A Conversation with Jessica Kirzane about Yiddish Studies

The Academic Life

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In this episode you’ll hear about: how Jessica first began to learn Yiddish, what drew her to translation work, the importance of finding encouraging mentors and creating peer supports, what it means to be “contingent” faculty, and a discussion of her new book Diary of A Lonely Girl.

Our guest is: Dr. Jessica Kirzane, who teaches Yiddish language as well as courses in Yiddish literature and culture. She received her PhD in Yiddish Studies from Columbia University in 2017. Dr. Kirzane is the Editor-in-Chief of In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies. In addition, she has held several positions at the Yiddish Book Center: Translation Fellow in 2017-18, Pedagogy Fellow in 2018-19, and as an editor and contributor to the Teach Great Jewish Books site of the Yiddish Book Center. Her research interests include race, sex, gender, and regionalism in American Jewish and Yiddish literature and has published articles on the idea of rural America in Yiddish literature, interethnic romance in Yiddish periodicals, and lynching in American Yiddish literature. Most recently she has published a translation of Miriam Karpilove's The Diary of a Lonely Girl, or the Battle Against Free Love (Syracuse UP, 2020).

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender.

Listeners to this episode might be interested in:

• The Yiddish Book Center
• “New York’s First-Time Women Voters” in Jewish Currents
• “Freydl” in Columbia Journal
• The Abandoned Book: A New Collection of Yiddish Translations.
• To Tread on New Ground: Selected Hebrew Writings of Hava Shapiro. Ed. Carole Balin and Wendy Zierler (Wayne State University Press, 2014)
• Have I Got a Story For You: More than a Century of Yiddish Fiction from the Forward. (Norton, 2016)
• Diary of A Lonely Girl, or the Battle Against Free Love by Miriam Karpilove
• In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies.

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