Description: A historically contextualized original English translation of a 1935 Yiddish play by journalist and playwright, Leyb Malakh, which depicts the racial injustice of the Scottsboro Affair that unfolded in 1930s Alabama.
Brief description: Elissa Bemporad is Professor of History and Chair in East European Jewish History and the Holocaust at Queens College and the Graduate Center - CUNY. She is a three-time winner of the National Jewish Book Award. Bemporad is the author of three monographs, including Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets (Oxford University Press, 2019) and Revolution, Civil War, and New Ways of Life (NYU Press, 2025). She is the co-editor of several volumes, including, most recently, Pogroms: A Documentary History (Oxford University Press, 2021). Her work has appeared in different languages, including French, Hebrew, Yiddish, Italian, and Russian.
Review Quotes:
"This is a lucid and lively translation of a timely Yiddish play, one that asks difficult questions about allyship and the intersecting interests and conflicts of marginalized peoples. How do we see ourselves in the "other"? Can we see truly, or is our own image always foregrounded in our representation of others?" --Barbara Henry, author of Rewriting Russia: Jacob Gordin's Yiddish Drama (2011)
"Alyssa Quint and Ellen Perecman deserve high praise for bringing this artifact of interwar Warsaw to an English readership. A work of unapologetic agitprop depicting racism, imperialism, and capitalism for a working-class audience, the play illustrates how engaged Yiddish culture was with international politics as well as an aesthetic avant-garde. This will be an invaluable resource for teachers, performers, and devotees of Yiddish culture." --Marc Caplan, author of Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin: A Fugitive Modernism (2021) "Mississippi, available in English for the first time, should change our understanding of discussions about race in the 1930s. This sensitive translation by Ellen Perecman and Alyssa Quint, combined with Quint's thoughtful and thoroughly researched introduction, will add a new artistic source to studies of Black history, Jewish history, and Yiddish theater." --Amelia Glaser, author of Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine (2020)