Tuesdays, February 4, 11, 18, and 25, 2025, 7:00–8:30 p.m. ET
Join Dr. Madeleine Cohen, academic director of the Yiddish Book Center, for an online course exploring issues of gender and women’s experience in Yiddish poetry in translation. Each week, Dr. Cohen will be joined by a different guest scholar and translator to discuss two Yiddish poems by women writers. Knowledge of Yiddish is not required; we will read the poems in Yiddish and in multiple English translations. The course will offer a mix of well-known and lesser-known poems and will focus on how the art of literary translation helps us to experience poetry, whether we can read the original or not.
Special guests will include:
Kathryn Hellerstein discussing Kadya Molodowsky, including Molodowsky's poem "Froyen-lider" ("Women-Poems").
Faith Jones discussing Celia Dropkin, including Dropkin's poems "Tsirkus-dame" ("The Acrobat") and "Odem" ("Adam").
Chana Toth-Sewell discussing Rokhl Korn, including Korn's "Fun yener zayt lid" ("On the Other Side of the Poem") and "Alte Hanke" ("Old Hanke").
All sessions are held live via Zoom. Recordings will be available to all registrants.
Cost: $100 for Yiddish Book Center members; $125 for nonmembers
Madeleine Cohen is the academic director of the Yiddish Book Center. Mindl has a PhD in Comparative Literature with an emphasis in Jewish Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on modern Yiddish literature and the relationships between Jewish politics in central and eastern Europe and writing about place; she is also interested in translation studies and the recovery of writing by women. Mindl has taught Yiddish language at UC Berkeley, Harvard University, the Yiddish Book Center, and for a number of community organizations. In addition to overseeing the educational programs of the Yiddish Book Center, she directs translation initiatives at the Center, which includes the Yiddish translation fellowship and the short works in translation series. Mindl was formerly chief editor for In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies, and now serves as president of In geveb’s board of directors. She is a visiting lecturer in Jewish Studies at Mount Holyoke College.
Kathryn Hellerstein is author of A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish, 1586-1987; she is the editor and translator of Paper Bridges: Selected Poems of Kadya Molodowsky and of the forthcoming Women Yiddish Poets: An Anthology.
Faith Jones is co-translator of The Acrobat: Selected Poems of Celia Dropkin.
Chana Toth-Sewell is a Neubauer Family Distinguished Doctoral Fellow in Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago.