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The Yiddish Supernatural on Screen

Dybbuks, Demons and Haunted Jewish Pasts

The Yiddish Supernatural on Screen cover

The Yiddish Supernatural on Screen

Dybbuks, Demons and Haunted Jewish Pasts

Description

As a linguistic carrier of a thousand years of European Jewish civilization, the Yiddish language is closely tied to immigrant pasts and sites of Holocaust memory. In The Yiddish Supernatural on Screen, Rebecca Margolis investigates how translated and subtitled Yiddish dialogue reimagines Jewish lore and tells new stories where the supernatural looms over the narrative. The book traces the transformation of the figure of the dybbuk—a soul of the dead possessing the living—from folklore to 1930s Polish Yiddish cinema and on to global contemporary media. Margolis examines the association of spoken Yiddish with spectral elements adapted from Jewish legends within the horror genre. She explores how all-Yiddish prologues to comedy film and television depict magic located in an immigrant or pre-immigrant past that informs the present. Framing spoken Yiddish on screen as an ancestral language associated with trauma and dispossession, Margolis shows how it reconstructs haunted and mystical elements of the Jewish experience.

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Reimagining the Dybbuk on the Yiddish Screen
Chapter 2: Haunted Presents in Yiddish Horror Movies
Chapter 3: Magical Pasts in Yiddish Prologues

Product details

Published Feb 27 2024
Format Ebook (Epub & Mobi)
Edition 1st
Pages 234
ISBN 9781666910889
Imprint Lexington Books
Illustrations 15 BW Photos
Series Jewish Science Fiction and Fantasy
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Author

Rebecca Margolis

Rebecca Margolis is Pratt Foundation Chair of Jewi…

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