Media Type: Article
Yiddish Studies
At the annual Association for Jewish Studies (AJS) meeting this December, there was a notable refrain: “Yiddish is everywhere!” Over three days, more than forty panels, roundtables, and seminars featured at least one—and often more than one—presentation that substantially engaged with Yiddish-language materials. The topics ranged across fields, including history, literature, musicology
Beyond Ashkenaz: New Research on Ethnic Jewish Diversity in the Americas
Debates surrounding Jewish identity, culture, and religion abound across time and space. At the root of the discourse are questions about group boundaries; inclusion and exclusion; and the foundations of Jewish identities. In the United States, Jews from diverse, non-Ashkenazi backgrounds often find their Jewishness questioned, their stories marginalized. However, mirroring a broader trend, the
Jewish Learning through Cultural Arts
The most recent Pew Research Center’s report on American Judaism, “Jewish Americans in 2020,” found that although American Jews overall are not a highly religious group, they are highly engaged in Jewish cultural activities, including cooking Jewish food, visiting historical Jewish sites, reading Jewish literature, and watching television shows or movies about Jewish or Israeli themes.
New Developments in Caribbean Jewish Studies
A rich historiography of Caribbean Jewry had begun to emerge in the work of scholars such as Natalie Zemon Davis and Jonathan Schorsch, building on earlier studies by Robert Cohen and other
New Work on American Jewish Literature
Even more than scholars in other disciplines, it seems to me, literary scholars regularly disagree about what, methodologically, they’re up to. Lately some of the debates in the field have been over “distant reading” practices, historicism, and whether what we call literary theory still has relevance to the work that we do (and surely somebody reading this will feel that I don’t even have that list right).
