Jordan Finkin and Debra Caplan on Naydus Press and Yiddish Translation

Recorded on Thursday April 8, 2021, 1pm

A conversation between Jordan Finkin (HUC) and Debra Caplan (Baruch College, CUNY) on Yiddish translation and the founding of Naydus Press, a nonprofit publishing house that aims to increase access to Yiddish literature in English translation.

Sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Jordan Finkin is Rare Book and Manuscript Librarian at the Klau Library of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. A specialist in modern Jewish literatures and Hebrew and Yiddish poetry, he is the author of A Rhetorical Conversation: Jewish Discourse in Modern Yiddish Literature (Penn State, 2010), An Inch or Two of Time: Time and Space in Jewish Modernisms (Penn State, 2015), and Exile as Home: The Cosmopolitan Poetics of Leyb Naydus (HUC, 2017), among other publications. He is also a literary translator; his translation of Leyb Rashkin’s novel, The People of Godlbozhits, appeared in 2017. Dr. Finkin is the founder of Naydus Press.

Debra Caplan is Associate Professor of Theatre at Baruch College, CUNY. Her research focuses on Yiddish theatre and drama, theatrical travel, and Jewish performance culture. She is the author of Yiddish Empire: The Vilna Troupe, Jewish Theater, and the Art of Itinerancy (University of Michigan Press, 2018; winner of the MLA Fenia and Yaakov Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies). Professor Caplan is the co-founder of the Digital Yiddish Theater Project, an initiative to develop a digital portal for Yiddish theater. She is currently working on a biography of the Yiddish actress Molly Picon.