Individual Scholar Page

Personal Info

Photo

About Me

I am a scholar of Yiddish Studies interested in questions of race, gender, and regionalism in American Yiddish fiction. I received my Ph.D. in Yiddish Studies from Columbia University in 2017.

I am the Assistant Instructional Professor in Yiddish at the University of Chicago, where I teach all levels of Yiddish language, as well as courses in Yiddish culture and literature.

I am also the Editor-in-Chief of In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies.

Recent Publications

Diary of a Lonely Girl, or the Battle against Free Love, by Miriam Karpilove, trans. and with an introduction by Jessica Kirzane (Syracuse University Press, 2020)

“Women, Love, and the Reform Jewish Mission: Jewish-Christian Marriage in Emma Wolf’s Other Things Being Equal and its Literary Successors.” American Jewish History (forthcoming).

“Ambivalent Attitudes Toward Intermarriage in the Forverts, 1905-1920.”  Journal of Jewish Identities 8:1 (January 2015), pp. 23-47.

“’This is How a Generation Grows:’ Lynching as a Site of Ethical Loss in Yiddish Literature.”  Zutot 9 (2012), pp. 59-71.  Reprinted in In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies.

“The ‘Yiddish Gaze’: American Yiddish Literary Representations of Black Bodies and their Torture.” Race with Jewish Ethics.  Jonathan Crane, ed.  Penn State University Press. (forthcoming).

“Afterward” (with Ellen Cassedy) to On the Landing: Collected Stories of Yenta Mash.  Trans. Ellen Cassedy.  University of New Mexico Press, 2019.

“‘What Kind of a Man are You?’: The Sexualization of Race and the Trope of Alienation in Yiddish American Narratives of Interethnic Sexual Encounter.”  The Sacred Encounter: Jewish Perspectives on Sexuality. Lisa Grushcow, ed.  CCAR Press, 2014, pp. 195-208.

“Emma Wolf” in the Shalvi-Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women, a project of the Jewish Women’s Archive (forthcoming).

review of Kadya Molodovsky’s A Jewish Refugee in New York, trans. Anita Norich, in Empty Mirror

Anctil, Pierre. Jacob-Isaac Segal: A Montreal Yiddish Poet and His Millieu, in Canadian Jewish Studies / Études juives canadiennes, vol 27 (June 2019).

“Lot’s Wife Speaks,” review of Laura Eve Engel’s debut poetry collection, Things That Go in Jewish Currents.

review of Eddy Portnoy. Bad Rabbi: And Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press. in H-Judaic

review of Blume Lempel. Oedipus in Brooklyn and Other Stories, trans. Ellen Cassedy and Yermiyahu Aron Taub, in Jewish Book Council Reviews

“Oh, Give Me a Home: Jewish American Literature Beyond the City.”  Paper Brigade, vol. 3., December 2018.

For a listing of my writing and resources on pedagogy, see: https://jessicakirzane.com/pedagogical-materials/

For a listing of my translations, by author, see:  https://jessicakirzane.com/translations/

Media Coverage

Social Media

@jessicakirzane

Country Focus

Expertise by Geography

Eastern Europe, North America, United States

Expertise by Chronology

19th century, Modern, 20th century

Expertise by Topic

Book History, Family, Gender, Holocaust & Nazi Persecution, Libraries & Archives, Literary History, Local & Regional, Migration & Immigration, Pedagogy, Race, Religion, Sexuality, Urban History, Women