As I demonstrate in my critical study Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children’s Literature, the Yiddish children’s literary canon that burgeoned on the secularist left during the first half of the twentieth century forms a rich archive for revisiting the anxieties and ideas…
“Up to this point, there has not been a single book about electricity in Yiddish, aside from a few small pamphlets,” declared the engineer Israel Okun in January 1922. It was a bold, frank introduction to his new Yiddish translation of…
On May 13, 1939, the German ocean liner S.S. St. Louis set sail from Hamburg with 937 Jewish refugees on board—among them, Lillian and Georg Friedmann. Fleeing Nazi persecution, they boarded with tourist or transit entry permits purchased from Cuban immigration director Manuel Benítez. Their destination…
On a cold winter afternoon in February 1919, several hundred soldiers descended upon the Jewish neighborhoods of the small Ukrainian city of Proskuriv (today Khmel’nyts’kyi, Ukraine). Ten days earlier, Symon Petliura, head of the short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic, had dispatched to the border city nearly…
On a humid summer’s night in July 1961, thirteen-year-old Ricky Farber and his friends bounced around their suburban neighborhood in Arlington, Virginia. There, they stumbled upon an odd and frightening house draped in massive Nazi battle flags. What happened next would be a source of contention: Farber and…
