Jessica Kirzane

Jessica Kirzane is an associate instructional professor of Yiddish at the University of Chicago. She is also the Editor-in-Chief of In Geveb : A Journal of Yiddish Studies, an online publication that includes essays and peer-reviewed articles of interest to Yiddish scholars and students.

An enthusiastic translator of Yiddish literature, Jessica has been published in Another Chicago Magazine, Pakn Treger, AzonaL, Columbia Journal, Your Impossible Voice, In geveb, and elsewhere. She has translated three books by popular Yiddish writer Miriam Karpilove: Diary of a Lonely Girl, or the Battle against Free Love (Syracuse University Press, 2020), Judith (Farlag Press, 2022), and A Provincial Newspaper and Other Stories (Syracuse University Press, 2023). She is currently working on a translation of Zlatke, a coming-of-age story of a Bundist activist, by Miriam Raskin.

Jessica was a 2017 translation fellow at the Yiddish Book Center and is currently the 2025-2025 Rabbi Emmanul S. Goldsmith Translation Fellow at the Yiddish Book Center. She earned a Pedagogy Certificate from the Yiddish Book Center in 2024. She earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Virginia and her Ph.D. in Yiddish Studies from Columbia University in 2017.

Jessica is married to Daniel Kirzane, Rabbi at KAM Isaiah Israel, in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. She and her husband have two children.