Our Most Beautiful Children: Communist Contests and Poetry for Immigrant Jewish Youth in Popular Front France (original) (raw)

Lending identity: circulating literacy, current events, Yiddish culture, and politics in interwar France

Contemporary French Civilization, 2020

This article traces the histories of three Yiddish-language libraries in 1930s Paris. Through an analysis of borrowing practices, holdings, and events, this article illustrates how the libraries of the Kultur-lige and Medem-farband functioned as vectors of culture and politics in interwar Paris. These Yiddish libraries created public and communal spaces within which people from all corners of the Yiddish-speaking Parisian world could sit and learn about current events, literature, history, and politics.

"The Passionate Few": Youth and Yiddishism in American Jewish Culture, 1964 to Present

Jewish Social Studies, 2021

In the last two decades, journalists have chronicled a contemporary "Yiddish Revival," focusing in particular on the language's popularity among a subculture of young Jews. But, while the Holocaust and other circumstances threatened Yiddish on a global scale by the mid-twentieth century, youthful pursuits of, in, and for Yiddish are by no means new. Indeed, each American-born generation has produced a group of young activists who continued to produce, perform, and engage with Yiddish language and culture, adapting the ideals of the Yiddishist movement to new cultural, linguistic, and historical conditions. Chronicling this generational project through the lens of the Yiddishist youth movement Yugntruf and the Yiddish-speaking farm that grew out of it, this article demonstrates how Yiddishism has evolved to mirror the needs, desires, and visions of each North American cohort at its helm, taking on new forms through the lived experiences and relationships of its activists.

Aron Beckerman's City of Light: Writing French History and Defining Immigrant Jewish Space in Interwar Paris

Urban History, 2016

This paper examines the writing of a little-known, but prolific interwar immigrant Eastern European Parisian Yiddish writer, Aron Beckerman, to demonstrate how Yiddish journalism played a pivotal role in defining Paris as a simultaneously French and Jewish space to immigrant Jews living in the city. Engaging urban historical theory on the communal-building effect that public space can have, this article argues that within Beckerman’s writings on Paris-its history and specific places within the city-we see a Paris emerge that details a universalist Republican identity, which, when read through a Jewish lens, leads simultaneously to a particular immigrant, Yiddish-speaking, leftist Jewish understanding of what it means to be "French."

The challenge of memory for Yiddish language activists in Montréal, (p. 221-232)

Ira Robinson, Naftali S. Cohen and Lorenzo Ditommaso, eds, History, Memory, and Jewish Identity, Boston, Academic Studies Press, North American Jewish Studies, 2016, 378 p. , 2016