Whether associated with assimilation into the dominant culture or rebellion against it, the German Jew is often portrayed as the paragon of Weimar culture. Yet accounts of Weimar Jewish culture tend to overlook the heterogeneity of Germany's Jewish population, paying short shrif…
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Reading poetry in Yiddish, Hebrew and English from across the twentieth century, this dissertation examines how literary lineage is constructed and challenged by Jewish women in Eastern Europe, America and Mandatory Palestine. Between Jewish women's limited access to the past an…
World War One has evoked a prodigious and sustained literary response from Jewish writers in Eastern and Western Europe, America and Israel. For some, it was their formative literary experience; for others their culminating one. Some wrote as soldiers or veterans, others as refu…
This dissertation examines the development of narrative form in 19 th century Yiddish and 20th century West African literature. Engaging with the theory of “minor” literature articulated by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, this study adds to their framework for identifying “mi…
In my dissertation, I compare translations of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice into three languages: German, Hebrew, and Yiddish. The Merchant of Venice was chosen for this project because its translations are particularly demonstrative of the attempt to create national (mod…
Milgroym/Rimon (1922-1924) was a bilingual, Yiddish/Hebrew modernist magazine of art and literature published in Berlin from 1922 to 1924 by the historian Mark Wischnitzer (1882-1955) and the art historian Rachel Wischnitzer-Bernstein (1885-1989). I argue that the central purpos…
Although an impressive body of scholarship has illuminated aspects of the early Yiddish theatre (1876–1883) and its founder Avraham Goldfaden (1840–1909), there have been few sustained inquiries into the literary quality of his work. Scholars have been quick to dismiss Goldfaden…
Hibat-Zion, the first Jewish national movement of its kind, emerged in Czarist Russia during the early 1880s. Over a fourteen-year period (1881–1895), the movement made a profound contribution to the birth of a modern Jewish national ideology. Hibat-Zion created and inspired the…
Yiddish-speaking immigrants arriving in London from the early 1880s, developed a rich cultural life. They established a Yiddish press, publishing houses, theatres and music halls. Although these institutions were often small and short-lived, the vibrancy of the popular culture i…
This dissertation is rooted in the observation that, in the development of Yiddish, certain tendencies of Yiddish discourse bear a distinct resemblance to features found in Talmudic and Rabbinic texts. These are elements of a system where the patterns and logic of conversation a…
In the intimate circles of Hebrew and Yiddish culture during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, prominent writers often became celebrities: writers like S.Y. Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleykhem, and Itzik Manger were greeted by large crowds across Eastern Europe; others…
This dissertation is a study of the context and content of vocal music in the lives of contemporary Yiddish-speaking Hasidic women and girls. While the music of Hasidic men has been collected, published, and analyzed to an extent, virtually nothing is known about the songs of Ha…
This study examines the languages of Jews in Europe and Palestine on the one hand, and the Jewish intelligentsia within the Zionist movement on the other. I compare the linguistic preferences of different social strata within European Jewry. The Zionist movement claimed to addre…
This thesis examines the development of Yiddish literary culture in Montreal, Canada during its nascent period between 1905 and 1940. The focus is on Montreal's pre-Holocaust Yiddish literary life, and its proponents: A. Almi, Reuben Brainin, H. M. Caiserman, N. Y. Gotlib, Hersh…
This dissertation examines the life and work of the Jewish writer Uri-Nisn Gnesin (1879-1913). Living in Russia, using Yiddish in his daily life, and writing prose in Hebrew, Gnesin was part of a multicultural and multilingual generation, which was too assimilated to live the tr…
This dissertation analyzes the works of Yiddish and Hebrew writer Isaac Leib Peretz (1852-1915) during the 1890's. It criticaly engages with the entire range of Peretz's literary output during this period in both languages. It argues that Peretz functioned as a literary agent of…
This dissertation explores the dynamics of identity construction and nation building in Hebrew and Yiddish literature in Russia and Poland in the decade following the 1905 revolution. It examines these dynamics through a study of the poetry of Yaakov Steinberg between the years …
Throughout Eastern European Jewish history, the Yiddish language served to demarcate which subjects, people, and ideas were specific to the Jewish sphere, and which belonged to the larger world. Within this context, the use of the Hebrew and Aramaic components of the language, r…
The emergence of the Yiddish Art Song is a fairly recent phenomenon. Its full flowering took place in the United States in this century although the seeds were generously planted in Europe towards the end of the 19 th century. One of the most prolific composers of Yiddish Art so…