A Yiddish Studies to Come (original) (raw)
The paper seeks to expand the area of modern Yiddish culture beyond literary fiction. It explores the rise of modern Yiddish theatre, press, poetry, and political literature in Imperial Russia in the 1880s. The essay argues that these forms of Yiddish cultural expression first became significant and widespread phenomena in the 1880s. It also highlights the emergence of a diverse Yiddish readership and audience, with different levels of Jewish and European cultural background, in order to counter the common dichotomy that Yiddish was for the masses, whereas Hebrew and Russian were used by the Jewish elites. Finally, the article places the rise of Modern Yiddish culture within the context of major social and economic transformations in East European Jewry: urbanization, population growth, and downward economic mobility. Overall, the article refines and revises certain conclusions offered in the author's book The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture (2005).
Yiddish Literature and Culture in America Syllabus - University of Wisconsin 2016
Course Overview: At the turn of the 20 th century millions of Yiddish-speaking East European Jews arrived in America. Through study of the Yiddish literature and culture they produced, this course will give students insight into these immigrants' experience and their efforts to find a comfortable perch in the American landscape. The course will be subdivided into four sections covering different aspects of these Yiddish-speaking immigrants' experience and efforts: The immigration process and arrival in America; immigrant entry into the workplace; encounter with urban modernity and America's racial and ethnic diversity; the tension between assimilatory pressures and the desire for a transnational identity. Although turn-of-the-century Jewish immigrants produced an unprecedented Yiddish cultural blossoming worthy of concentrated study, this course, which fulfills the Undergraduate Studies Ethnic Studies General Education Requirement, strives to employ this rich culture as a jumping-off point to help you achieve greater understanding and appreciation of the experience of contemporary ethnic/racial minorities with origins abroad who have become a growing element of American society since the expansion of immigration to the United States in the 1960s. Learning Goals: 1) Students will achieve greater understanding and appreciation of diversity and thereby help improve campus climate and better prepare themselves for life and careers in an increasingly multicultural U. S. environment. 2) Through study of American Yiddish culture students will attain knowledge of the immigration process and the challenges faced by ethnically and racially divergent immigrant groups as they work to find their desired place in America. 3) Students will achieve grounding in American Yiddish Culture through encounter with works created by fifteen of its leading authors, poets, and directors. 4) Students will learn strategies for analyzing literary, filmic, and poetic texts intended to improve their critical thinking.
Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 2023
At the turn of the twentieth-century Yiddish was standardized, and in the interwar period, this language became the basis for a thriving culture, both in Europe and in America. Yiddishland was for real with its 10–12 million Yiddish-speakers. In comparison, the number of Dutch-speakers living then was similar. However, during the Second World War, Germany visited the Katastrofe (Holocaust) on Europe’s Jews. Yiddishland was erased, survivors dispersed, mostly to America and Israel. Afterwards, silence followed, except for the Nuremberg Trials. But in 1951 the US freed many leading Nazis, who joined West Germany’s elite. Would the total destruction of Dutch speakers and their culture be met with a similar indifference? Instead, this guilty indifference of European and American facilitators-cum-beneficiaries towards the Katastrofe was offloaded onto the survivors themselves. A myth coalesced that it was survivors, who kept silent on the Katastrofe (xvii) until the Eichmann trial in the early 1960s (117). This ground-breaking monograph under review shows otherwise. Yiddish-speaking survivors, journalists and historians spoke up during the war, immediately after, and continued describing and analysing all aspects of the Katastrofe until the 1990s. The five surviving Yiddish historians from interwar Poland, Philip Friedman, Isaiah Trunk, Nachman Blumental, Joseph Kermish and Mark Dworzecki – wrote, edited, published, discussed, lectured and corresponded in Yiddish, across the entire world, faithful to the principle of accessing sources in their original languages (196, 212), in this case, Yiddish. When oral history was frowned upon, they interviewed survivors, mainly in Yiddish. These five historians also helped survivors write and publish izkor bikher (yizkor books) their shtetlekh (shtetls). Mark L. Smith shows how ‘novel approaches’ to the study of the Katastrofe were developed decades earlier by the aforementioned Yiddish historians (278). These Yiddish historians busted a variety of myths, for instance, of ‘Jewish cowardice’ (233), or that Jews ‘allowed themselves to be murdered’ (230). It was Dworzecki, who in 1958, created the world’s first chair in Holocaust studies at Bar-Ilan University. Earlier, when freedom of research was curbed in communist Poland, Blumental, Kermish and Trunk founded, in 1950, a Katastrofe research programme in the Warsaw Ghetto Fighters’ House in Israel (29–30). It was the first museum of the Katastrofe, established in 1949. Eventually, the Yiddish historians began translating their works into other languages. But the primary sources remain available predominantly in Yiddish. The detailed annotated bibliographies of these five historians’ publications offer a gateway to this material. My sole criticism is that alongside Romanizations and English translations of Yiddish titles, these titles ought to be given in the original Yiddish-Hebrew script too. Finally, thanks to Smith’s monograph, at present no student of the Katastrofe will have an excuse to do research on the subject without a reading command of Yiddish. Would any scholar even consider probing into modern Germany without being able to read in German? Shouldn’t the same level of respect be accorded to Yiddishland, and the victims of the Katastrofe perpetrated by German genocidaires?