American Yiddish Poetry's Encounter with Black America

From the turn of the twentieth century into the years following World War II, Jewish immigrant writers in the U.S. produced many poems in Yiddish that address and attempt to represent African-American experience. These "Yiddish Black" poems fall loosely into three categories: poems that make direct or indirect reference to lynchings; narrative poems or poem-sequences that depict Black characters within the framework of their daily lives; and poems that depict the Yiddish "encounter" with the Black person and set up varying degrees of identification and alienation between the writer and his or her subject. Yiddish Black poems do not exploit the Black image as much as use it to project the sympathies and sense of shared displacement felt by their audience of Yiddish readers.