Modern Ladino Culture

"This groundbreaking, eye-opening study demonstrates that literary and cultural analytical tools are key to answering historical questions about Ladino texts. . . . Borovaya's study underscores the richness of Ladino literature as a source for the history of Ottoman Sephardim and their diasporic offshoots."

~Aviva Ben-Ur, University of Massachusetts

"A superb literary-historical study of Ladino literature . . . that goes very far in fleshing out, correcting, and innovatively interpreting the history and substance of Ladino literary production."

~Sarah Abrevaya Stein, author of Making Jews Modern (IUP, 2003)

"Olga Borovaya's brilliant path-breaking book transforms our understanding of modern secular Ladino cultural production at its apogee. . . .This extraordinary work, the result of prodigious research and analysis, will become the ultimate book of reference for future scholarship on the subject."

~Aron Rodrigue, Stanford University

"Borovaya's meticulously-researched book examines the relationship between linguistic and historical developments as they come into view through these Ladino texts.1.2 2013"

~Journal of Jewish Languages

"Olga Borovaya's brilliant book—the first comprehensive study of modern Ladino print culture—transforms our understanding of the Ottoman Sephardi world in the era of westernisation that preceded its demise. . . [T]his terrific book is a work of prodigious scholarship and arresting insight. It should be required reading not just for modern Jewish historians, but for all those interested in literacy, secularisation and the impact of the West in the Ottoman world. Dec. 2015"

~English Historical Review

"With detailed notes and an index Borovaya presents a comprehensive but highly readable analysis which provides a welcome companion to the study of a rather rare collection of materials."

~Jewish Book Council

"Olga Borovaya has written a highly intelligent and highly intelligible book on Ladino literary production in the modernizing, secularizing final century and a half of the Ottoman empire. Borovaya brings clarity and freshness to an area of study that has long remained the hotly debated and often fiercely guarded domain of a small clutch of scholars."

~Slavic Review

"This is a groundbreaking and comprehensive study of the modernization of the culture of a minority group. ... On the basis of exhaustive research, Borovaya combines enlightening analysis with detailed information in a study that provides an innovative approach to the study of Ladino culture and Sephardi history. In addition to scholars of Sephardi studies, this work is of tremendous importance for those interested in cultural developments among minority groups, and the interconnections among various cultural aspects."

~H-Judaic