This one-day workshop highlights women’s roles and experiences in Yiddish, the most widely spoken Jewish vernacular before the Holocaust. During the workshop scholars will explore how women in Yiddish culture have navigated crisis, creativity, and representation across diverse historical and geographic contexts. From Soviet postwar to American literary worlds, the sessions highlight how women’s voices ˗ often marginalized or silenced ˗ engage with themes of memory, embodiment, motherhood, and identity while reshaping cultural and literary traditions. Together, the panels trace a movement from absence and stereotype toward self-representation and feminist reinterpretation, emphasizing the recovery, reinterpretation, and transformation of women’s contributions to Yiddish culture.

Day of schedule:

10:00 - 11:30

Panel 1: Between Crisis and Creation: Bodies, Memory, and Experience in Soviet and Postwar Yiddish

Chair: Roger Horowitz, University of Delaware 

Respondent: Anna Shternshis, University of Toronto

Tamara Gleason Freidberg, USHMM, “Memorial Builders: Women React to the Khurbn/Holocaust in the Yiddish-Speaking Community in Mexico, 1941-1961” 

LeiAnna X. Hamel, Smith College, “Writing the Soviet Jewish Woman: Shifra Holodenko’s Yiddish Poetry of Arctic Exploration”

Julie Sharff, University of Toronto, “Shira Gorshman and Soviet Yiddish: Explorations of Abortion and Motherhood”

12:00 - 1:30 

Panel 2: From Poetic Silence to Recovered Song: Women’s Voices in Yiddish Culture

Chair: Eliyahu Yoggev, University of Delaware

Respondent: Patricia Sloane-White, University of Delaware

Sarah Myerson, Roosevelt Island Jewish Congregation NYC, “Rose Cohen: Reconstructing and Performing Yiddish Songs from Oral Histories”

Naomi Seidman, University of Toronto, “Miriam Ulinover and the Bais Yaakov Movement”

Rebecca Weingart, Washington University in St. Louis, “‘Without words, bring forth my saying’: Silence in Yiddish Women’s Poetry”

2:30 - 4:30 

Panel 3: From Stereotype to Self-Representation: Women in American Literary Worlds

Chair: Polly Zavadivker, University of Delaware

Respondent: Naomi Seidman, University of Toronto

Pamela Brenner, Harvard University, “Vikhne Dvoshe and the Yidene: An Examination of Female Stereotypes in Popular Yiddish Fiction”

Sandra Chiritescu, New York University, “Yiddish in Second Wave Jewish Feminist Journals: Bridges and Lilith” 

Marcin Janczak, University of Toronto, “Yiddishkeit à la Québécoise - Gender, Postmemory and Multilingual Exile in Régine Robin’s La Québécoite”

Chaya Sara Oppenheim, University of Pennsylvania, “A Language of Their Own: Gendered Yeshivish Dialect in Orthodox Jewish Women’s Magazine Fiction”

6:00-7:30 

"Yiddish Glory" Evening Concert Event with Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Psoy Korolenko (New York) and historian Anna Shternshis (University of Toronto)

This event is free and open to the public. Co-sponsored by University of Delaware's Jewish Studies Program, Department of History, Faculty Senate Committee on Cultural Activities and Public Events (CAPE), and the Halina Wind Preston Holocaust Education Committee.