YIVO and Bloomsbury Academic Publish Mississippi: A Yiddish Play about the Scottsboro Affair
(New York, NY) – The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is proud to announce the publication of Mississippi: A Yiddish Play about the Scottsboro Affair, the fourth volume in its acclaimed Yiddish Voices series, published in partnership with Bloomsbury Academic.
Available July 23, 2026, this book features the first English translation of Polish-Jewish playwright Leib Malach's powerful 1935 Yiddish play, introducing a significant work of Yiddish theater to English-language readers for the first time. The translation is by Ellen Perecman and Alyssa Quint.
Written in response to the Scottsboro Affair—the wrongful arrest of nine African American youths in Alabama in 1931—Mississippi stands as a powerful example of how Yiddish writers engaged with global events and confronted the urgent realities of racial injustice. The play was originally staged in Warsaw by the experimental Yiddish theater company Young Theater (Yung Teatr), under the direction of the legendary theater director and drama theorist Mikhl Weichert.
“Mississippi resonated with the first Jewish audiences that saw the play in Warsaw and Cracow in the late 1930s, for the way the play seemed to reflect—if only by analogy—the growing menace of anti-Jewish persecution in Europe,” said Quint.
Through its fictionalized retelling of the Scottsboro Affair, Mississippi reveals how Yiddish intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s grappled with the persecution of Black Americans, drawing connections to the discrimination faced by Jews in Europe. In her introductory essay, Alyssa Quint, examines the political ideals that shaped the work and highlights how European Jews recognized striking parallels between their own vulnerability and the experiences of Black Americans.
“Mississippi, available in English for the first time, should change our understanding of discussions about race in the 1930s,” said Amelia Glaser, author of Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine (2020). “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.”
The book is currently available for pre-order at the YIVO Store.
The Yiddish Voices series, made possible through the generous support from the family of Harriet R. Yassky, brings the richness of Yiddish literature to contemporary readers through expertly translated Yiddish works spanning a wide range of authors, genres, and subject matters. Published in partnership with the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and Bloomsbury Academic, each volume presents a rich and engaging English translation accompanied by a thoughtfully paired introduction by a leading historian. Superbly curated by Alyssa Quint and Elissa Bemporad, the series showcases first-time translations of enduring Yiddish texts—including memoirs, novels, and plays—whose topics and themes have powerful contemporary resonance.
For more information contact:
Shelly Freeman
Chief of Staff
YIVO
The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is dedicated to the preservation and study of the history and culture of Eastern European Jewry worldwide. For over a century, YIVO has pioneered new forms of Jewish scholarship, research, education, and cultural expression. Our public programs and exhibitions, as well as online and on-site courses, extend our global outreach and enable us to share our vast resources. The YIVO Archives contains more than 24 million original items, and YIVO’s Library has over 400,000 volumes—the single largest resource for such study in the world. yivo.org / yivo.org/the-whole-story