2025 Theses Doctoral

Bobes, Mames and Daughters: Uncovering Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century American Jewish and American Yiddish Feminist Genealogies

Chiritescu, Sandra Nora

“Bobes, Mames, and Daughters” investigates how feminist genealogies are established in Yiddish and American-Jewish literature of the late twentieth and twenty-first century and what role Yiddish plays therein. In pondering the question of how Jewish women establish a feminist goldene keyt, the dissertation aims to uncover models of female and feminist genealogies of grandmothers, mothers, and daughters in literature. The research is situated between the interdisciplinary fields of Yiddish Studies and Gender Studies and provides several necessary interventions with respect to the heretofore overlooked nexus of Yiddish and American-Jewish feminist discourses.

The dissertation examines Yiddish and English-language works by Jewish women as parallel and intertwining phenomena partaking in explicitly feminist discourses to differing degrees. By and large, my reading of these texts examines how these Yiddish and American-Jewish writers trace their personal histories and Jewish histories as formative for their present and intersecting identities as Jews, women, Americans, feminists and more. The juxtaposition of American-Yiddish with American-Jewish feminist literature challenges, then, the current understanding of Jewish-inflected (secular) feminism, Jewish womanhood, and gendered Jewishness as it emerges in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century in America.