Shund.org is a database of Yiddish popular fiction, collecting and analyzing works of entertainment literature written in Yiddish and published as books and pamphlets and serialized in the Yiddish press. The site launched in beta mode in August 2023, cataloguing the popular fiction that appears in the New York newspaper Forverts, but with plans to grow the database significantly in the coming years. The project is the result of a collaboration with Matt Cook, Digital Scholarship Program Manager for Harvard Library.
A Woman’s Honor, The Lost Daughter, It’s Hard to be a Mother, The Masked World—these are just a few titles from the thousands of Yiddish pulp novels published during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Serialized as stand-alone pamphlets or in the pages of the Yiddish press, novels like these are twisting tales of murder and infidelity, adventure and political intrigue. Though labeled by critics as “trash” (shund in Yiddish), they were central to Jewish daily life throughout the global network of Ashkenazi Jewry. Today these texts remain largely unstudied even as scholars assert their importance to understanding Yiddish culture and its afterlives. This project aims to bridge this gap by producing a collaborative, open-access database that will synthesize shund’s varied and disparate archives and facilitate new scholarship. With a better understanding of what exactly constitutes shund, a group of scholars can together produce comparative histories of the genre while theorizing it as a paradigm for how marginalized cultures confront the modern world.
This project is supported by grants from Harvard’s Milton Fund, the Dean’s competitive fund for innovative scholarship, and the Center for Jewish Studies.
In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies
In geveb aims to be a central address for the study of all things Yiddish—the focal point for discussions of Yiddish literature, language, and culture, and
the home for the next generation of Yiddish scholarship. In geveb, which in Yiddish means “in web,” catalyzes and renews dialogue between scholars around the world about Yiddish culture, weaving together the voices and texts of Yiddish’s past, present, and future.
The online journal features peer-review articles and book reviews, new translations, a forum for the exchange of pedagogical materials surrounding the teaching of Yiddish language and Yiddish culture, and a blog for multimedia essays.
I was the journal’s founding editor-in-chief and served in the position from 2014–2016; I was senior editor (co-editor of the peer-review section) from 2016–2022; I’m currently a member of the editorial board.
saulnoamz.com 