Foreword
Acknowledgements
Introduction

1 Talk of the Town
   Phenomenon
   Concept

2 Forsht ayer shtetl!
   Early Writings
   Activist Scholarship
   Looking Forward, Looking Back
   Postwar Collecting and Recollecting
   Shtetl Studies Come of Age

3 Shtetl Fabulous
   Image
   Place
   Fantasy

Notes
Index

By examining the meaning of shtetl, Jeffrey Shandler asks how Jewish life in provincial towns in Eastern Europe has become the subject of extensive creativity, memory, and scholarship. He traces the trajectory of writing about these towns, by Jews and non-Jews, residents and visitors, researchers, novelists, memoirists, journalists, and others, to demonstrate how the Yiddish word for “town” emerged as a key word in Jewish culture and Jewish studies. 

JEFFREY SHANDLER is a professor of Jewish studies at Rutgers University. He is the author of While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust; Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture; and Jews, God, and Videotape: Religion and Media in America.