Rebecca Margolis

I am director and Pratt Foundation Chair of Jewish Civilisation at the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation (ACJC) in the School of Philosophical, Historical & International Studies (SOPHIS) in the Faculty of Arts. 

I joined Monash University from the University of Ottawa, Canada in early 2020. 

• Language revitalization, specifically in the context of Yiddish civilization and culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries;
• Yiddish cinema, including film and television from the 1930s and a more recent incarnation the last two decades;
• Jewish representation on screen as funny; 
• Film translation and subtitling, in particular as it pertains in lesser-spoken languages;
• Memory of the Holocaust and its aftermath in literature, film, and performance;
• The Australian Jewish experience as reflected in its culture, with a particular focus on Melbourne

My publications examine the Jewish experience at the intersections of language literature, theatre, film, education, and organizational life. My forthcoming monograph,ייִדיש לעבט Yiddish Lives On: Journeys of Language Revitalization (McGill Queen's University Press, 2023), examines strategies for the transmission of a lesser-spoken language and culture in the areas of publishing, education, community and youth activism, performance, cinema and new media. My ongoing research project, New Yiddish Cinema, investigates a 21^st-century corpus of film and television created in a Jewish diaspora language that few of its creators, actors or viewers speak. The project examines this transnational cinema as well as the processes of screen translation in the production and reception of cinema in a lesser-used language. I am working on a manuscript titled The Supernatural in New Yiddish Cinema: Dybbuks, Demons and a Haunted Jewish Past (Lexington Books, Jewish Science Fiction and Fantasy series) as well as research into Yiddish in American comedy television.