מענדעלע

Mendele was a moderated mailing list dedicated to the lively exchange of views, information, news, and שאָר־ירקות related to Yiddish language and literature. Named after Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh’s most famous fictional character, Mendele began circulating among a handful of academics in 1991 and grew to several thousand subscribers by the time it closed in 2016. In addition to remaining an invaluable resource for etymologies, literary history, and פּיטשעװקעס of your choice, Mendele stands as an index of the earliest online communities of Yiddishland, and even hit the big-time as an irritant for a landmark novel of the American Jewish canon.

While you will find the main archives of Mendele on this site, Mendele eventually grew to include several other projects, archives of which are available at the links below:

 (1) The Mendele Review (1997-2008), a literary supplement edited by Leonard Prager z"l of Haifa University, containing scholarly articles, translations, book reviews, and more.

 (2) The Yiddish Theater Forum (2002-06), edited by Joel Berkowitz, now of University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

 (3) Personal Notices and Announcements (2008-21), for Yiddish-related events, commercial offerings, and the like.

 (4) Library of Yiddish Literature, containing PDFs of standardized Yiddish texts and some audio files. An alternate version is available here.

Mendele was founded in 1991 by Noyekh Miller z"l, professor of sociology at Trinity College. Victor Bers, professor emeritus of classics at Yale University, joined on the ground floor as “silent shutef” and more formally in 1997, along with the prolific Iosif Vaisman, now professor of biology at George Mason University. Kalman Weiser, professor of Jewish history at York University, served as shames from 2006-2014 (after an auspicious debut in 1994).

The current listowners are Victor Bers and Joshua Price, lector in Yiddish at Yale.

Raphi Halff, graduate student in Comparative Literature at Harvard University, joined as webmaster in 2023.

The Mendele listserv is no longer active and no longer maintains a subscription list. Since its founding, Mendele has had various digital homes at Trinity College, Yale University, University of North Carolina, Columbia University, Wordpress, and Google. This site, with its redesign of the archives, now constitutes a בית נאמן בישׂראל as part of the other Yiddish subdomains of yiddish.nu. As all digital projects, it can be easily changed and improved. If something is not working for you, let us know: raphi [dot] halff [at] gmail [dot] com.

The Mendele project can be downloaded in its entirety, database and all, from GitHub. You can also read an experimental paper Raphi (not really) wrote about it here and view the static listserv it references here.