivations as a translator from Yiddish and a writer in English and Yiddish. 

May 08, 2016

A new translation of a nineteenth century chapbook detailing the comic adventures of a woman named Bintshe and her mission to save a dilapidated bathhouse. 

May 05, 2016

The continued adventures of Miriam Karpilove's "Lonely Girl" in a new translation by Jessica Kirzane 

Jan 20, 2016

A young woman in New York struggles with the ideals of romantic love. 

Jan 11, 2016

How can we read Yiddish poetry across time to find a new common language? How can we create a space for the imagined dialogues of Kadia Molodowsky and Adrienne Rich with their foremothers, an alternative narrative of blood and text? 

Aug 11, 2015