Solomon A. Birnbaum: an appreciation of a lifetime of scholarship on Yiddish 1 (original) (raw)
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As an integral part of the cultural history of German Jewry, early modern Yiddish and the literary corpus it produced found their way into the debate over the "Jewish question" in German scholarly discourse of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century. Focusing on the field of Jewish Volkskunde, this paper explores the place of Yiddish in the works of two ideologically opposing camps: the racial perception of Jewry on the one hand, and the liberal, integrationist definition of Jewry on the other. As demonstrated in the paper, the engagement of turn-of-the-century Jewish folklorists with early modern Yiddish did not derive merely from a scholarly ambition to encompass all aspects of Jewish culture, or from nostalgic longings to a bygone Jewish world. It was, to a large extent, an expression of cultural and intellectual resistance by a minority group, who attempted to promote an alternative to the hegemonic scholarly discourse of the time.
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UNIWERSYTET MARII CURIE- SKŁODOWSKIEJ What American-Jews Think in Yiddish
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This paper is devoted to the study of Yiddish loanwords in contemporary English and specifically to the ways in which they are applied in language by American Jews today. The purpose of the paper is to show the distinct pattern of use of loanwords by the Jewish community as a linguistic community and a sub-culture in the US. The work consists of three chapters. The first chapter introduces and reviews theories of culture and language focusing on the ethnolinguistic approach, surveying, among others, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the idea of worldview, and the use of keywords and culture-specific words in the study of culture. The second chapter explores the Yiddish language from a diachronic perspective, examining the cultural-linguistic changes it sustained over about 700 years through social change and migration. The final chapter is devoted to the analysis of my questionnaire. Using the data gathered in it, this chapter sets to establish the extent to which a selected vocabulary is familiar to the respondents' demographics, while also examining the respondents' knowledge of the words' context(s) of use.