Joseph Leftwich born Joseph Lefkowitz, was a British

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

-Jewish critic and translator into English of Yiddish literature

Yiddish literature

Yiddish literature encompasses all belles lettres written in Yiddish, the language of Ashkenazic Jewry which is related to Middle High German. The history of Yiddish, with its roots in central Europe and locus for centuries in Eastern Europe, is evident in its literature.It is generally described...

. He is known particularly for his 1939 anthology

Anthology

An anthology is a collection of literary works chosen by the compiler. It may be a collection of poems, short stories, plays, songs, or excerpts...

 The Golden Peacock of Yiddish poetry

Yiddish literature

Yiddish literature encompasses all belles lettres written in Yiddish, the language of Ashkenazic Jewry which is related to Middle High German. The history of Yiddish, with its roots in central Europe and locus for centuries in Eastern Europe, is evident in its literature.It is generally described...

, and his 1957 biography of Israel Zangwill

Israel Zangwill

Israel Zangwill was a British humorist and writer.-Biography:Zangwill was born in London on January 21, 1864 in a family of Jewish immigrants from Czarist Russia, to Moses Zangwill from what is now Latvia and Ellen Hannah Marks Zangwill from what is now Poland. He dedicated his life to championing...

.

He was one of the 'Whitechapel Boys

Whitechapel Boys

The Whitechapel Boys is a name given to a loose group of Anglo-Jewish writers and artists of the early 20th century. It is named after Whitechapel, which contained one of London's main Jewish settlements and from which many of its members came...

' group (the others being John Rodker

John Rodker

John Rodker was a British writer, modernist poet, and publisher of some of the major modernist figures. He was born in Manchester into a Jewish immigrant family, who moved to London while he was still young.-Career:...

, Isaac Rosenberg

Isaac Rosenberg

Isaac Rosenberg was an English poet of the First World War who was considered to be one of the greatest of all English war poets...

 and Stephen Winsten

Stephen Winsten

Stephen Winsten was the name adopted by Samuel Weinstein, one of the 'Whitechapel Boys' group of young Jewish men and future writers in London's East End in the years before World War I . In the First World War he was a conscientious objector, and imprisoned in Bedford and Reading gaols...

) of aspiring young Jewish writers in London's East End, in the period roughly 1910–1914. He himself retrospectively coined the name, to include also the artists David Bomberg

David Bomberg

David Garshen Bomberg was an English painter, and one of the Whitechapel Boys.Bomberg was one of the most audacious of the exceptional generation of artists who studied at the Slade School of Art under Henry Tonks, and which included Mark Gertler, Stanley Spencer, C.R.W. Nevinson and Dora Carrington...

 and Mark Gertler.

Works

• War (1915)
• What will happen to the Jews? (1936)
• Along the Years, Poems: 1911–1937 (1937)
• The Golden Peacock: An anthology of Yiddish Poetry (1939)
• Yisroel: The First Jewish Omnibus (1945)
• The Tragedy of Anti-Semitism (1948) with A. K. Chesterton
  A. K. Chesterton
  Arthur Kenneth Chesterton MC was a far right-wing politician and journalist who helped found right-wing organisations in Britain, primarily in opposition to the break-up of the British Empire, and later adopting a broader anti-immigration stance. His cousin, the author G. K...
  
  
• Israel Zangwill (1957) biography
• The Way We Think (2 volumes) (1969) editor
• Anthology of Modern Yiddish Literature (1974)
• A Distant Voice: An Autobiography of Samuel Lewin, translator
• Years at the Ending : Poems 1892–1982 (1984)

External links

• Article on the Whitechapel Boys