This volume presents an outstanding new translation of two favorite comic novels by the preeminent Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem (1859–1916). The Letters of Menakhem Mendl and Sheyne Sheyndl portrays a tumultuous marriage through letters exchanged between the title character, an itinerant bumbler seeking his fortune in the cities of Russia before departing alone for the New World, and his scolding wife, who becomes increasingly fearful, jealous, and mystified. Motl, Peysi the Cantor’s Son is the first-person narrative of a mischievous and keenly observant boy who emigrates with his family from Russia to America. The final third of the story takes place in New York, making this Aleichem’s only major work to be set in the United States. Motl and Menakhem Mendl are in one sense opposites: the one a clear-eyed child and the other a pathetically deluded adult. Yet both are ideal conveyors of the comic disparity of perception on which humor depends. If Motl sees more than do others around him, Menakhem Mendl has an almost infinite capacity for seeing less. Aleichem endows each character with an individual comic voice to tell in his own way the story of the collapse of traditional Jewish life in modern industrial society as well as the journey to America, where a new chapter of Jewish history begins. This volume includes a biographical and critical introduction as well as a useful glossary for English language readers.

This illuminating study explores a central but neglected aspect of modern Jewish history: the problem of abandoned Jewish wives, or agunes ("chained wives")—women who under Jewish law could not obtain a divorce—and of the men who deserted them. Looking at seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Germany and then late nineteenth-century eastern Europe and twentieth-century United States, Enforced Marginality explores representations of abandoned wives while tracing the demographic movements of Jews in the West. Bluma Goldstein analyzes a range of texts (in Old Yiddish, German, Yiddish, and English) at the intersection of disciplines (history, literature, sociology, and gender studies) to describe the dynamics of power between men and women within traditional communities and to elucidate the full spectrum of experiences abandoned women faced.

Jewish literatures and cultures : context and intertext / Anita Norich -- From continuity to contiguity : thoughts on the theory of Jewish literature / Dan Miron -- Beyond influence : toward a new historiographic paradigm / Michael L. Satlow -- Hellenistic Judaism : myth or reality? / Gabriele Boccaccini -- "He was renowned to the ends of the earth" (1 Maccabees 3:9) : Judaism and Hellenism in 1 Maccabees / Martha Himmelfarb -- Roman statues, rabbis, and Greco-Roman culture / Yaron Z. Eliav -- The ghetto and Jewish cultural formation in early modern Europe : towards a new interpretation / David Ruderman -- Hybrid with what? : the variable contexts of Polish Jewish culture : their implications for Jewish cultural history and Jewish studies / Moshe Rosman -- Idols of the cave and theater : a verbal or visual Judaism? / Kalman P. Bland -- "Reverse marranism," translatability, and practice of secular Jewish culture in Russian / Gabriella Safran -- Intertextuality, Rabbinic literature, and the making of Hebrew modernism / Shachar Pinsker -- Brooklyn am Rhein? : the German sources of Jewish-American literature / Julian Levinson -- Diaspora and translation : the migrations of Jewish meaning / Naomi Seidman.

A feminist biography of the only woman to become prime minister of Israel In this authoritative and empathetic biography, Pnina Lahav reexamines the life of Golda Meir (1898–1978) through a feminist lens, focusing on her recurring role as a woman standing alone among men. The Only Woman in the Room is the first book to contend with Meir’s full identity as a woman, Jew, Zionist leader, and one of the founders of Israel, providing a richer portrait of her persona and legacy. Meir, Lahav shows, deftly deflected misogyny as she traveled the path to becoming Israel’s fourth, and only female, prime minister, from 1969 to 1974. Lahav revisits the youthful encounters that forged Meir’s passion for socialist Zionism and reassesses her decision to separate from her husband and leave her children in the care of others. Enduring humiliation and derision from her colleagues, Meir nevertheless led in establishing Israel as a welfare state where social security, workers’ rights, and maternity leave became law. Lahav looks at the challenges that beset Meir’s premiership, particularly the disastrous Yom Kippur War, which led to her resignation and withdrawal from politics, as well as Meir’s bitter duel with feminist and civil rights leader Shulamit Aloni, Meir’s complex relationship with the Israeli and American feminist movements, and the politics that led her to distance herself from feminism altogether. Exploring the tensions between Meir’s personal and political identities, The Only Woman in the Room provides a groundbreaking new account of Meir’s life while also illuminating the difficulties all women face as they try to ascend in male-dominated fields.

Jewish theatre—plays about and usually by Jews—enters the twenty-first century with a long and distinguished history. To keep this vibrant tradition alive, the National Foundation for Jewish Culture established the New Play Commissions in Jewish Theatre in 1994. The commissions are awarded in an annual competition. Their goal is to help emerging and established dramatists develop new works in collaboration with a wide variety of theatres. Since its inception, the New Play Commissions has contributed support to more than seventy-five professional productions, staged readings, and workshops. This anthology brings together nine commissioned plays that have gone on to full production. Ellen Schiff and Michael Posnick have selected works that reflect many of the historical and social forces that have shaped contemporary Jewish experience and defined Jewish identity—among them, surviving the Holocaust, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the lives of newcomers in America, Israel, and Argentina. Following a foreword by Theodore Bikel, the editors provide introductory explanations of the New Play Commissions and an overview of Jewish theatre. The playwrights comment on the genesis of their work and its production history.

A fascinating study of the picaresque protagonists of Yiddish literature and their minority authors

Magnetic duo and stars of the Brooklyn food scene, Liz Alpern and Jeffrey Yoskowitz revitalize Old World food traditions for today's modern kitchens in their debut cookbook.

This multicultural reference work on Jewish folklore, legends, customs, and other elements of folklife is the first of its kind.

Old Odessa, on the Black Sea, gained notoriety as a legendary city of Jewish gangsters and swindlers, a frontier boomtown mythologized for the adventurers, criminals, and merrymakers who flocked there to seek easy wealth and lead lives of debauchery and excess. Odessa is also famed for the brand of Jewish humor brought there in the 19th century from the shtetls of Eastern Europe and that flourished throughout Soviet times. From a broad historical perspective, Jarrod Tanny examines the hybrid Judeo-Russian culture that emerged in Odessa in the 19th century and persisted through the Soviet era and beyond. The book shows how the art of eminent Soviet-era figures such as Isaac Babel, Il'ia Ilf, Evgenii Petrov, and Leonid Utesov grew out of the Odessa Russian-Jewish culture into which they were born and which shaped their lives.

For many centuries Jews have been renowned for the efforts they put into their children's welfare and education. Eventually, prioritizing children became a modern Western norm, as reflected in an abundance of research in fields such as pediatric medicine, psychology, and law. In other academic fields, however, young children in particular have received less attention, perhaps because they rarely leave written documentation. The interdisciplinary symposium in this volume seeks to overcome this challenge by delving into different facets of Jewish childhood in history, literature, and film. No Small Matter visits five continents and studies Jewish children from the 19th century through the present. It includes essays on the demographic patterns of Jewish reproduction; on the evolution of bar and bat mitzvah ceremonies; on the role children played in the project of Hebrew revival; on their immigrant experiences in the United States; on novels for young Jewish readers written in Hebrew and Yiddish; and on Jewish themes in films featuring children. Several contributions focus on children who survived the Holocaust or the children of survivors in a variety of settings ranging from Europe, North Africa, and Israel to the summer bungalow colonies of the Catskill Mountains. In addition to the symposium, this volume also features essays on a transformative Yiddish poem by a Soviet Jewish author and on the cultural legacy of Lenny Bruce.