Kathryn Hellerstein

Kathryn Hellerstein is Professor of Yiddish and past Director of the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a visiting professor in Comparative Literature at Harvard in Spring 2026. Her monograph, A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish, 1586-1987 won the 2014 National Jewish Book Award in Women’s Studies and the 2015 Modern Language Association Fenia and Yaacov Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies. She edited the selected essays of Irene Eber, Jews in China: Cultural Conversations, Changing Perceptions (Pennsylvania State UP, 2020). Her co-edited volume, China and Ashkenazic Jewry: Transcultural Encounters, was published by De Gruyter in 2022. Hellerstein’s current projects include Women Yiddish Poets: Anthology; China through Yiddish Eyes: Cultural Translation in the Twentieth Century; The Rosewaters and the Colmans: Jewish Identity in Two Cleveland Jewish Families (1840-1915); and Jewish Women Poets as Translators: Changing Liturgy and Canon.