Shandler, Jeffery
1956-
He was born in 1956 in the state of Pennsylvania, a cultural historian and a prose and poetry author. He studied at Columbia University, where he defended his doctoral dissertation in the field of Yiddish linguistics.
He has published in English an entire array of monographs, among them:
While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 1999);
Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (University of California Press, 2005);
Shtetl: A Vernacular Intellectual History (Rutgers University Press, 2014);
Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age: Survivors' Stories and New Media Practices (Stanford University Press, 2017);
Yiddish: Biography of a Language (Oxford University Press, 2020).
He began using the pen name Klara-Bel in 2022 with poems in the journal
Afn Shvel (At the Threshold) and
with a story in the journal
Yidishland (Yiddishland).
Since then, he has published several stories in Yidishland, and—in installments—a novel,
Di Blondzhendike Aventures fun Fayvl Esroyger, Zikhrones Iberdeytseylt fun Zayne Opshamlingen (The Rambling of Fayvl the Citron Man, Memoirs Retold by His Descendants).
He resides in New York (2026).