About Me

Rokhl Kafrissen is a teacher, cultural critic, and playwright and the winner of the prestigious 2022 Adrienne Cooper Dreaming in Yiddish prize. She’s been writing about life in the capital of Yiddishland since 2005, when her “Rootless Cosmopolitan” column began appearing in Jewish Currents. Between 2017 and the end of 2024 her “Rokhl’s Golden City” column appeared in Tablet magazine 150 times, covering the length and breadth of Yiddish culture. 

Her opinion pieces, reviews, and essays have appeared in publications all over the world, including Haaretz, Forward, Lilith, Pakn Treger, Jewish Week, and Sapir Journal, and her work has been cited in numerous academic books and articles. She has gained a following for her classes on “Everyday Ashkenazi Magic” and her unique teaching style allows students to discover Ashkenazi folk culture through Yiddish texts: literature, journalism, ethnography, folk song, and more. 

Having lived in New York City for over 25 years, Rokhl has an unparalleled understanding of contemporary Yiddish culture. In May, 2022, she presented a talk called “Mapping the Impossible in the Capitol of Modern Yiddish Culture” for the Yiddishland Pavilion, part of the 2022 Venice Biennale. In September, 2021, Dr. Jeremiah Lockwood, a Research Fellow at UCLA’s Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience, published an in-depth article discussing her work called “Kum tsu mir: Rokhl Kafrissen’s Yiddish Utopia.” Lockwood writes, 

Kafrissen has played an active role as an intellectual supporting new Jewish cultural productivity… ‘Rokhl’s Golden City,’ her bi-monthly column, offers unique coverage of the Yiddish and klezmer worlds of New York and features a breadth of analysis and historical context that is rare in journalism about Jewish music. 

Fall semester 2023, Rokhl designed and taught a new introductory course about Yiddish language and culture for undergraduates in the California State University system. As a guest lecturer, Kafrissen has taught classes on Yiddish literature and culture for Wake Forest University, Youngstown State University and California State University at Northridge. During Fall 2023 and 2024 she taught a popular course on Ashkenazi women’s folk magic for the Yiddish Book Center. She has taught Hebrew school classes as well as synagogue adult education groups, and presented lectures at festivals such as Yiddish New York and Klezkanada. 

Her many years as a supertitle operator for New York's lively Yiddish theater scene served as inspiration to write her own bilingual plays. She was a 2019-2020 14th Street Y LABA fellow, for which she wrote Shtumer Shabes/Silent Sabbath, a black comedy on the dangers of ethnography. Shtumer Shabes received two developmental readings at the end of 2024 and an in-depth interview about the play was featured in In Geveb.