Big Jewish Books

From the Bible to the prayerbook to modern gatherings of secular literature, the anthology has long been a central form of Jewish cultural production. This essay reviews Kathryn Hellerstein's A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish, 1586-1987 (2014), a groundbreaking study of poets who appeared in four early-twentieth-century Yiddish anthologies of female poets (and, inter alia, a fine anthology of translations and commentaries by Hellerstein). It also considers the recent Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry (2014), whose problematic introduction and glossary are balanced out by a useful and various set of poems by 112 poets born since 1945, as well as individual volumes by the Yiddish modernist Celia Dropkin (The Acrobat [2014]) and poet, translator, and anthologist Peter Cole (The Invention of Influence [2014]). © 2015 The Author. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.