Kathryn Hellerstein

Kathryn Hellerstein is Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, specializing in Yiddish, and the Ruth Meltzer Director of the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania.

Her books include a translation and study of Moyshe-Leyb Halpern’s poems, In New York: A Selection, Paper Bridges: Selected Poems of Kadya Molodowsky, and Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology, of which she is co-editor. Her monograph, A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish, 1586-1987, won the Barbara Dobkin Prize in Women’s Studies from the Jewish Book Council for the 2014 National Jewish Book Award, and the Modern Language Association 2015 Fenia and Yakov Leviant Prize in Yiddish Studies. Hellerstein’s translations, poems, and many scholarly articles on Yiddish and Jewish American literature have appeared in journals and anthologies, including American Yiddish Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology, to which she was a major contributor. Hellerstein has received grants from the NEA, the NEH, and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as from the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, the Marcus Center at the American Jewish Archives, and the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard. Her Women Yiddish Poets: An Anthology, is forthcoming from Stanford University Press. Hellerstein is currently writing a book, China through Yiddish Eyes: Cultural Translation in the Twentieth Century. 

Hellerstein received her doctorate from Stanford University.