“feminism”

Blog

“We Collected Everything”: An Interview with Frieda Johles Forman

Julie Sharff

An interview with a pioneering Yiddish feminist translator.

Blog

Daughterhood

Helen Mintz

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.

Pedagogy

Di froyen”: Two Students’ Experiences

Naomi Piper-Pell and Olive Benito-Myles

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

Blog

How to Suppress Yiddish Women’s Writing

Faith Jones

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.

Blog

Discovering Di Froyen

Sarah Biskowitz

The fabled booklet Di Froyen Women and Yiddish: Tribute to the Past, Directions for the Future: Conference Proceedings, published in 1997, which records the Di froyen conference held October 28-29, 1995, reminds us of the conference’s legacy as a turning point for women in Yiddish. More than that, it underscores participants’ visionary goals and uphill work to achieve them. It also raises questions of gender, language, and power that continue to animate contemporary feminist Yiddishist debates.

Review

Review of Women Writing Jewish Modernity by Allison Schachter

Jessica Kirzane

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

Blog

The 2087th Question or When Silence Is the Only Answer

Irena Klepfisz

What kind of life will there be after the Resurrection of the Dead? 

I may not believe in an afterlife or in resurrections, but I do believe that cultures can be reawakened and revived in new generations. 

Blog

Feminist Dybbuks in Melbourne: Possession, Desire and Voice

Nicola Menser Hearn

In August 2018, Australian theatre maker and director Samara Hersch, along with Chamber Made, a company operating at the ‘nexus of contemporary performance, music and sound’, presented Dybbuks – a production in three acts exploring ideas of possession; of women being with the dead; of desire, ritual, and voice. Here, Nicola Menser Hearn reviews the production and discusses it with Hersch.


Blog

Behind the Scenes: Vaybertaytsh’s “Farvos” Series and the Making of “Mameloshn Academy?”

Sandra Fox

On making community and a Yiddish feminist podcast, or: where the academy ends and the self begins.