We close out the Yiddish Book Center’s 2021 Decade of Discovery’s Yiddish and Social Justice with a conversation about the roots of social justice in Yiddish literature and culture. An engaging conversation with scholars, authors, and cultural commentators: Alyssa Quint, Amelia Glaser and Tony Michels.

Alyssa Quint is the Leon Charney Visiting Fellow at Yeshiva University and the editor of the history section at Tablet Magazine. She is the author of The Rise of the Modern Yiddish Theater, which was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and she is a co-editor of two forthcoming volumes on the Yiddish theater, an edited work of essays and translations called Women on the Yiddish Stage and a critical edition of a legendary Yiddish operetta called Shulamis. Her articles, lectures, and a new exhibit called A Tale of Two Museums can be found online at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the Digital Yiddish Theater Project, and Tablet Magazine.

Amelia Glaser teaches in the literature department at UC San Diego, where she also directs the Jewish studies program and the Russian, East European, and Eurasian studies program. She is the author of Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine, with Harvard University Press and Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands (Northwestern UP, 2012).

Tony Michels is the George L. Mosse Professor of American Jewish History and director of the Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin. He is the author of A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (2005) and the editor of the 2012 collection Jewish Radicals: A Documentary History.