Silver Screen, Hasidic Jews: The Story of An Image

This is a book review of Shaina Hammerman, Silver Screen, Hasidic Jews: The Story of An Image (Indiana University Press, 2018).

Silence and anguish: Muting the feminine voice in Éliette Abécassis’s La Répudiée

As a seminal French-Jewish author, Éliette Abécassis frequently focuses on Jewish issues pertaining to the feminine condition, with emphasis on women’s rights and liberties. In La Répudiée (first published 2000), she invites the reader to discover the mysterious, hermetic world of Hasidic Jews residing in the sacred city of Jerusalem. Within this patriarchal community, the locus of the narrative concentrates on the plight of the protagonist, Rachel, a young woman married to Nathan. This essay examines the imposed silence that oppresses the voice of the Hasidic wife Rachel, who is struggling with the unspeakable crisis of infertility in her marriage. This analysis will also study Abécassis’s revision of her biblical ‘sister’, Rachel, as a quintessential figure of suffering and valiant self-sacrifice.

English Can Be Jewish but Hebrew Cannot: Code-switching Patterns among Yiddish-speaking Hasidic Women

This article discusses why and how English was able to turn into a contemporary Jewish language among Yiddish-speaking American Hasidic Jews, in marked contrast to Israeli Hebrew (IH), which has not been similarly adjusted. One reason is that communal attitudes towards English are not as ideologically charged as compared to the “zealous” opposition to IH. Another reason is that English is able to undergo phonological and lexical modifications that enable Hasidic English to function as an ethnolect used within the community. This process, however, is linguistically more complex for IH, which thus remains an outsider language among Israeli Yiddish-speaking Haredim. The outsider status of IH versus the insider status of Hasidic English is reflected in the code-switching patterns attested among Yiddish public speakers, resulting in a common and effortless pattern of Yiddish-English switching among American speakers, as opposed to rare and marked instances of switches to IH among Israeli speakers.