Jewish Roots, Canadian Soil by Rebecca Margolis

We reflect on the legacy of Montreal’s Yom Kippur Ball and try to get to the bottom of an instance of vandalism at an Illinois Chabbad Centre. On this episode, we talk about the Montreal businessman being called the ‘Jewish Schindler’ and break our promise to stop talking about the Canadian election.

The Australian Jewish experience as reflected in its culture, with a particular focus on Melbourne.Erika Davis, who runs the blog Black Gay and Jewish, talks about the work she’s doing to fight racism in the Jewish community with the Jewish Multiracial Network.

Memory of the Holocaust and its aftermath in literature, film, and performance.

Film translation and subtitling, in particular as it pertains in lesser-spoken languages.

Yiddish cinema, including film and television from the 1920s through the present.

Language revitalization, specifically in the context of Yiddish civilization and culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

My scholarly and supervisory interests include:

I am researching past and contemporary Jewish cultural life in Melbourne. As part of this project, I am working on a manuscript titled The Supernatural in New Yiddish Cinema: Dybbuks, Demons and a Haunted Jewish Past (Lexington Books, Jewish Science Fiction and Fantasy series) as well as research that interrogates the tropes of Yiddish as funny on American television. The project examines this transnational cinema as well as the processes of screen translation in the production and reception of cinema in a lesser-used language.

My ongoing research project, New Yiddish Cinema, investigates a 21 st-century corpus of film and television created in a Jewish diaspora language that few of its creators, actors or viewers speak. I am the author of Jewish Roots, Canadian Soil: Yiddish Cultural Life in Montreal, 1905-1945 and ייִדיש לעבט Yiddish Lives On: Journeys of Language Revitalization (2023). My publications examine the Jewish experience at the intersections of language literature, theatre, film, education, and organizational life. My primary area of research is the cultural production of migrants and their descendants, in particular as it intersects with language continuity. I joined Monash University from the University of Ottawa, Canada in early 2020. I am Pratt Foundation Chair of Jewish Civilisation at the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation (ACJC) in the School of Philosophical, Historical & International Studies (SOPHIS) in the Faculty of Arts.

Jewish Roots, Canadian Soil by Rebecca Margolis