Jewish Studies

Miriam Schwartz studies multilingualism in Jewish literature. Have you ever watched a dubbed movie and noticed the actors' lips don't quite match the words? Here's the puzzle at the heart of her research: many Yiddish and Hebrew texts are written in one language, but the characters in those stories would actually have been speaking another. A novel from the early twentieth century might be written entirely in Hebrew, for example, even though its characters would have spoken Yiddish, Polish, or Russian. What happens to those "invisible" languages? Miriam's work shows how these hidden languages leave traces on the page and shape the story, even when they never appear directly. Her research follows this question in literature written across Eastern Europe, North and South America, and the Middle East.

Miriam is also passionate about recovering the voices of forgotten women writers. Many Yiddish women authors were overlooked or struggled to publish their work simply because of their gender, and Miriam works to bring their writing back into the spotlight. For instance, tracing the forgotten Yiddish writer Rivke Rus through multiple archives in North America and Israel, Miriam recovered her life story and offers a new reading of her novels.

Miriam has also contributed to the Bais Yaakov Project at the University of Toronto, working to make the 1930s Bais Yaakov Journal accessible to a wider audience. In an article for the project, she examines how religious Jewish girls in 1930s Poland learned what it meant to be an "ideal" woman. She explores a folkloric tale about a young Jewish woman named Odl, who valued modesty above everything, even her own life. The story reveals the image of ideal femininity being taught to religious Jewish girls at the time.

Don't miss your chance to study with this fascinating scholar this upcoming fall!