Alyssa Quint
By Alyssa Quint
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Culture How Yiddish Blossomed After the Holocaust
Survivors and Exiles: Yiddish Culture After the Holocaust By Jan Schwarz Wayne State University Press, 360 pages, $46.99 In 1954, while passing through the Uruguayan capital city of Montevideo, the Yiddish literary editor Mark Turkov met a Jewish journalist from Paris who had begun writing a book about his experience in Auschwitz. Turkov invited him…
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Culture How YIVO Became a Lasting Cultural Center
YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture By Cecile Esther Kuznitz Cambridge University Press, 324 pages, $95 As it stands today, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is the brick-and-mortar memory of East European Jewry. Photographs, letters, theater placards, diaries, institutional records, and rabbinical responsa are just some of the documents in its collection….
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Culture Tracing the History of Jewish Autobiography
Being for Myself Alone: Origins of Jewish Autobiography By Marcus Moseley Stanford University Press, 650 pages, $70. * * *| ‘This is the Life Story of Judah Aryeh…. Few and evil have been the days of my life in this world… on Monday the 28th day of Nissan — corresponding to the 23d day of…
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Culture Beyond Bubbeleh: Reading Real Yiddish
These days, books about Yiddish have been hamming it up for the mainstreamers. A slew of new books have arrived to decode the cultural essence of the language of Ashkenazic Jewry for an audience of non-Jews and Jews (both of whom appear equally innocent of Yiddish these days). “Yiddish With Dick and Jane” is only…
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Culture Asch’s Diamonds
Maybe it’s the fallacy that rewarding literature must be difficult that explains why no scholar has lingered in the literary universe of Polish-born American Yiddish novelist and playwright Sholem Asch (1880-1957). Asch, who published alongside Isaac Bashevis Singer and other luminaries in the Yiddish Forward, was considered a master of Yiddish fiction until a literary…
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Culture Beyond Research: Ansky’s Chronicle of Tenderness
The Enemy at His Pleasure: A Journey Through the Jewish Pale of Settlement During World War I By S. Ansky Edited and Translated By Joachim Neugroschel Metropolitan Books, 352 pages, $30. * * *| On January 1, 1915, an article was published in a Warsaw-based Yiddish newspaper that appealed to its readers to record their…
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Culture Sealed Mit a Kiss: Yiddish Love Poems
Simkhe: epistolarishe libe-lider (Celebration: Love-letter Poems) By Troim Katz Handler, translated by Shimon Beyles International Association of Yiddish Clubs, 73 pages, $18. * * *| No one who has drunk from the cup of Sappho, much less from the bounty of today’s literary erotica, will blush over “Simkhe: epistolarishe libe-lider,” or “Celebration: Love-letter Poems,” by…
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News Fiction’s Feminine Side Gets Equal Time
Alyssa Quint regularly contributes to the Forward. Beautiful as the Moon, Radiant as the Stars: Jewish Women in Yiddish Stories By Sandra Bark Warner Books, 352 pages, $14.95. * * *| According to Fanya Glants’s husband, the celebrated American-Yiddish poet A. Leyeles, she was a genuine artist whose bond with literature was both intimate and…
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In Case You Missed It
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Yiddish אַ מוצאי־שבת אין פּאָרטלאַנד, אַ קאַצנשפּרונג פֿונעם „אײַס“־בניןA Saturday night in Portland, very close to the ICE building
שלום בערגער האָט גערעדט סײַ מיט די דעמאָנסטראַנטן קעגן „אײַס“ סײַ מיט די „טראָמפּיסטן“
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Fast Forward Cuomo dominates Jewish vote in final Quinnipiac poll before election
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Fast Forward ADL removes ‘Protect Civil Rights’ from website as it narrows its mission amid right-wing attacks
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Yiddish צי זאָל איך ווערן אַ ראַבינער?So should I become a rabbi?
אַן אַקאַדעמיקער באַשרײַבט זײַן איבערלעבונג אויף אַ רעטריט פֿאָקוסירט אויפֿן אינספּירירן ייִדן צו ווערן גײַסטיקע פֿירער.
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