Contributors
Executive Editor: Caroline Luce, Ph.D.
Caroline Luce is the Ross Postdoctoral Fellow and the Research and Digital Projects Manager of the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies, as well as the Chief Curator of the Mapping Jewish Los Angeles Project. Dr. Luce received her Ph.D. from the UCLA History Department in 2013 for her dissertation research examining the complexities of working-class identity and Yiddish-based labor and community organizing in Boyle Heights. She teaches LA Jewish history and American Labor history at UCLA and is working on a book project provisionally entitled, "Viva Pastrami! Yiddish and the Construction of Ethno-Racial Working-Class Identity in the Borderlands of East L.A."
Mark L. Smith
Mark L. Smith specializes in aspects of Jewish history related to Yiddish language and culture — particularly the 20th-century historians who wrote Jewish history in Yiddish — a topic on which he is known for speaking and writing. He received his Ph.D. in Jewish History from UCLA in 2016. As a research fellow at the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies, he is currently preparing the book based on his dissertation, “The Yiddish Historians and the Struggle for a Jewish History of the Holocaust.”
Caroline Luce is the Ross Postdoctoral Fellow and the Research and Digital Projects Manager of the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies, as well as the Chief Curator of the Mapping Jewish Los Angeles Project. Dr. Luce received her Ph.D. from the UCLA History Department in 2013 for her dissertation research examining the complexities of working-class identity and Yiddish-based labor and community organizing in Boyle Heights. She teaches LA Jewish history and American Labor history at UCLA and is working on a book project provisionally entitled, "Viva Pastrami! Yiddish and the Construction of Ethno-Racial Working-Class Identity in the Borderlands of East L.A."
Design and Art Director: David Wu
David Wu is the Digital Projects and Marketing Coordinator of the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies.
Editor: Hershl Hartman
Hershl Hartman has been working as a Yiddish writer, educator, and professional translator and interpreter for over fifty years. With degrees in Jewish Education and Yiddish Journalism, he began his career working as a reporter for the Morgn Frayhayt from 1947 to 1951 in New York. After moving to Los Angeles with his family, became the Education Director of the Sholem Community in Los Angeles, serving as the school’s principal until 1985. He has also translated hundreds of Yiddish works, including "Skalat, the Destruction of a Village" (one of the eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust written by a survivor in 1947) and "The Megile of Itzak Manger," the famed poet's retelling of the biblical story of Esther.
Editor: Miriam Koral
Miriam Koral is the CEO and Founding Director of the California Institute for Yiddish Culture and Language, established in 1999. She has been writing, translating, and teaching Yiddish for over twenty years. She is a Continuing Lecturer in Yiddish at UCLA where she teaches Yiddish language and a course she developed as an introduction to a century of Yiddish culture through the medium of film. A published Yiddish poet and prose writer herself, her most recent book translation is Shmuel Rozhansky's Jacob Dinezon: The Mother Among Our Classical Yiddish Writers (1958).
Contributors
Etai Rogers-Fett
Etai Rogers-Fett grew up in Los Angeles, immersed in a cholent of local Jewish histories from their family and Jewish Humanist sunday school. Etai studied Yiddish language, literature, and Eastern European Jewish history at Johns Hopkins University, focusing on the Yiddish press in the 1905 Russian Revolution and interwar Poland. While grounded in these rich histories, Etai is inspired by contemporary Yiddishist efforts to build communities that both honor and reimagine the language’s past connections to class, gender, and Jewish identity.
Julian Levinson
Julian Levinson is the Samuel Shetzer Professor of American Jewish Studies at the University of Michigan. His research explores the myriad ways Jews have reinvented their cultural identities and in dialogue with prevailing American literary and religious traditions. His first book, Exiles on Main Street: Jewish American Writers and American Literary Culture (winner of the National Jewish Book Award for American Jewish Studies, 2008), focuses on the ways Jews have drawn on the classic American literary tradition, specifically Transcendentalism, in the creation of a distinctly Jewish-American literary idiom. He is currently completing a second book on transformations of Jewish identity in the context of American Protestant bibliocentrism. He has published widely on Yiddish literary culture, including a chapter on Yiddish responses to Walt Whitman and two articles on Moyshe-Leyb Halpern in the context of international literary modernism. His translations of poems by Halpern, Aron-Glanz Leyeles, and Reuben Ludwig have appeared in Tikkun, Jewish Currents, and The Michigan Quarterly Review.
Jessica Kirzane
Jessica Kirzane received her Ph.D. in Yiddish Studies from Columbia University in 2017. Her research examines the representation of intermarriage in Jewish American writing in the early twentieth century. Jessica's work has previously appeared in the Journal of Jewish Identities, Zutot, and The Sacred Encounter: Jewish Perspectives on Sexuality (CCAR Press, 2014). Jessica also serves on the editorial board and as translation editor of In Geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies.
Michael Casper
Michael Casper is a Ph.D. candidate at UCLA.
Sunny Yudkoff
Sunny Yudkoff is an Assistant Professor in the Department of German, Nordic and Slavic at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard in 2015 and is currently at work on her first book entitled, Let it Be Consumption! Tuberculosis and the Modern Jewish Writer. She also serves on the editorial board of In Geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies.
Tamar Schneider Levin
Tamar Schneider Levin was born into a culturally rich Yiddish speaking family that lived in the Sholem Aleichem Houses in the Bronx. Her parents, Ruth and Misha Schneider z’l", were graduates of the Yiddish Teachers Seminary in New York, and counselors at Camp Boiberik. Tamar graduated from Arbeter Ring Shule #14 where her teachers were Avrom Bromberg and Saul Maltz. Yiddish books, newspapers and periodicals were read and discussed at home and Yiddish songs were sung. As an adult, Tamar has led Yiddish circles in New Jersey and Tennessee and studied at the YIVO/Columbia Zummer Program.
Hershl Hartman has been working as a Yiddish writer, educator, and professional translator and interpreter for over fifty years. With degrees in Jewish Education and Yiddish Journalism, he began his career working as a reporter for the Morgn Frayhayt from 1947 to 1951 in New York. After moving to Los Angeles with his family, became the Education Director of the Sholem Community in Los Angeles, serving as the school’s principal until 1985. He has also translated hundreds of Yiddish works, including "Skalat, the Destruction of a Village" (one of the eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust written by a survivor in 1947) and "The Megile of Itzak Manger," the famed poet's retelling of the biblical story of Esther.
Editor: Miriam Koral
Miriam Koral is the CEO and Founding Director of the California Institute for Yiddish Culture and Language, established in 1999. She has been writing, translating, and teaching Yiddish for over twenty years. She is a Continuing Lecturer in Yiddish at UCLA where she teaches Yiddish language and a course she developed as an introduction to a century of Yiddish culture through the medium of film. A published Yiddish poet and prose writer herself, her most recent book translation is Shmuel Rozhansky's Jacob Dinezon: The Mother Among Our Classical Yiddish Writers (1958).
Contributors
Etai Rogers-Fett
Etai Rogers-Fett grew up in Los Angeles, immersed in a cholent of local Jewish histories from their family and Jewish Humanist sunday school. Etai studied Yiddish language, literature, and Eastern European Jewish history at Johns Hopkins University, focusing on the Yiddish press in the 1905 Russian Revolution and interwar Poland. While grounded in these rich histories, Etai is inspired by contemporary Yiddishist efforts to build communities that both honor and reimagine the language’s past connections to class, gender, and Jewish identity.
Julian Levinson
Julian Levinson is the Samuel Shetzer Professor of American Jewish Studies at the University of Michigan. His research explores the myriad ways Jews have reinvented their cultural identities and in dialogue with prevailing American literary and religious traditions. His first book, Exiles on Main Street: Jewish American Writers and American Literary Culture (winner of the National Jewish Book Award for American Jewish Studies, 2008), focuses on the ways Jews have drawn on the classic American literary tradition, specifically Transcendentalism, in the creation of a distinctly Jewish-American literary idiom. He is currently completing a second book on transformations of Jewish identity in the context of American Protestant bibliocentrism. He has published widely on Yiddish literary culture, including a chapter on Yiddish responses to Walt Whitman and two articles on Moyshe-Leyb Halpern in the context of international literary modernism. His translations of poems by Halpern, Aron-Glanz Leyeles, and Reuben Ludwig have appeared in Tikkun, Jewish Currents, and The Michigan Quarterly Review.
Jessica Kirzane
Jessica Kirzane received her Ph.D. in Yiddish Studies from Columbia University in 2017. Her research examines the representation of intermarriage in Jewish American writing in the early twentieth century. Jessica's work has previously appeared in the Journal of Jewish Identities, Zutot, and The Sacred Encounter: Jewish Perspectives on Sexuality (CCAR Press, 2014). Jessica also serves on the editorial board and as translation editor of In Geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies.
Michael Casper
Michael Casper is a Ph.D. candidate at UCLA.
Sunny Yudkoff
Sunny Yudkoff is an Assistant Professor in the Department of German, Nordic and Slavic at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard in 2015 and is currently at work on her first book entitled, Let it Be Consumption! Tuberculosis and the Modern Jewish Writer. She also serves on the editorial board of In Geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies.
Tamar Schneider Levin
Tamar Schneider Levin was born into a culturally rich Yiddish speaking family that lived in the Sholem Aleichem Houses in the Bronx. Her parents, Ruth and Misha Schneider z’l", were graduates of the Yiddish Teachers Seminary in New York, and counselors at Camp Boiberik. Tamar graduated from Arbeter Ring Shule #14 where her teachers were Avrom Bromberg and Saul Maltz. Yiddish books, newspapers and periodicals were read and discussed at home and Yiddish songs were sung. As an adult, Tamar has led Yiddish circles in New Jersey and Tennessee and studied at the YIVO/Columbia Zummer Program.
Mark L. Smith
Mark L. Smith specializes in aspects of Jewish history related to Yiddish language and culture — particularly the 20th-century historians who wrote Jewish history in Yiddish — a topic on which he is known for speaking and writing. He received his Ph.D. in Jewish History from UCLA in 2016. As a research fellow at the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies, he is currently preparing the book based on his dissertation, “The Yiddish Historians and the Struggle for a Jewish History of the Holocaust.”
Discussion of "Contributors"
Add your voice to this discussion.
Checking your signed in status ...