Allison Schachter is a professor of English, Jewish studies, and Russian and East European studies at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. She researches modern Jewish culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in comparative perspectives. Her first book, Diasporic Modernisms: Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2012), traced the shared diasporic histories of Hebrew and Yiddish modernism. Her second book, Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919–1939 (Northwestern University Press, 2022), a National Jewish Book Award finalist, revises the history of Hebrew and Yiddish modernism by foregrounding women’s voices. She is currently working on a new project on mid-century women intellectuals, which examines how African American and Jewish women writers theorized the postwar moment from feminist and leftist perspectives. She is an avid translator of Yiddish literature. Together with Jordan Finkin, she translated From the Jewish Provinces: The Selected Stories of Fradl Shtok (Northwestern University Press, 2021), which was awarded the 2022 Modern Language Association’s Fenia and Yaakov Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies. They are currently working on a translation of selected stories by Rokhl Brokhes.
Abstract: Lorraine Hansberry, Tillie Olsen: Black and Jewish Women Intellectuals, Race, and the Cold War
