Yiddish Hauntings in New Fiction and Film

Join Tali Lavi in conversation with Eleanor Reissa, Dr. Leah Kaminsky and Professor Rebecca Margolis as they speak of the power of Yiddish in representing the Ashkenazi Jewish experience in new fiction, television and film. What happens when today's artists employ Yiddish in their work? This session will draw upon the mysterious and the uncanny in reimagining Jewish pasts. Come prepared for the unexpected to occur.

Speakers:

Dr Leah Kaminsky: physician and award-winning writer. Her debut novel, The Waiting Room, won the Voss Literary Prize. The Hollow Bones won both the Literary Fiction and Historical Fiction categories of the 2019 International Book Awards, and the 2019 American Book Fest’s Best Book Award for Literary Fiction. She is the author of ten books and holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Eleanor Reissa (US): a storyteller in English and Yiddish – her first language. She is an award- winning director and playwright, actress, singer, translator, choreographer, and author. She was last seen on Broadway in ‘Indecent’, plays the matriarch in ‘The Zweiflers’, winner of the Cannes TV Series Award 2024, and has an anthology, The Last Survivor and Other Modern Jewish Plays. She has sung in every major venue in New York and at international festivals. A daughter of Holocaust fighters, her memoir, The Letters Project: A Daughter’s Journey, is a search to discover the truth about her father, as well as herself.

Professor Rebecca Margolis: the Pratt Foundation Chair of Jewish Civilisation at Monash University. Her scholarship focusses on Yiddish linguistic continuity and cultural production to include education, publication, performance, and cinema in Canada has appeared in Jewish Roots, Canadian Soil: Yiddish Culture in Montreal, 1905-1945 and Yiddish Lives On: Strategies of Language Transmission. Her latest book, The Yiddish Supernatural on Screen: Dybbuks, Demons and a Haunted Jewish Past draws on her research of Yiddish dialogue in a corpus of international movies and television over the last twenty years. Her current project investigates how and why Yiddish in American film and television is heard as funny.

Tali Lavi (moderator): writer, critic and public interviewer whose work has appeared in The Jewish Quarterly, The Saturday Paper, Australian Book Review and other publications. Her essay ‘Counting’ was published in Marina Benjamin’s Garden Among Fires: A Lockdown Anthology. She has an MA in Creative Writing (RMIT University), has written a play (Tales of Ash) and is currently working on a longer form work. Tali has interviewed writers for various writers festivals. She was on MJBW’s programming team (2013-2023) and Programming Co-Manager with Janine Schloss (2019-21).

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