Isaac Leib Peretz (1851–1915), a.k.a Yitskhok Leybush Peretz, best known as I.L. Peretz was a modernist Yiddish language author and playwright. Payson R. Stevens, Charles M. Levine, and Sol Steinmetz count him with Mendele Mokher Seforim and Sholom Aleichem as one of the three great classical Yiddish writers.

His first Yiddish work appeared in 1888. From 1889 he was based in Warsaw.

A writer of social criticism, sympathetic to the labor movement, he wrote stories, folk tales and plays. He founded Hazomir, which became the cultural centre of pre-World War I Yiddish Warsaw.

Much as Jacob Gordin influenced Yiddish theater in New York City in a more serious direction, so did Peretz in Eastern Europe. Israil Bercovici sees Peretz's works for the stage as a synthesis of Gordin and the more traditional and melodramatic Abraham Goldfaden, an opinion that Peretz himself apparently would not have rejected: "The critics," he wrote, "the worst of them thought that M.M. Seforim was my model. It's not true. My teacher was Abraham Goldfaden."

References

• —, I.L. Peretz (http://www.bialik.netaxis.qc.ca/yiddish/peretz.htm) on the site of Yiddish at Bialik.
• Bercovici, Israil, O sută de ani de teatru evreiesc în România ("One hundred years of Yiddish/Jewish theater in Romania"), 2nd Romanian-language edition, revised and augmented by Constantin Măciucă. Editura Integral (an imprint of Editurile Universala), Bucharest (1998). ISBN 973982722. 116.
• Stevens, Payson R.; Levine, Charles M.; and Steinmetz, Sol The contributions of I.L. Peretz to Yiddish literature (http://www.myjewishlearning.com/culture/literature/EuropeanLit/Ashkenazi_Literature/ILPeretz.htm), 2002, on MyJewishLearning.com.