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2012, Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry Volume 24
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34 pages
1 file
The plan to create a Chair for Yiddish at the University of Vilnius, Lithuania (previously the Polish Stefan Batory University) not long after the outbreak of WWII was cause more for acrimonious debates among Yiddishists than for collective rejoicing. Given the highly politicized and factious nature of interwar Jewish society, this should come as little surprise. The case of the Chair reflects as much personal rivalries and antagonisms as it does differing perspectives among Yiddishists on the very value and viability of secular Yiddish culture at a moment that was widely understood to represent a crossroads in Jewish history. Beyond this, it offers an opportunity to examine relationships between Jews and their neighbours in Eastern Europe in this tense period and to consider contemporary Yiddishists’ own evaluations of prospects for extraterritorial national cultural autonomy for Jews in differing political environments.
The Jewish Experience of the First World War, 2018
Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 2021
Modernist Yiddish literature was an important part of the Yiddish-cultural response to the existential turmoil caused by the First World War. This “small literature,” to use Kafka’s phrase, came into being without the support of a nation-state and in an alien environment. In a 1922 edition of Warsaw’s avant-garde magazine Albatros, Yiddish poets reflected on their “wandering through various centres of their Jewish extraterritoriality.” Five years later, in 1927, when stateless Yiddish literature became a member of the International PEN Club, this existential extraterritoriality underwent a bold reinterpretation with the new concept of “Yiddishland.” My paper reconstructs the discourse that led to the transformation of the existential concept of eksteritoryalishkayt along with the creation of the cosmopolitan cultural project originally called “dos land yidish,” and later “Yiddishland:” a republic of words that unified the Yiddish speakers globally via literature and arts.
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).
2009
Honoured delegates, guests, and hosts: We are gathered here to consider the fate of a language and culture that have survived a thousand years of European history. The history of Yiddish is somewhat exotic, as European languages go, and if contemporary meanings can be read into history, then Yiddish may just have something to say about the borderless and the displaced among the minority languages of Europe, and about minority languages in general. The history of Yiddish, and the dialectology of Yiddish, have tended to ignore the political boundaries and divides within Europe. For centuries, the Yiddish territory constituted a vast "linguistic empire" in Europe, albeit as a minority language everywhere, in power nowhere. From a linguistic point of view, Yiddish was left free to develop entirely according to the external vicissitudes of history and the internal laws of historical linguistics, without the usual apparatus of normative academies and government edicts. Yiddish was and remained a folk language in Western and Central Europe. It was only in its "second home" in the Slavonic and Baltic lands of Eastern Europe that it evolved into a highly nuanced medium suitable for sophisticated literature of international status. It is that modern, Eastern European Yiddish that was exported by emigrés to the satellite Yiddish centres of London, Paris, and Berlin, to other Western European cities, and overseas, early in our own century. West to east progressions from the folksy to the sophisticated are, as, we see from Yiddish, every bit as viable as those going the other way. Let us not be the ones to predict where the greatest European creations will come from in the next hundred years.
Wortfolge
Prior to the Katastrofe (Yiddish for ‘Holocaust’), Warsaw was the world’s capital of Yiddishland, or the Ashkenazic civilization of Yiddish language and culture. In the terms of absolute numbers of Jewish inhabitants, at the turn of the 20th century, New York City surpassed Warsaw. Yet, from the perspective of cultural and political institutions and organizations, Warsaw remained the center of Europe’s Jewish life. This article offers an overview of the rise of Warsaw as such a center, its destruction during World War II, and the center’s partial revival in the aftermath, followed by its extinction, which was sealed with the antisemitic ethnic cleansing of Poland’s last Jewish communities in 1968. Twenty years after the fall of communism, beginning at the turn of the 2010s, a new awareness of the Jewish facet of Warsaw’s and Poland’s culture and history has developed during the past decade. It is a chance for a new opening, for embracing Jewish culture, Yiddish and Judaism as inhere...
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?
East European Jewish Affairs, 2020
Scholars have long posited a connection between the emergence of Jewish historical consciousness and the “new Jewish politics” of the period 1881–1917. They have largely neglected, however, the many popular Yiddish-language histories that appeared during this time. These popular histories – nearly all of them printed in Warsaw and dedicated to the topic of “world history” – were sold in the first decade of the twentieth century by newly established Yiddish publishing houses and were heavily advertised in the burgeoning Yiddish daily press. I argue that the narratives of cultural work presented in this genre of history provided a conceptual infrastructure for the eventual articulation of a Jewish mass politics in the post-1905 era. Moving beyond the textual analysis of canonical (Russian and Hebrew-language) historical literature reveals the discourses and practices that enabled Yiddish-speakers in the rapidly urbanizing Pale to imagine the Jewish nation as a coherent historical agent.
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Verifiche, 2019
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Contemporary Problems in Mathematical Physics, 2002
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