“peer-review”
Article
“An altogether unusual love and understanding”: The Shomer Sisters and the Gender Politics of Shund Theatre
Sonia Gollance
Examining Rose Shomer Bachelis and Miriam Shomer Zunser in the context of their famous shund-writing family, this article argues that their operetta "Der liebes tants" -- a love triangle with an Apache dance motif -- should be read against the grain to emphasize the importance of sisterhood.
Apr 21, 2023
Article
'Di Yidn Kumen!': Israeli and Multicultural Identities in Israeli Yiddish Light Entertainment Shows
Roni Cohen and Olga Levitan
Article
My Mom Drank Ink: The “Little Negro” and the Performance of Race in Yente Telebende’s Stage Productions
Gil Ribak
Article
Kol Nidre and the Making of the Jewish Theatre Audience
Ruthie Abeliovich
Focusing on Abraham M. Sharkansky’s 1896 play Kol nidre, oder di geheyme yidn in madrid (Kol Nidre, or the Secret Jews of Madrid), this article examines how, on both sides of the Atlantic, the Kol Nidre prayer performed in the Yiddish theatre reflected profound modern and migratory cultural transgressions, between categories such as high and low, religion and entertainment, the holy and the theatrical.
Apr 21, 2023
Article
Holocaust Literature and Autorevision: Shaye Shpigl’s Ghetto Stories Written in, and Rewritten after, the Lodz Ghetto
Sven-Erik Rose
Article
The Yiddish Columbus: Critical Counter-History and the Remapping of American Jewish Literature
Rachel Rubinstein
Glantz’s masterwork Kristobal Kolon offers a transnational vision of the Americas that insists—in Yiddish—on its Jewish, Muslim, indigenous and African origins, suggesting a new geography for American Jewish literature that exceeds the boundaries of what we understand the Americas and Jewishness to be, and challenging our expectations of what Yiddish literature can contain.
Nov 09, 2022
Article
‘Brother Jews of the Entire World!’ Bergelson, Hofshteyn, and Soviet-Yiddish in the Worldwide Jewish Family
Brett Winestock
Article
A Yiddish Newspaper at War with Yiddish: Abraham Cahan and the 1931 Language Debate in the New York Forverts
Gennady Estraikh
Article
Prayer and Crime: Cantor Elias Zaludkovsky’s Concert Performance Season in 1924 Poland
Jeremiah Lockwood
In his concert career Zaludkovsky walked a fine line between performing the sacred identity of cantor and falling into the forms of cultural crime that he himself had identified as corrupting tradition through excessive commercialization and mediatization of sacred music.
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May 23, 2022
Article
Reading as the Shaping Force of Life: Debora Vogel’s Contributions to Education
Anna Maja Misiak
Translation by Matthew Johnson
The writer and educator Debora Vogel contended with questions raised by avant-garde art in the 1920s and 1930s and, throughout her writings, repeated the following question as a leitmotiv: What does “life” mean and which forms does it assume? This article considers how Vogel engaged with these questions about form in various essays and in her educational work at the Jewish orphanage at Zborowska 8 in Lwów.
Oct 26, 2021
Article
The Goldenberg Variations: The International “Star System” and the Yiddish Theater of Buenos Aires in 1930
Zachary M. Baker
Article
The Image of Streetwalkers in Itzik Manger’s and Debora Vogel’s Ballads
Ekaterina Kuznetsova and Anastasiya Lyubas
Article
Double or Nothing: Jewish Speech and Silence in Georges Perec’s *W ou le souvenir d’enfance"
Marc Caplan
Article
Nit dos dorf, nit di kretshme: Speaking About Jewish Taverns in the Works of Sholem Aleichem
Adi Mahalel
Article
Sholem Aleichem's Stempenyu: Speaking through Song
Avraham Novershtern
Translation by Avi Steinhart
Article
Badkhones in Life and Cinema: A Reading of the Marshalik in the 1937 Dybbuk Film
Joel Rosenberg
Article
The Anarchist Sage/Der Goen Anarkhist: Rabbi Yankev-Meir Zalkind and Religious Genealogies of Anarchism
Anna Elena Torres
Article
Yokhed ve-tsiber: Individual Expression and Communal Responsibility in a Yiddish Droshe by Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik
Ariel Evan Mayse
Scholarship on Soloveitchik’s teachings has tended to focus exclusively on his Hebrew or English works rather than his Yiddish writings, but the present essay traces Soloveitchik’s style and exploring the nuances of intellectual legacy through the lens of an important Yiddish homily, a little-studied but critical essay called “Yokhed ve-tsiber” (“The Individual and the Collective”), an undated work was first delivered as a droshe (sermon) on his father’s yortsayt.
Feb 11, 2019
Article
A Linguistic Bridge Between Alienation and Intimacy: Chabad’s Theorization of Yiddish in Historical and Cultural Perspective
Eli Rubin
Article
A Narrow Path: Language and Longing for a Holy Place that is Lost
Aviv Luban
For the nascent Polish Braslev Hasidic movement, the events of 1917 and their aftermath severed the group from its Holy Place: the grave of Reb Nakhmen in what is now Uman, Ukraine. This geopolitical reality elicited a unique literary and spiritual response in the form of an impassioned prayer, penned by Reb Yitskhok Brayter (c. 1886-1942), a leader of that community.
Jan 27, 2019
Article
Man, Woman, and Serpent: Kabbalah and High Modernity in the Early Writings of Aaron Zeitlin
Nathan Wolski
Article
The Shtik Kabole Niger Couldn’t Digest: Poetry, Messianism, and Literatoyre in Aaron Zeitlin’s Keter
Nathan Wolski
Article
Traveling and Traversing Chabad’s Literary Paths: From Likutei torah to Khayim gravitser and Beyond
Eli Rubin
This paper aims to complicate the neat chronology that bifurcates modern Jewish literature from its Hasidic roots, using Fishl Schneersohn's novel Khayim Gravitser and Avraham Shlonsky's Hebrew translation of the novel to demonstrate that these authors continued the Hasidic literary tradition of Chabad even as they embraced alternative literary forms in the cause of new aesthetic agendas.
Oct 09, 2018
Article
'Before the bow that was drawn': The Vilna Komitet and its documentation of the destruction of Polish Jewry, 1939–1940/41
Miriam Schulz
Translation by Joshua Price and Miriam Schulz
A translation of the introduction of Miriam Schulz's recent book, Der Beginn des Untergangs: Die Zerstörung der jüdischen Gemeinden in Polen und das Vermächtnis des Wilnaer Komitees ("Before the bow that was drawn": The Vilna Komitet and its documentation of the destruction of Polish Jewry).
May 14, 2018
Review
Yiddish Mass Culture in History and Practice: Eddy Portnoy's Bad Rabbi: And Other Strange But True Stories of the Yiddish Press
Ayelet Brinn
Article
Translation, Cosmopolitanism and the Resilience of Yiddish: Wischnitzer’s Milgroym as a Pathway Towards the Global Museum
Susanne Marten-Finnis
Article
Rebellion and Creativity: Contextualizing Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Author’s Note” to The Penitent
David Stromberg
Article
“The Great Call of the Hour”: Hillel Zeitlin’s Yiddish Writings on Yavneh
Arthur Green and Ariel Evan Mayse
Article
The Price of Remorse: Yiddish and the Work of Mourning in Jacob Steinberg’s Hebrew Poetry
Elazar Elhanan
Article
Tongue-Twisted: Itzik Manger between mame-loshn and loshn-koydesh