This event is sponsored in coordination with the Yiddish Folklife Festival of the Finger Lakes (YFFFL), a new three-day arts and cultural festival taking place April 25-27, 2025 at the Lifelong Community Center downtown and other venues in Ithaca, NY.

Featuring live klezmer music, folk dancing, a community potluck, cooking and cultural workshops, a nature talk, an academic lecture, an open mic, and other community events, this intergenerational, all-ages festival is open to the public, including those new to Yiddish music and culture.

*Please see YFFFL Full Festival Schedule for YFFFL full festival pass & links to other individual events of the festival.

It is an exhilarating time to be a feminist in Yiddish studies. As Rachel Rubinstein recently chronicled in a chapter on the translation Yiddish writing by women, we are in the midst of a “new wave” of translations and critical scholarship that is “accelerating with astonishing intensity.” Kirzane has been among the leaders of this wave through her translations of Yiddish writer Miriam Karpilove and her editorial work for In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies. In this talk she will discuss her experiences recovering Karpilove, a brazen feminist writer at the turn of the twentieth century, and will place this translation work in the context of the history - and present day - of recovery and translation of women who wrote in Yiddish.

Jessica Kirzane is the associate instructional professor of Yiddish at the University of Chicago and the editor-in-chief of In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies. Her work has appeared in the edited volumes Matrilineal Dissent: Women Writers and Jewish American Literary History (Wayne State UP 2024) and Judaism, Race, and Ethics (Penn State UP, 2020) as well as in journals such as American Jewish History, the Journal of Jewish Identities, and Middle West Review. She has translated poetry and prose from Yiddish, including three volumes of work by Miriam Karpilove: Diary of a Lonely Girl, or the Battle against Free Love (Syracuse UP, 2020), Judith (Farlag Press, 2022), and A Provincial Newspaper and Other Stories (Syracuse UP 2023).