Public Humanities

Faculty and Graduate Student Outreach

  • PhD student Ri J. Turner was a co-organizer of the Paris Yiddish Center’s Third Summer Program for Yiddish Language and Literature in Berlin in summer 2022, where she also co-taught the program’s three-week Seminar for Teachers.
  • Congrats to PhD candidate Jacqueline Krass (English) on receiving an Association for Jewish Studies (AJS) travel grant to present the paper, “Inappropriate, Obscene, Primitive: The Accented Poetry of Cathy Park Hong and Jerome Rothenberg” at the upcoming AJS conference in December 2022.
  • Mayrent Director Professor Sunny Yudkoff has organized a roundtable at the upcoming Association for Jewish Studies conference in December 2022 on “The Postwar Yiddish Bookshelf.”
  • Interested in the Yiddish stage? Check out the recent translation of the memoirs of Yiddish actress Khine Braginskaya produced by PhD student Ri J. Turner (History) on UW–Milwaukee’s Digital Yiddish Theatre Project website.
  • Congrats to PhD candidate Jacqueline Krass (English) on receiving a grant to participate in the 2022 Yiddish Vokh in Copake, NY.
  • Congrats to PhD student Ri J. Turner (history) on being awarded the Lipton Essay Award from the Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies for her paper,  “Lamarckian Evolution: Good for the Jews (or for Humans in General)?: The 1921 Chapter of the Zhitlowsky / Lieberman Feud,” which she also presented at the Center for Jewish History’s Scholars’ Working Group on the American Yiddish Press in May 2022.
  • In fall 2021, PhD student Ri J. Turner (History) taught Beginner’s Yiddish at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (via Zoom). For more information, check out:  https://yivo.org/FALL2021-Beginner1-Thursday
  • Congratulation to Dr. Chad S.A. Gibbs (History, PhD ‘20) on his appointment as Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies in Yaschik/Arnold Jewish Studies Program and Director of the Zucker/Goldberg Center for Holocaust Studies at the College of Charleston.
  • In June 2021, PhD student Ri J. Turner (History) presented the first fruits of a project to set little-known Yiddish women’s poetry to music in a (Zoom) concert entitled “Gebeyn fun mayn gebeyn” (“Bone of My Bone”). The title comes from a poem by Yiddish poet Malka Lee (1904-1976). Turner worked together with violinist and arranger Nicolas Dupin and pianist Bastien Hartmann, through the Paris Yiddish Center. For more information, click here.
  • Professor Sunny Yudkoff (Mayrent/UW–Madison) and Professor Saul Zaritt (Harvard University) held a conversation at the National Yiddish Book Center via Zoom on the subject, “Jacob Glatstein and Yiddish Rage.” Experience the conversation here!
  • Interested in the connections between Yiddish and Pennsylvania Dutch? Be sure to read Max Kade Director Professor Mark Louden’s recent essay, “Yiddish and Pennsylvania Dutch Among Hasidim and Amish,” published on anabaptisthistorians.org.
  • Doctoral candidate Erin Faigin (history) and Professor Sunny Yudkoff recently participated in the Mellon Sawyer Seminar “Jewish Multilingualism in the Midwest: Yiddish Translations of Urban Experience,” hosted by the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (February 2021). Read here in Yiddish about their presentations.
  • Professor Sunny Yudkoff joins other literary scholars to recommend readings for our current moment in the roundtable Pandemic and Plague: Literary Encounters. To read Sholem Aleichem’s 1901 monologue “The Pot,” click here for English and here for Yiddish.
  • Graduate student (History) Dylan Kaufman-Obstler presented a paper entitled “Debating a Yiddish Future: The Paradox of Yiddish Communist Education in the United States” at the Biennial Scholars Conference on American Jewish History (June, 2020).
  • Graduate students Matthew Greene (German, Nordic, Slavic) and Chad Gibbs (History) expand the historical record of the survivors of Treblinka : https://ingeveb.org/blog/briv-funem-arkhiv-a-memoir-in-four-acts
  • Graduate student (History) Dylan Kaufman-Obstler published a review for In Geveb of Naomi Prawer Kadar’s new book Raising Secular Jews: Yiddish Schools and Their Periodicals for American Children, 1917-1950 . You can read the review here.