Prof. Iris Idelson-Shein

PI

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Iris Idelson-Shein is an associate professor in the department of Jewish History at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. She has published on Jewish translation, Old Yiddish literature, and notions of gender, sexuality, and the body in early modern Europe in such journals as the American Historical Review, Eighteenth-Century Studies, AJS Review, and the Jewish Quarterly Review.

 

She is the author of Difference of a Different Kind: Jewish Constructions of Race During the Long Eighteenth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) and Between the Bridge and the Barricade: Jewish Translation in Early Modern Europe (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024), which won the AJS’s Jordan Schnitzer Award and was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award.

 

Idelson-Shein's work has been supported by the European Research Council, the DFG, and the Israel Science Foundation. She is an alumnus of the Israel Young Academy.

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Selected Publications:

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• Between the Bridge and the Barricade: Jewish Translation in Early Modern Europe. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024

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• Difference of a Different Kind: Jewish Constructions of Race During the Long Eighteenth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.​​

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• Jánošíková, Magdaléna & Idelson-Shein, Iris. "New Science in Old Yiddish: Jewish Vernacular Science and Translation in Early Modern Europe." Jewish Quarterly Review 113 no. 3 (2023): 394-423

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• "Of Wombs and Words: Migrating Misogynies in Early Modern Medical Literature in Latin and Hebrew." AJS Review: The Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies, vol. 46 no. 2 (2022): 243-269. 

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• "Rabbis of the (Scientific) Revolution: Revealing the Hidden Corpus of Early Modern Translations Produced by Jewish Religious Thinkers.” American Historical Review 126.1 (2021): 54-82.

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• "Motivations for Translation in Early Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Translations." Zion 81(4) [Hebrew] (2021): 535-562.

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• “No Place Like Home: The Uses of Travel in Early Jewish Children’s Literature.” In Jews and Journeys: Travel and the Performance of Jewish Identity. Ed. Joshua and Levinson Orit Bashkin. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. pp. 129-145.

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• Idelson-Shein, Iris. “Shabbethai Bass and the Construction – and Deconstruction – of a Jewish Library.” Jewish Culture and History 22, no. 1 (2021): 1-16.

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• “Kill The Hen That Crows Like A Cock: Animal Encounters in Old Yiddish Literature," Journal of Jewish Studies 71.2 (2020): 321-344.

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• “Meditations on a Monkey-Face: Monsters, Transgressed Boundaries and Contested Hierarchies in a Yiddish Eulenspiegel.” Jewish Quarterly Review 108.1 (2018): 28-59.

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•  “The Beginning of the End: Maskilic Pedagogy and the Rise of the Child.” Jewish Quarterly Review 106.3, Forum: Jews and Education (2016): 383-395.

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•  “The Monstrous Mame: Mapping the Margins of Maternity in Early Modern Jewish Discourse.” Jewish Social Studies 20, no. 2 (2015): 37-71.

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• “‘Their Eyes Shall Behold Strange Things’: Abraham ben Elijah of Vilna Confronts the Spirit of Mr. Buffon.” AJS Review 36, no. 2 (2012): 295-322.

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• “‘What have I to do with Wild Animals?’: Glikl Bas Leib and the Other Woman.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 44, no. 1 (2010): 57-77.