Jessica Kirzane (University of Chicago)
Thursday, March 12
3 pm, Digital Humanities Lab, Golda Meir Library
Collaborative Digital Open Access Publishing and Community Building:Â In Geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies
In Geveb was founded six years ago by a group of then-graduate students to be a central location for the field of Yiddish Studies. It is a free, open-access digital platform without academic affiliation, with a mission to extend the boundaries of the field while fostering community within the field. Editor-in-chief Jessica Kirzane will discuss how the journal’s born-digital platform and independent funding model open up new arenas for scholarly publishing and collaboration. Her talk will focus especially on the pedagogy section of the journal, which addresses the work many Yiddish Studies practitioners perform day in and day out.
Book launch:Â Diary of a Lonely Girl: or The Battle against Free Love, by Miriam Karpilove
translated by Jessica Kirzane
7 pm, Sam & Helen Stahl Center for Jewish Studies, 3367 N. Downer Ave.
First serialized in the Yiddish press in 1916–18, Diary of a Lonely Girl is a novel of intimate feelings and scandalous behaviors, suffused with dark humor. Squeezed between men who use their freethinking ideals to pressure her to be sexually available and nosy landladies who require her to maintain her respectability, the narrator wryly expresses frustration at her vulnerable circumstances. The novel boldly explores issues of consent, body autonomy, and women’s empowerment and disempowerment around sexuality, courtship, and politics.
Jessica Kirzane is an Assistant Instructional Professor in Yiddish at the University of Chicago and Editor-in-chief of In Geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies. She was a 2017 Translation Fellow and a 2018 Pedagogy Fellow at the Yiddish Book Center.
Miriam Karpilove (1888–1956) published dramas, criticism, sketches, short stories, and novellas in many prominent Yiddish periodicals during her long career. She was a member of the Forverts staff, publishing seven novels and numerous works of short fiction in that paper between 1929 and 1937.
Both talks are free and open to the public. Books will be available for purchase and signing at the evening talk, courtesy of Boswell Book Company.
Co-sponsors: Boswell Book Company and UWM’s Digital Humanities Lab, Language Resource Center, Center for 21st-Century Studies, Translation and Intepreting Studies program, and Departments of French, Italian, and Comparative Literature and Women’s and Gender Studies.