Miriam Borden | University of Toronto (original) (raw)
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This paper investigates the origins of the description of the Tsenerene, the popular 17th century... more This paper investigates the origins of the description of the Tsenerene, the popular 17th century Yiddish Bible adaptation, as the “women’s Bible.” Tracing a genealogy of the term that locates its origins in the late 19th and early 20th century arguments for or against the importance of Yiddish in Eastern European society, I propose that the Tsenerene has become a convenient mythopoetic tool for crafting and navigating a range of Jewish identities and ideologies. Lack of scholarly critical assessment of the Tsenerene as women’s Bible has generated mistaken assumptions about the readership and audience. Further, examination of the contents of the work fails to produce a compelling case for an overwhelmingly female character or readership. I suggest a metastructure within the text indicating a distinctly rabbinic pedagogical dialogue between text and reader that has never been examined, demanding an investigation of the contents of the work itself.
Papers by Miriam Borden
Canadian Jewish Studies, 2024
Students in Yiddish supplementary schools used texts produced by educators steeped in a diaspora ... more Students in Yiddish supplementary schools used texts produced by educators steeped in a diaspora nationalist pedagogy that reflected the ideological coupling of Yiddish and Yiddishkeit: the Yiddish language informed one's sense of Jewishness. By the 1960s, doodles students left in their schoolbooks challenged this coupling of language and identity. Though it is generally supposed that Yiddish primers ultimately tell us more about the aspirations of adults than they do about the experiences of children, reading these texts together reveals that children evolved their own relationship between Yiddish and Jewishness that was far more subtle than what they encountered in their textbooks. Postwar primers emphasize maintaining the Yiddish language on American soil, to the exclusion of the external culture; children's doodles argue that more important than preserving the language was locating Yiddishkeit in the culture around them.
This paper investigates the origins of the description of the Tsenerene, the popular 17th century... more This paper investigates the origins of the description of the Tsenerene, the popular 17th century Yiddish Bible adaptation, as the “women’s Bible.” Tracing a genealogy of the term that locates its origins in the late 19th and early 20th century arguments for or against the importance of Yiddish in Eastern European society, I propose that the Tsenerene has become a convenient mythopoetic tool for crafting and navigating a range of Jewish identities and ideologies. Lack of scholarly critical assessment of the Tsenerene as women’s Bible has generated mistaken assumptions about the readership and audience. Further, examination of the contents of the work fails to produce a compelling case for an overwhelmingly female character or readership. I suggest a metastructure within the text indicating a distinctly rabbinic pedagogical dialogue between text and reader that has never been examined, demanding an investigation of the contents of the work itself.
Canadian Jewish Studies, 2024
Students in Yiddish supplementary schools used texts produced by educators steeped in a diaspora ... more Students in Yiddish supplementary schools used texts produced by educators steeped in a diaspora nationalist pedagogy that reflected the ideological coupling of Yiddish and Yiddishkeit: the Yiddish language informed one's sense of Jewishness. By the 1960s, doodles students left in their schoolbooks challenged this coupling of language and identity. Though it is generally supposed that Yiddish primers ultimately tell us more about the aspirations of adults than they do about the experiences of children, reading these texts together reveals that children evolved their own relationship between Yiddish and Jewishness that was far more subtle than what they encountered in their textbooks. Postwar primers emphasize maintaining the Yiddish language on American soil, to the exclusion of the external culture; children's doodles argue that more important than preserving the language was locating Yiddishkeit in the culture around them.