Part literary history and part medical sociology, Gilman’s book chronicles the careers of three major immigrant Yiddish poets of the twentieth century—Solomon Bloomgarten (Yehoash), Sholem Shtern, and H. Leivick—all of whom lived through, and wrote movingly of, their experience as patients in a tuberculosis sanatorium. Gilman addresses both the formative influence of the sanatorium on the writers’ work and the culture of an institution in which, before the days of antibiotics, writing was encouraged as a form of therapy. He argues that each writer produced a significant body of work during his recovery, itself an experience that profoundly influenced the course of his subsequent literary career. Seeking to recover the “imaginary” of the sanatorium as a scene of writing by doctors and patients, Gilman explores the historical connection between tuberculosis treatment and the written word. Through a close analysis of Yiddish poems, and translations of these writers, Gilman sheds light on how essential writing and literature were to the sanatorium experience. All three poets wrote under the shadow of death. Their works are distinctive, but their most urgent concerns are shared: strangers in a strange land, suffering, displacement, acculturation, and, inevitably, what it means to be a Jew.

Volume XXIX of Studies in Contemporary Jewry takes its title from a joke by Groucho Marx: "I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member." The line encapsulates one of the most important characteristics of Jewish humor: the desire to buffer oneself from potentially unsafe or awkward situations, and thus to achieve social and emotional freedom. By studying the history and development of Jewish humor, the essays in this volume not only provide nuanced accounts of how Jewish humor can be described but also make a case for the importance of humor in studying any culture. A recent survey showed that about four in ten American Jews felt that "having a good sense of humor" was "an essential part of what being Jewish means to them," on a par with or exceeding caring for Israel, observing Jewish law, and eating traditional foods. As these essays show, Jewish humor has served many functions as a form of "insider" speech. It has been used to ridicule; to unite people in the face of their enemies; to challenge authority; to deride politics and politicians; in America, to ridicule conspicuous consumption; in Israel, to contrast expectations of political normalcy and bitter reality. However, much of contemporary Jewish humor is designed not only or even primarily as insider speech. Rather, it rewards all those who get the punch line. A Club of Their Own moves beyond general theorizing about the nature of Jewish humor by serving a smorgasbord of finely grained, historically situated, and contextualized interdisciplinary studies of humor and its consumption in Jewish life in the modern world.

At the turn of the twentieth century, tuberculosis was a leading cause of death across America, Europe, and the Russian Empire. The incurable disease gave rise to a culture of convalescence, creating new opportunities for travel and literary reflection. Tubercular Capital tells the story of Yiddish and Hebrew writers whose lives and work were transformed by a tubercular diagnosis. Moving from eastern Europe to the Italian Peninsula, and from Mandate Palestine to the Rocky Mountains, Sunny S. Yudkoff follows writers including Sholem Aleichem, Raḥel Bluvshtein, David Vogel, and others as they sought "the cure" and drew on their experiences of illness to hone their literary craft. Combining archival research with literary analysis, Yudkoff uncovers how tuberculosis came to function as an agent of modern Jewish literature. The illness would provide the means for these suffering writers to grow their reputations and find financial backing. It served a central role in the public fashioning of their literary personas and ushered Jewish writers into a variety of intersecting English, German, and Russian literary traditions. Tracing the paths of these writers, Tubercular Capital reconsiders the foundational relationship between disease, biography, and literature.

Neither in Dark Speeches nor in Similitudes is an interdisciplinary collaboration of Canadian and American Jewish studies scholars who compare and contrast the experience of Jews along the chronological spectrum (ca. 1763 to the present) in their respective countries. Of particular interest to them is determining the factors that shaped the Jewish communities on either side of our common border, and why they differed. This collection equips Canadian and American Jewish historians to broaden their examination and ask new questions, as well as answer old questions based on fresh comparative data.

In a famous comment made by the poet Chayim Nachman Bialik, Hebrew—the language of the Jewish religious and intellectual tradition—and Yiddish—the East European Jewish vernacular—were “a match made in heaven that cannot be separated.” That marriage, so the story goes, collapsed in the years immediately preceding and following World War I. But did the “exes” really go their separate ways? Lingering Bilingualism argues that the interwar period represents not an endpoint but rather a new phase in Hebrew-Yiddish linguistic and literary contact. Though the literatures followed different geographic and ideological paths, their writers and readers continued to interact in places like Berlin, Tel Aviv, and New York—and imagined new paradigms for cultural production in Jewish languages. Brenner traces a shift from traditional bilingualism to a new translingualism in response to profound changes in Jewish life and culture. By foregrounding questions of language, she examines both the unique literary-linguistic circumstances of Ashkenazi Jewish writing and the multilingualism that can lurk within national literary canons.

"Symptoms of the Self offers the first full study of one of the most paradoxically popular figures in transatlantic theatre history: the stage consumptive. Consumption, or tuberculosis, remains one of the world's most deadly epidemic diseases; in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in France, Britain, and North America, it was a leading killer, responsible for the deaths of as many as one in four members of the population. Despite-or perhaps because of-their horrific experiences of tubercular mortality, throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century audiences in these same countries flocked to see consumptive characters love, suffer, and die onstage. Beginning with the origins of the stage consumptive in Romantic-era France and ranging through to the queer theatres of New York City in the 1970s, this book explores famous plays such as La dame aux camélias (Camille) and Uncle Tom's Cabin alongside rediscovered sentimental dramas, frontier melodramas, and naturalistic problem plays. It shows how theatre artists used the symptoms of tuberculosis to perform the inward emotions and experiences of the modern self, and how the new theatrical vocabulary of realism emerged out of the innovations of the sentimental stage. In the theatre, the consumptive character became a vehicle through which-for better and for worse-standards of health, beauty, and virtue were imposed; constructions of class, gender, and sexuality were debated; the boundaries of nationhood were transgressed or maintained; and an exceedingly fragile whiteness was held up as a dominant social ideal. By telling the story of tuberculosis on the transatlantic stage, Symptoms of the Self aims to uncover some of the wellsprings of modern Western theatrical practice-and of ideas about the self that still affect the way human beings live and die"--

Described by theater critics as one of the twentieth century’s greatest talents, Benjamin Zuskin (1899–1952) was a star of the Moscow State Jewish Theater. In writing The Travels of Benjamin Zuskin, his daughter, Ala Zuskin Perelman, has rescued from oblivion his story and that of the theater in which he served as performer and, for a period, artistic director. Against the backdrop of the Soviet regime’s effort to stifle any expression of Jewish identity, the Moscow State Jewish Theater—throughout its thirty years of existence (1919–49)—maintained a high level of artistic excellence while also becoming a center of Jewish life and culture. A member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, Zuskin was arrested under fabricated charges and eventually executed on August 12, 1952, along with twelve other eminent Soviet Jews and committee members. Zuskin Perelman’s fascinating chronicle, more than just a personal memoir, conveys the vibrancy and energy of Jewish theater, celebrates the cultural achievements of Soviet Jews, and calls attention to the tragic fate that awaited them. The Travels of Benjamin Zuskin sheds light on Soviet Jewish history through the lens of one of the period’s most influential cultural icons.