Rebecca Margolis

I am 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. 

My primary area of research is the cultural production of migrants and their descendants, in particular as it intersects with language continuity.

My publications examine the Jewish experience at the intersections of language literature, theatre, film, education, and organizational life. I am the author of Jewish Roots, Canadian Soil: Yiddish Cultural Life in Montreal, 1905-1945 and ייִדיש לעבט Yiddish Lives On: Journeys of Language Revitalization (2023). 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. As part of this project, 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 that interrogates the tropes of Yiddish as funny on American television. I am researching past and contemporary Jewish cultural life in Melbourne.

My scholarly and supervisory interests include:

• 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 1920s through the present;
• Jewish representation on screen; 
• 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.