"The Passionate Few": Youth and Yiddishism in American Jewish Culture, 1964 to Present (original) (raw)
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American Jewish History, 2019
Camp Boiberik, founded in 1923, and Camp Hemshekh, founded in 1959, both had goals of creating Yiddish atmospheres, employing the language throughout the lived experience of camp. Pushing against challenging sociolinguistic trends, their efforts did not come without challenges. However, their attendees’ struggles with and negotiations surrounding Yiddish and Yiddishism led to new understandings of what the language and its associated movement could mean for new generations of American Jews raised in increased comfort, social mobility, and affluence. Considering changing engagements with Yiddish at two Yiddish-focused summer camps, this article describes how these camps came to reimagine and repurposed Yiddishism as a tool towards the transformation and identity-building of American Jewish youth. Considering these camps within the wider history of Jewish camping and the Yiddishist movement from its foundation onward, the author also shows how these camps’ renewed visions of Yiddishism remained pertinent and influential in the decades after these camps closed in 1979 and 1980. Rather than conforming to narratives of death or revival, Hemshekh and Boiberik help depict a more complex story of Yiddish and Yiddishism in postwar America.
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.
Jewish Quarterly Review, 2022
The article examines the history of the first sustainable Yiddish daily in the world, Yidishes tageblat (Jewish Daily News), published in New York between 1885 and 1928). The history of the Tageblat exposes two lacunas in the existing scholarship about Yiddish culture in America. First, there are almost no English-language studies about Orthodox Yiddish newspapers. Second, whereas many historians have accepted and repeated a characterization of the Tageblat as an “Orthodox” paper, in reality it exhibited mildly traditional views that catered to many immigrants’ aching for homey Yiddishkayt, which did not necessitate rigorous observance of Jewish law. The newspaper’s conservatism was anchored in the concept of klal-yisroel (the Jewish people as a whole) rather than specific precepts. The article examines various writers/editors in the paper and shows how they were far not only from Orthodoxy, but sometimes even from traditionalism. This topic also illuminates the paucity of studies about conservative as well as lowbrow American Yiddish culture, especially in comparison to the plethora of studies about radical (socialist, communist, etc.) Yiddish culture. Finally, the article analyzes the difficulty to isolate and define the Tageblat’s kind of traditionalism as a historical phenomenon.
The Yiddish Conundrum: A Cautionary Tale for Language Revivalism
The Palgrave Handbook of Minority Languages and Communities, 2018
For those who cherish the goal of preserving small, endangered languages, some developments (and lessons) from the case of Yiddish might be illuminating, though not in the sense of some straightforward measure of 'success' or 'failure'. There is no consensus on the interpretation of the current curious-and contentious-situation. If the issues raised might serve as a point of departure for debate on its implications for other languages, particularly the potential damage from exaggeratedly purist 'corpus planning movements' as well as potentially associated 'linguistic disrespect' toward the majority of the living speakers of the 'language to be saved', then this chapter's modest goal will have been realized. Moreover, the perils of a sociolinguistic theory overapplied by a coterie with access to funding, infrastructure, and public relations need to be studied. 1 Ultimately, the backdrop for study of the current situation is the pre-Holocaust status quo ante of a population of Yiddish speakers for which estimates have been in the range of 10 to 13 million native speakers. 2 Nowadays, on the one hand, millions of dollars a year are spent on 'saving Yiddish' among 'modern Jews' (secular and 'modern Orthodox') and interested non-Jews. People may be academically, culturally, literarily, musically, sentimentally, ideologically, and otherwise attracted. The number of Yiddishspeaking families these efforts have generated is in dispute, but it is under a
Yiddish Returns: Language, Intergenerational Gifts, and Jewish Devotion.
A medium as brief as this hardly provides ample room to thank my committee. Andrew Shryock guided me through the multiple iterations of this project, often by way of long conversations that always pushed me to think more expansively about my work. Much of what is best about this dissertation bears his imprint, and I'm grateful to have benefitted from such a creative advisor. Deborah Dash Moore offered a model of academic mentorship and intellectual engagement that has profoundly shaped my conception of what it means to produce scholarship. In addition to her impact on this project, the environment of collegiality and intellectual exchange she fostered as director of the Frankel Center over the past decade has been a true gift to scholars in Jewish studies. Webb Keane always struck directly at what was most theoretically at stake in my work. Alaina Lemon was a source of new ideas and productive critique. Finally, before I even enrolled at Michigan, Jonathan Boyarin served as a generous mentor and interlocutor. He has shaped my approach to theory and ethnography at all stages of this project.