Two Studies in Yiddish Culture
Author: Percy Matenko
Publisher: Brill Archive
Published: 1968
Total Pages: 196
ISBN-13:
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Survivors and Exiles
Author: Jan Schwarz
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Published: 2015-05-15
Total Pages: 360
ISBN-13: 0814339069
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →After the Holocaust’s near complete destruction of European Yiddish cultural centers, the Yiddish language was largely viewed as a remnant of the past, tragically eradicated in its prime. In Survivors and Exiles: Yiddish Culture after the Holocaust, Jan Schwarz reveals that, on the contrary, Yiddish culture in the two and a half decades after the Holocaust was in dynamic flux. Yiddish writers and cultural organizations maintained a staggering level of activity in fostering publications and performances, collecting archival and historical materials, and launching young literary talents. Schwarz traces the transition from the Old World to the New through the works of seven major Yiddish writers—including well-known figures (Isaac Bashevis Singer, Avrom Sutzkever, Yankev Glatshteyn, and Chaim Grade) and some who are less well known (Leib Rochman, Aaron Zeitlin, and Chava Rosenfarb). The first section, Ground Zero, presents writings forged by the crucible of ghettos and concentration camps in Vilna, Lodz, and Minsk-Mazowiecki. Subsequent sections, Transnational Ashkenaz and Yiddish Letters in New York, examine Yiddish culture behind the Iron Curtain, in Israel and the Americas. Two appendixes list Yiddish publications in the book series Dos poylishe yidntum (published in Buenos Aires, 1946–66) and offer transliterations of Yiddish quotes. Survivors and Exiles charts a transnational post-Holocaust network in which the conflicting trends of fragmentation and globalization provided a context for Yiddish literature and artworks of great originality. Schwarz includes a wealth of examples and illustrations from the works under discussion, as well as photographs of creators, making this volume not only a critical commentary on Yiddish culture but also an anthology of sorts. Readers interested in Yiddish studies, Holocaust studies, and modern Jewish studies will find Survivors and Exiles a compelling contribution to these fields.
The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture
Author: David E. Fishman
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Published: 2010-02-15
Total Pages: 200
ISBN-13: 9780822960768
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture explores the transformation of Yiddish from a low-status vernacular to the medium of a complex modern culture. David Fishman examines the efforts of east European Jews to establish their linguistic distinctiveness as part of their struggle for national survival in the diaspora. Fishman considers the roots of modern Yiddish culture in social and political conditions in Imperial Tsarist and inter-war Poland, and its relationship to Zionism and Bundism. In so doing, Fishman argues that Yiddish culture enveloped all socioeconomic classes, not just the proletarian base, and considers the emergence, at the turn of the century, of a pro-Yiddish intelligentsia and a Yiddishist movement. As Fishman points out, the rise of Yiddishism was not without controversy. Some believed that the rise of Yiddish represented a shift away from a religious-dominated culture to a completely secular, European one; a Jewish nation held together by language, rather than by land or religious content. Others hoped that Yiddish culture would inherit the moral and national values of the Jewish religious tradition, and that to achieve this result, the Bible and Midrash would need to exist in modern Yiddish translation. Modern Yiddish culture developed in the midst of these opposing concepts. Fishman follows the rise of the culture to its apex, the founding of the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO) in Vilna in 1925, and concludes with the dramatic story of the individual efforts that preserved the books and papers of YIVO during the destruction and annihilation of World War II and in postwar Soviet Lithuania. The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture, like those efforts, preserves the cultural heritage of east European Jews with thorough research and fresh insights.
Jewish Cultural Studies
Author: Simon J. Bronner
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Published: 2021-05-04
Total Pages: 480
ISBN-13: 0814338763
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Defines the distinctive field of Jewish cultural studies and its basis in folkloristic, psychological, and ethnological approaches.
Yiddish in Israel
Author: Rachel Rojanski
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2020-01-07
Total Pages: 338
ISBN-13: 0253045185
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Yiddish in Israel: A History challenges the commonly held view that Yiddish was suppressed or even banned by Israeli authorities for ideological reasons, offering instead a radical new interpretation of the interaction between Yiddish and Israeli Hebrew cultures. Author Rachel Rojanski tells the compelling and yet unknown story of how Yiddish, the most widely used Jewish language in the pre-Holocaust world, fared in Zionist Israel, the land of Hebrew. Following Yiddish in Israel from the proclamation of the State until today, Rojanski reveals that although Israeli leadership made promoting Hebrew a high priority, it did not have a definite policy on Yiddish. The language's varying fortune through the years was shaped by social and political developments, and the cultural atmosphere in Israel. Public perception of the language and its culture, the rise of identity politics, and political and financial interests all played a part. Using a wide range of archival sources, newspapers, and Yiddish literature, Rojanski follows the Israeli Yiddish scene through the history of the Yiddish press, Yiddish theater, early Israeli Yiddish literature, and high Yiddish culture. With compassion, she explores the tensions during Israel's early years between Yiddish writers and activists and Israel's leaders, most of whom were themselves Eastern European Jews balancing their love of Yiddish with their desire to promote Hebrew. Finally Rojanski follows Yiddish into the 21st century, telling the story of the revived interest in Yiddish among Israeli-born children of Holocaust survivors as they return to the language of their parents.
Two Studies in Yiddish Culture. I. The Aqedath Jishaq
Politics of Yiddish
Author: Dov-Ber Kerler
Publisher: Rowman Altamira
Published: 2000-01-01
Total Pages: 222
ISBN-13: 0585223572
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Politics of Yiddish means different things to different people. For some it refers to the various social and political forces that shaped the status and the functional diversification of the language. For others it may be analyzed within the context of personal or even collective love and hate of one’s mother-tongue vis-à-vis the politically “mightier” and “culturally more prestigious” languages. After the Second World War, the post-Holocaust realities forced a complete reconceptualization of Yiddishism as both an ideology and a state of mind. Yet, despite or perhaps because of numerous heated debates for and against Yiddish, and the unabating personal wars within the “Yiddishist” camp itself, the subject of Politics of Yiddish is bound to fascinate many modern historians, sociolinguists, and literary scholars. In the present volume it serves as a general theme for studies devoted to internal and external politics of Yiddish language, literature, ethnography, and scholarship.
The Zelmenyaners
Author: Moyshe Kulbak
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-10-15
Total Pages: 449
ISBN-13: 1480440752
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A “masterpiece” of a comic novel following four generations of a Jewish family in Minsk torn asunder by the new Soviet reality (Forward). This is the first complete English-language translation of a classic of Yiddish literature, one of the great comic novels of the twentieth century. The Zelmenyaners describes the travails of a Jewish family in Minsk that is torn asunder by the new Soviet reality. Four generations are depicted in riveting and often uproarious detail as they face the profound changes brought on by the demands of the Soviet regime and its collectivist, radical secularism. The resultant intergenerational showdowns—including disputes over the introduction of electricity, radio, or electric trolley—are rendered with humor, pathos, and a finely controlled satiric pen. Moyshe Kulbak, a contemporary of the Soviet Jewish writer Isaac Babel, picks up where Sholem Aleichem left off a generation before, exploring in this book the transformation of Jewish life.
Choosing Yiddish
Author: Lara Rabinovitch
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Published: 2012-12-15
Total Pages: 596
ISBN-13: 0814337996
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Yiddish Hip Hop, a nineteenth-century “Hasidic Slasher,” obscure Yiddish writers, and immigrant Jewish newspapers in Buenos Aires, Paris, and New York are just a few of the topics featured in Choosing Yiddish: New Frontiers of Language and Culture. Editors Lara Rabinovitch, Shiri Goren, and Hannah S. Pressman have gathered a diverse and richly layered collection of essays that demonstrates the currency of Yiddish scholarship in academia today.Organized into six thematic rubrics, Choosing Yiddish demonstrates that Yiddish, always a border-crossing language, continues to push boundaries with vigorous disciplinary exchange. “Writing on the Edge” focuses on the realm of belles lettres; “Yiddish and the City” spans the urban centers of Paris, Buenos Aires, New York City, and Montreal; “Yiddish Goes Pop” explores the mediating role of Yiddish between artistic vision and popular culture; “Yiddish Comes to America” focuses on the history and growth of Yiddish in the United States; “Yiddish Encounters Hebrew” showcases interactions between Yiddish and Hebrew in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and “Hear and Now” explores the aural dimension of Yiddish in contemporary settings. Along the way, contributors consider famed and lesser-known Yiddish writers, films, and Yiddish hip-hop, as well as historical studies on the Yiddish press, Yiddish film melodrama, Hasidic folkways, and Yiddish culture in Israel. Venerable scholars introduce each rubric, creating additional dialogue between newer and more established voices in the field.The international contributors prove that the language—far from dying—is fostering exciting new directions of academic and popular discourse, rooted in the field’s historic focus on interdisciplinary research. Students and teachers of Yiddish studies will enjoy this innovative collection.
Without Jews?
Author: Magdalena Ruta
Publisher: Wydawnictwo UJ
Published: 2017-06-19
Total Pages: 452
ISBN-13: 8323394911
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Magdalena Ruta explores the virtually unknown area of Yiddish literature created in Poland after World War II. She unravels before general readers and future researchers numerous texts and analyses them in a lucid and captivating manner. The book should appeal to readers from various disciplines as well as to a non-scholarly audience as it touches upon difficult and complex problems that only recently have become the subject of thorough research and that are still perceived as controversial, such as Polish-Jewish relations after the war, or the fascination of a substantial number of Polish Jewish intellectuals with communism. It is worth stressing that the author deals with this sensitive topic competently and objectively. Prof. Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska
