The Yiddish Voices Series

Yiddish Voices is an exciting new series of translated works that connects today’s readers with Yiddish literature, in its full range of authors, genres, and subject matter. Published in partnership with Bloomsbury and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, each volume presents a rich and engaging literary work in English translation with a well-matched historian’s introduction, one that is both erudite and readable. Expertly curated by Alyssa Quint and Elissa Bemporad, the series is organized to showcase first-time translations of enduring Yiddish texts—memoirs, novels, and plays—from which arise topics and themes that have powerful resonance today.

The Yiddish Voices Series was prepared for publication with support from the family of Harriet R. Yassky.

Additional funding provided by The Naomi Prawer Kadar Foundation.

Three Yiddish Plays by Women: Female Jewish Perspectives, 1880-1920

Edited by Alyssa Quint (Anthology Editor)
Bloomsbury Publishing in partnership with YIVO
Published in 2023

This is an unprecedented collection of three newly translated Yiddish plays written by women in the period from 1880 to 1920. Taken together, these plays provide a fascinating insight into female Jewish perspectives on a range of women's issues prevalent at the time and, in some cases, still prevalent today. The works explore topics such as the Jewish law of the 'chained widow', pregnancy out of wedlock, and birth control, amongst many others.

Three Yiddish Plays by Women includes an incisive contextual introduction which provides historical context for each individual work, summaries and discussion of the texts and stage histories for two of the three that have them. The introduction offers biographical information about each playwright and looks at what ambit they were each active in, taking into consideration gender norms. It also engages an array of recent sources and angles on intersecting questions of theater and gender in a landmark volume of vital significance to students of women's history, modern Jewish history, cultural history and theatre history.

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Series Editors

Elissa Bemporad is Professor of History and Chair in East European Jewish History and the Holocaust at Queens College and CUNY Graduate Center, USA. She is the author of Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (2013), winner of the National Jewish Book Award, the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History, and a finalist for the Jordan Schnitzer Award. Her most recent book, entitled Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets (2019), also won a National Jewish Book Award. Elissa is also the co-editor of two volumes: Women and Genocide: Survivors, Victims, Perpetrators (2018, with Joyce Warren); and Pogroms: A Documentary History of Anti-Jewish Violence (2021, with Gene Avrutin). She is editor of Jewish Social Studies and is currently working on a biography of Ester Frumkin.

Alyssa Quint is a writer based in New York City, USA. She is a Visiting Fellow at Yeshiva University, USA and Associate Editor at Tablet Magazine. She is the author of The Rise of the Modern Yiddish Theater (2019), a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and a finalist for the Jordan Schnitzer Award. She is also the editor of two forthcoming volumes on the Yiddish theater – Women on the Yiddish Stage and Avrom Goldfaden’s Shulamis: a Critical Edition. She is a contributing editor of the online Digital Yiddish Theater Project and a curator of a number of exhibits at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research where she served as senior scholar for many years.

Editorial Advisory Board

— David Samuels (Tablet Magazine, USA)
— Jeffrey Shandler (Rutgers University, USA)
— Stefanie Halpern (Director of the Archives, YIVO/USA)
— Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimlet (Polin Museum, Poland)
— Francois Guesnet (University College London, UK)
— Joel Berkowitz (University Wisconsin, USA)
— Miriam Trinh (Hebrew University, Israel)
— Naomi Seidman (University of Toronto, Canada)
— Anita Norich (University of Michigan, USA)