Paul Celan, born Paul Antschel, was a Romanian-born French poet, Holocaust survivor, and literary translator. Celan is regarded as one of the most important figures in German-language literature of the post-World War II era and a poet whose verse has gained an immortal place in the literary pantheon. Celan’s poetry, with its many radical poetic and linguistic innovations, is characterized by a complicated and cryptic style that deviates from poetic conventions.
Louis Untermeyer was an American poet, anthologist, critic, and editor. He was appointed the fourteenth Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1961.
Daniel Fuchs was an American screenwriter, fiction writer, and essayist.
Moyshe-Leyb Halpern was a Yiddish-language modernist poet. He was born and raised in a traditional Jewish household in Zlotshev, Galicia and brought to Vienna at the age of 12 in 1898 to study commercial art. He then began writing modernist poetry in German. Upon returning to his hometown in 1907, he switched to writing in Yiddish. One of his best-known poems is a satire about his hometown.
Gabriel Preil was a modern Hebrew poet active in the United States, who wrote in Hebrew and Yiddish. Preil translated Robert Frost and Walt Whitman into Hebrew.
Celia Dropkin was a Russian-born American Yiddish poet, writer, and artist.
Irena Klepfisz is a Jewish lesbian author, academic and activist.
April Anne Bernard is an American writer, poet, and novelist.
Ruth Feldman was an American poet and translator.
Mani Leib was a Yiddish-language poet.
Jules Chametzky was an American literary critic, writer, editor, and unionist. His essays in the 1960s and 1970s on the importance of race, ethnicity, class, and gender to American literary culture anticipated the later schools of New Historicism and Cultural Studies in American letters.
John Felstiner, Professor Emeritus of English at Stanford University, was an American literary critic, translator, and poet. His interests included poetry in various languages, environmental and ecologic poems, literary translation, Vietnam era poetry and Holocaust studies. John Felstiner died in February 2017 at the age of 80. He had been suffering from the effects of progressive aphasia at his time of death, at a hospice near Stanford.
Yente Serdatzky was a Russian-born American Yiddish-language writer of short fiction and plays, active in New York City.
Fradl Shtok was a Jewish-American Yiddish-language poet and writer, who immigrated to the United States from Galicia, Austria-Hungary, at the age of 18 or 19. She is known as one of the first Yiddish poets to use the sonnet form; and her stories, which were less well received than her poems in her lifetime, have since been recognized as innovative for their exploration of subjectivity, and, in particular, for their depiction of Jewish female characters at odds with traditional roles and expectations.
Judd L Teller (Yehuda-Leib) was an American author, social historian, lecturer, poet, and held many professional posts in Jewish community life.
The Congress Weekly magazine was a periodical, published in New York, by the American Jewish Congress.
Kathryn Ann Hellerstein is an American academic and scholar of Yiddish-language poetry, translation, and Jewish American literature. Specializing in Yiddish, she is currently a professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the Ruth Meltzer Director of the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. She is known for her research focus on Yiddish women writers, notably Kadya Molodowsky, Malka Heifetz Tussman, and Celia Dropkin.
Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto is Abraham Cahan's first book, published in 1896. It depicts the life of Jewish immigrants living in a New York City ghetto. The plot follows Yekl, Russian-Jewish immigrant sweatshop worker, as he attempts to assimilate into American culture. His attempts are complicated by the arrival of his wife and son, which force him to decide between his Jewish identity and a new American one.
