Yiddish Culture between the Two World Wars: The Case of Leyb Malakh and Mikhl Weichert’s 'Mississippi'

Tuition: $200 | YIVO members: $150**

This is a live, online course held on Zoom. Enrollment will be capped at about 25 students. All course details (Zoom link, syllabus, handouts, recordings of class sessions, etc.) will be posted to Canvas. Students will be granted access to the class on Canvas after registering for the class here on the YIVO website. This class will be conducted in English, and any readings will be in English.

Instructor: Alyssa Quint

In 1935, the Warsaw-based experimental Yiddish theater troupe called Ying-teater (Theater of the Young) débuted Mississippi, a play about the Scottsboro Boys, twelve African Americans who had been falsely accused, tried, and sentenced to death for raping two white women on a freight train in Alabama in 1931. From today’s vantage point, a group of Jewish actors playing out a tragic episode that was still unfolding more than an ocean away—and at a time when their own communities grew more politically fragile—strikes one as nothing more than a cultural anomaly. And yet.

This course offers a close reading of Mississippi as generated by a long-simmering transnational cultural milieu. Alongside a bilingual script of the play, we will dip into an array of fascinating primary sources closely connected to it and its makers, including reviews, letters, music, and theater theory. With each one, we will explore a facet of the distinctive Yiddish cultural world at its apex during this era. These characteristics include an unprecedented openness and thirst for culture beyond its own Jewish borders; the leftist political alignment of so many of its cultural producers; the distinctively transnational nature of the Yiddish-speaking world that so profoundly shaped its journalism, theater, and commercial literature; and, finally, the tightening noose of Nazism and antisemitism in Poland of the late 1930s, and its cultural resonances on the Yiddish street.

Yiddish Level:
The course will be conducted in English, with readings (including the script of the play and primary sources) provided in the original Yiddish and English translation. No Yiddish proficiency is required, but those with Yiddish literacy will be encouraged to read the original and bring insights to bear on the discussion.

Course Materials:
The instructor will provide all course materials digitally throughout the class on Canvas.

Alyssa Quint is Associate Editor at Tablet Magazine, a Senior Research Scholar at Yeshiva University’s Center for Israel Studies and a contributing editor of The Digital Yiddish Theater Project. Her book The Rise of the Modern Yiddish Theater (2019) documents the first days of the modern Yiddish theater in late Imperial Russia. She is currently at work on a translation of Leyb Malakh’s Mississippi.

**Become a member today, starting at $54 for one year, and pay the member price for classes! You’ll save on tuition for this course and more on future classes and public programs tickets.