Project MUSE®: Studies in American Jewish Literature - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/443
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Studies in American Jewish Literature.daily12026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 27 (2008) through current issueLatest Articles: Studies in American Jewish LiteratureTWOProject MUSE®Studies in American Jewish Literature1948-50770271-9274Latest articles in Studies in American Jewish Literature. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Introduction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975619
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Three years after Isaac Bashevis Singer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978, a special issue of the journal Studies in American Jewish Literature, “Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Reconsideration,” was dedicated to the author.1 This marked the peak of Singer’s fame, solidifying his role as a central figure in American Jewish literature. As a symbol of Jewish pride, Singer served as a bridge between pre- and post-Holocaust perspectives, the United States and Poland, and Yiddish and English literary traditions. Notably, Singer was still alive in 1981, actively shaping his legacy, and the issue included five interviews with him.Since then, much has changed. Over the past four decades, scholars have critically
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/443/image/coversmallIntroduction2025-11-21text/htmlen-USIntroduction2025-11-212025TWOProject MUSE®124132026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-11-21The Phases and Faces of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Reception in Poland
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975620
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When I examined the reception of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s works thirty years ago, he was at the peak of his fame in the United States and a best-selling author in Poland (Adamczyk-Garbowska 1994b). Ten years later, in 2004, his centennial drew a lot of attention. In the United States it was marked, among other things, by the publication of a three-volume edition of his short stories within the Library of America series; in Poland a conference in the National Library in Warsaw attracted a great deal of attention and inaugurated a yearly Jewish culture festival called “Singer’s Warsaw” (Warszawa Singera), parallel in its scale to the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow initiated in 1988. A year earlier, a conference
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/443/image/coversmallThe Phases and Faces of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Reception in Poland2025-11-21text/htmlen-USThe Phases and Faces of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Reception in Poland2025-11-212025TWOProject MUSE®620992026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-11-21First Steps in Literature: The Early Writings of Yitskhok Bashevis
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975621
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Yitskhok Bashevis’s early writings published in the Warsaw Yiddish press and periodicals between 1925 and 1936 remain essentially unknown with just a few notable exceptions, such as his first novel Sotn in Goray. A mayse fun fartsaytns (Satan in Goray: A Story of Bygone Days [1935]), and three short stories.1 The rest have been neither translated nor collected in book form except for two collections in Polish and Hebrew (Shmeruk 1993; Rubinstein 2016) and one story in English translation (Kennedy 2022). Bashevis’s early work in interwar Warsaw is the only part of his oeuvre that he wrote while he lived and worked as a journalist, writer, and translator in the greatest Yiddish cultural metropolis of Eastern Europe
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/443/image/coversmallFirst Steps in Literature: The Early Writings of Yitskhok Bashevis2025-11-21text/htmlen-USFirst Steps in Literature: The Early Writings of Yitskhok Bashevis2025-11-212025TWOProject MUSE®884912026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-11-21Ventriloquism in Goray, or How Bashevis Found His Voice as a Dybbuk
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975622
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Despite a prolific career spanning nearly sixty-five years, Yitskhok Bashevis Singer’s first novel, Satan in Goray (Der Sotn in Goray [1933]), is considered “a masterpiece of stylization and dramatic symbolization,” and “his most concentrated, coherent, and complete work in the genre of the novel,” to quote Dan Miron (1996b, 157). The novel encapsulates the quintessential features of Singer’s oeuvre: a rich, fantastical use of superstition and the supernatural; a compelling fusion of Eros and Thanatos; blurred boundaries between reality and dream, Satan and saint, Messianic hope and bleak pessimism—all imbued with dark humor and grotesque elements. Scholars have traced the novel’s diverse sources, from popular
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/443/image/coversmallVentriloquism in Goray, or How Bashevis Found His Voice as a Dybbuk2025-11-21text/htmlen-USVentriloquism in Goray, or How Bashevis Found His Voice as a Dybbuk2025-11-212025TWOProject MUSE®520002026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-11-21“A Splendid Anachronism”: The Yiddish Voices of the Family Singer
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975623
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Menachem Kipnis captures I. J. singer having a chat with Jewish wagon drivers from Żyrardów, Poland. Photograph from Fun a velt vos iz nishto mer, facing p. 128, 1946. New York, Farlag Matones.The photograph in Fig. 1 was taken in 1926 by Menachem Kipnis for the weekly illustrated supplement of The Jewish Daily Forward. As usual, Kipnis supplied his own folksy caption, to wit: “Y. Y. Singer khapt a shmues mit yidn balegoles, fun Zyrardow, Poyln” (I. J. Singer Has a Chat with Jewish Wagon Drivers from Żyrardow, Poland). Sporting a walking stick and dressed in latest European fashion, the eminent Yiddish writer can be seen conversing with the local populace, not only, presumably, in order to learn about the difficult
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/443/image/coversmall“A Splendid Anachronism”: The Yiddish Voices of the Family Singer2025-11-21text/htmlen-US“A Splendid Anachronism”: The Yiddish Voices of the Family Singer2025-11-212025TWOProject MUSE®770532026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-11-21“There is no such thing as Yiddish literature”: Metafictional Doubling in I. B. Singer’s “Vanvild Kava”
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975624
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Isaac Bashevis Singer is often regarded not as one author, but two. The discrepancy between his two distinct bodies of work, one in Yiddish and another in English, can be described as a strategy of “double writing” (Fedchenko 2019, 109) that has led Singer to produce “a double corpus of literary texts, aimed at fitting into two different literary traditions” (108). Scholars have identified Singer’s twofold nature also as a gap between the nature of his work—a highly sophisticated body of modernist writing—and the nature of its reception, especially among his English readers, as a primitive storyteller, a representative of the Old World of Jewish Eastern Europe (Miller 1985, 121; see also Wisse 1981, 149). These
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/443/image/coversmall“There is no such thing as Yiddish literature”: Metafictional Doubling in I. B. Singer’s “Vanvild Kava”2025-11-21text/htmlen-US“There is no such thing as Yiddish literature”: Metafictional Doubling in I. B. Singer’s “Vanvild Kava”2025-11-212025TWOProject MUSE®699742026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-11-21Bashevis Reconsidered: Rereading Singer through Gender and Queer Lenses
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975625
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Isaac Bashevis Singer (1903–91) has a terrible reputation when it comes to women, both in life and in his works. When alive, he was repeatedly described as a womanizer who often led several extramarital affairs simultaneously, including sleeping with his female translators. However when researching that claim, Singer’s biographer noted that “everyone acknowledged it, but . . . no one had any idea who the women might have been” (Hadda 2003, 9). After his death, Bashevis’s allegedly promiscuous life cast a long shadow over his oeuvre, which, critics agreed, consisted of sexist depictions of women as faceless objects of male desire or as “insatiable sexual predators” (Torton Beck 1979).Twenty-first-century scholars
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/443/image/coversmallBashevis Reconsidered: Rereading Singer through Gender and Queer Lenses2025-11-21text/htmlen-USBashevis Reconsidered: Rereading Singer through Gender and Queer Lenses2025-11-212025TWOProject MUSE®539752026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-11-21Yentl and Teibele Onstage: Dramatic Adaptations of I. B. Singer’s Work for a 1970s American Audience
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975626
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On October 14, 2014, Barry Freundel, a prominent Washington, DC, rabbi, was arrested on charges of voyeurism. His secret video recording of women bathing in the mikvah rocked the Modern Orthodox world (Jaffe 2016). Unlike Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, whose sexual misconduct was an open secret from the 1960s until the 1990s (Blustain 1998; Weinreich 2019), Freundel quickly and publicly lost his career. In one of numerous think pieces addressing the scandal, Amy Stone invoked Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–91) to describe her horror at Freundel’s behavior: “This is the stuff of an Isaac Bashevis Singer story conjuring up the demonic side of shtetl life. Not the schoolboy prank where Yentl the Yeshiva Boy is
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/443/image/coversmallYentl and Teibele Onstage: Dramatic Adaptations of I. B. Singer’s Work for a 1970s American Audience2025-11-21text/htmlen-USYentl and Teibele Onstage: Dramatic Adaptations of I. B. Singer’s Work for a 1970s American Audience2025-11-212025TWOProject MUSE®876622026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-11-21Poetics, Phantasms, and the Ethics of Holocaust Representation: Isaac Bashevis Singer and American Fiction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975627
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Isaac Bashevis Singer’s reluctance to engage with the United States had been set in 1943, seven years after he arrived in New York as a well-regarded novelist from Warsaw. In August 1943, Bashevis (c. 1904–91) defined the predicament of Yiddish writers in the United States negatively when he characterized the Polish-Yiddish literary culture then in the process of being annihilated, writing, “A contradiction ran through this literature’s entire existence. . . . It was godly without a god, worldly without a world. . . . For the Yiddish writer who comes from there,” Bashevis concluded that “the very ground from which he derived literary sustenance has been destroyed along with Jewish Poland. His characters are dead.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/443/image/coversmallPoetics, Phantasms, and the Ethics of Holocaust Representation: Isaac Bashevis Singer and American Fiction2025-11-21text/htmlen-USPoetics, Phantasms, and the Ethics of Holocaust Representation: Isaac Bashevis Singer and American Fiction2025-11-212025TWOProject MUSE®669902026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-11-21Old Truths and New Clichés: Essays By Isaac Bashevis Singer by David Stromberg, and: Writings on Yiddish and Yiddishkayt: The War Years 1939–1945 by Isaac Bashevis Singer, and
: Simpl Gimpl the Definitive Bilingual Edition by Isaac Bashevis Singer, and: “‘I’m Doing Much Better’:
The Letters of Esther Kreitman to Isaac Bashevis Singer” by Esther Kreitman (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975628
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David Stromberg’s recent collections of essays by Isaac Bashevis Singer finally allow readers of English to consider the much broader context of Bashevis as a public intellectual and cultural critic. Rather than the coy, Yiddish-accented, old-world persona always ready with quip that he played up at public events, in these volumes Bashevis emerges as a European intellectual, struggling with the purpose of literature, the role of Yiddish, and the meaning of life. He had hoped to publish an English selection of his essays on several occasions, including during the last years of his life under the working title God’s Fugitives, but the demands of fame and then frailty, interrupted these plans. Writings on Yiddish and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/443/image/coversmallOld Truths and New Clichés: Essays By Isaac Bashevis Singer by David Stromberg, and: Writings on Yiddish and Yiddishkayt: The War Years 1939–1945 by Isaac Bashevis Singer, and
: Simpl Gimpl the Definitive Bilingual Edition by Isaac Bashevis Singer, and: “‘I’m Doing Much Better’:
The Letters of Esther Kreitman to Isaac Bashevis Singer” by Esther Kreitman (review)2025-11-21text/htmlen-USOld Truths and New Clichés: Essays By Isaac Bashevis Singer by David Stromberg, and: Writings on Yiddish and Yiddishkayt: The War Years 1939–1945 by Isaac Bashevis Singer, and
: Simpl Gimpl the Definitive Bilingual Edition by Isaac Bashevis Singer, and: “‘I’m Doing Much Better’:
The Letters of Esther Kreitman to Isaac Bashevis Singer” by Esther Kreitman (review)2025-11-212025TWOProject MUSE®358302026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-11-21