Rebecca Margolis – författare

The language of a thousand years of European Jewish civilization that was decimated in the Nazi Holocaust, Yiddish has emerged as a vehicle for young people to engage with their heritage and identity. Although widely considered an endangered language, Yiddish has evolved as a site for creative renewal in the Jewish world and beyond in addition to being used daily within Hasidic communities. Yiddish Lives On explores the continuity of the language in the hands of a diverse group of native, heritage, and new speakers. The book tells stories of communities in Canada and abroad that have resisted the decline of Yiddish over a period of seventy years, spotlighting strategies that facilitate continuity through family transmission, theatre, activism, publishing, song, cinema, and other new media. Rebecca Margolis uses a multidisciplinary approach that draws on methodologies from history, sociolinguistics, ethnography, digital humanities, and screen studies to examine the ways in which engagement with Yiddish has evolved across multiple planes.Investigating the products of an abiding dedication to cultural continuity among successive generations, Yiddish Lives On offers innovative approaches to the preservation, promotion, and revitalization of minority, heritage, and lesser-taught languages.

Basic Yiddish: A Grammar and Workbook comprises an accessible reference grammar with related exercises in a single volume.The workbook is structured around 25 short units, each presenting relevant grammar points which are explained using multiple examples in jargon-free language. Basic Yiddish is suitable for both class use as well as independent study. Key features include:a clear, accessible format many useful language examples jargon-free explanations of grammar abundant exercises with a full answer key Clearly presented and user-friendly, Basic Yiddish provides readers with the essential tools to express themselves in a wide variety of situations, making it an ideal grammar reference and practice resource for both beginners and students with some knowledge of the language.

Basic Yiddish: A Grammar and Workbook comprises an accessible reference grammar with related exercises in a single volume.The workbook is structured around 25 short units, each presenting relevant grammar points which are explained using multiple examples in jargon-free language. Basic Yiddish is suitable for both class use as well as independent study. Key features include:a clear, accessible format many useful language examples jargon-free explanations of grammar abundant exercises with a full answer key Clearly presented and user-friendly, Basic Yiddish provides readers with the essential tools to express themselves in a wide variety of situations, making it an ideal grammar reference and practice resource for both beginners and students with some knowledge of the language.

As a linguistic carrier of a thousand years of European Jewish civilization, the Yiddish language is closely tied to immigrant pasts and sites of Holocaust memory. In The Yiddish Supernatural on Screen, Rebecca Margolis investigates how translated and subtitled Yiddish dialogue reimagines Jewish lore and tells new stories where the supernatural looms over the narrative. The book traces the transformation of the figure of the dybbuk—a soul of the dead possessing the living—from folklore to 1930s Polish Yiddish cinema and on to global contemporary media. Margolis examines the association of spoken Yiddish with spectral elements adapted from Jewish legends within the horror genre. She explores how all-Yiddish prologues to comedy film and television depict magic located in an immigrant or pre-immigrant past that informs the present. Framing spoken Yiddish on screen as an ancestral language associated with trauma and dispossession, Margolis shows how it reconstructs haunted and mystical elements of the Jewish experience.