The Yiddish Supernatural on Screen

Book Talk Admission: Free Registration is required. Register

As a linguistic carrier of a thousand years of European Jewish civilization, the Yiddish language is closely tied to immigrant pasts and sites of Holocaust memory. In The Yiddish Supernatural on Screen: Dybbuks, Demons and Haunted Jewish Pasts, Rebecca Margolis investigates how translated and subtitled Yiddish dialogue reimagines Jewish lore and tells new stories, where the supernatural looms over the narrative. The book traces the transformation of the figure of the dybbuk—a soul of the dead possessing the living—from folklore to 1930s Polish Yiddish cinema and on to global contemporary media. Margolis examines the association of spoken Yiddish with spectral elements adapted from Jewish legends within the horror genre. She explores how all-Yiddish prologues to comedy film and television depict magic located in an immigrant or pre-immigrant past that informs the present. Framing spoken Yiddish on screen as an ancestral language associated with trauma and dispossession, Margolis shows how it reconstructs haunted and mystical elements of the Jewish experience.

Join YIVO for a discussion with Margolis about her book, led by Olga Gershenson.

Buy the book.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

About the Speakers

Rebecca (Rivke) Margolis is a professor and Pratt Foundation Chair of Jewish Civilisation at Monash University, Australia, having arrived from the University of Ottawa in 2020. Over the last 25 years, her research, teaching and community activity has focused on the continuity of Yiddish language as well as cultural innovation in the areas of education, community life, literature, theatre, cinema and new media. She is author of Jewish Roots, Canadian Soil: Yiddish Cultural Life in Montreal, 1905-1945 (2011) and Yiddish Lives On: Strategies of Language Transmission (2023). She is currently working on a project that investigates the connections between the Yiddish language and humor in American film and television.

Olga Gershenson is Professor of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies and of Film Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. A multi-disciplinary scholar, her interests lie at the intersection of culture, history, and film. She is the author of New Israeli Horror: Local Cinema, Global Genre (2023), The Phantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe (2013), Gesher: Russian Theater in Israel (2005), as well as editor of Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender (2009). She is currently working on a volume titled The Oxford Handbook of Judaism and Film. Profiled in Haaretz as the rare academic who “prefers engaging the masses in culture,” she curates film series, consults for festivals, and has a lively lecture schedule at universities, conferences, and museums around the world.