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Exploring the Yiddish language of my father, grandmother, her grandmother, and beyond, this autobiographical article frames language as an ever-changing space where identities are negotiated, formed, and contested. Placing the history of Yiddish alongside my own familial relationship to the language, I explore how the stories of individual lives and the histories of people are created through their relationship with and negotiation of language. Through my own personal experience, this article posits language as a both a space of alienation and belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This manifesto calls for a translational paradigm for Yiddish Studies and for the broader study of modern Jewish culture. The manifesto takes as a paradigm an early name for the Yiddish language, taytsh, which initially means "German," and leverages the ways in which this name signifies the proximity of Jewish and non-Jewish languages and their intimate entanglements. The call to taytsh is meant to provide an alternative vocabulary for analyzing Jewish modernity that would uncover its embeddedness within global empires while avoiding the siloing of Jewish identity (as stable, unified, and translatable) within multicultural and pluralist systems. Instead, a taytsh paradigm sees Jewish cultural production as constituted by ceaseless translation, in which vernacular inscrutability mingles with the possibility and failure of universal communication. To perform a taytsh reading of a text is to examine the incomplete relations of Jewish modernity—its translational origins and its migratory ends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Colloquia Germanica Stetinensia is the property of Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Szczecinskiego / University of Szczecin Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

My essay examines Yiddish-speaking immigrants in the Netherlands between the two world wars with a focus on Amsterdam, the Jewish center of the country. The Netherlands was never a major recipient of migrants of any kind, let alone Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Despite seeing the Netherlands primarily as a transit site, enough Yiddish-speakers stayed – either due to finding work in the country or because they failed to get entry papers to other countries – that they formed a visible presence in Amsterdam, The Hague, Scheveningen, and other cities across the country. Due to its small size and unstable immigrant population – since most immigrants did not plan on settling in Amsterdam – this community remained on the periphery of the global interwar Yiddish-speaking map. I argue that by being on the margins of the global Yiddish community Amsterdam's left-wing Yiddish-speaking community, organized around the Ansky Society, remained above the sharp politicized polemics that drove a wedge between communists and non-communist leftists in other Yiddish cultural centers not located in the Soviet Union. (There, the Communist Party's Evsektsiia had long ago ended public internecine debates.) I also show that Yiddish-speaking immigrants affected Dutch culture more generally. Because it operated in Yiddish, the Ansky Society was perceived to be marginal in the Netherlands. That marginalization allowed its members the political space (on the margins of both Dutch society and the global Yiddish-speaking diaspora) to advocate for international political positions that in any Dutch-language institution, Jewish or not, would have been considered too radical in a political culture that avoided extremes of any kind. The Ansky Society nonetheless served as the Netherlands' outspoken voice against the rise of fascism in all of its 1930s manifestations. Unlike the mainstream Dutch Jewish community, members of which enfranchised citizens and therefore deeply implicated in party politics and questions of loyalty, the Ansky Society had no such fears, because most of its members lacked citizenship. They were beyond (or perhaps beneath) questions of loyalty. Finally, the Ansky Society also publicly criticized the Dutch government's complacency in the face of fascism spreading across Europe. In other words, Amsterdam's Yiddish-speaking community in the interwar period was doubly marginalized – from global Yiddish culture and from Dutch politics – and was therefore politically empowered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the state of Yiddish language and culture in Melbourne, Victoria. It examines the issue of endangered language as it applies to Yiddish in the state and explores the potential of music in assisting language ability and retention. It proposes a means to stimulate the revitalization of Yiddish within the Jewish community.

Whereas Yiddish flourished in France in the immediate post-war period, partly due to the influx of survivors from Poland and Lithuania, the failure to ensure transmission of Yiddish to the following generation led to a decline. From the 1970s a number of significant academic institutions and programmes were created and the Bibliotheque Medem became a centre of documentation and acquired the bibliographic collections of libraries that had closed. In 2002 the Maison de la Culture Yiddish-Bibliotheque Medem (MCY) was established with the task not only of preservation but also of creating cultural opportunities through projects including publications, adult and children's education, and through encouraging the use of the spoken language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using pre-war Poland as an example, Helen Beer describes the richness of Yiddish cultural life prior to the Holocaust. Upon briefly sketching aspects of the Yiddish-speaking world of our times, she illustrates the modern phenomenon of forging an allegiance to Yiddish without knowledge of the language. Beer argues that Yiddish without Yiddish is not an option and that the only means of sustaining and perpetuating the language and culture is by means of learning and using it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article claims that leisure activities are major vehicles for promoting nostalgia, expressing and propagating cultures whose practitioners are gradually decreasing in numbers. It underlies the meanings, which middle-class senior citizens in Israel assign to sing-along nights in Yiddish. These evenings indicate the extent to which structured leisure activities have turned into social worlds, which allow longing for those old experiences replaced by new ones. Through singing, senior citizens intertwine personal and collective narratives and disseminate their vision of Yiddish culture both inside and outside of their community. Singing in Yiddish is one among various leisure activities, which enhances the call to all factions of society to refresh their cultures and speak out their unique voices. The propagation of Yiddish through organised leisure makes it possible to create and aggregate stocks of popular knowledge easily spread to consumers, experiencing nostalgia and simultaneously longing and expressing the right for cultural recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Yiddish philology, as well as its role in creating the national identity and creativity of the Jewish nation. According to the author, Yiddish philology also serves as a means to establish and strengthen a national culture consisting of the poetic works of great writers and the skills of its people to speak and write properly in their mother tongue. Philology, he further opines, brings order to the people's language which is split into various dialects. As such, he contends that all oppressed peoples treasure their national philology.

The article focuses on listening to Yiddish performance as a cultural practice. It examines the acoustics of Yiddish and the ways in which Yiddish signifies beyond the boundaries of formal Yiddish speech and language. Redirecting the focus of Yiddish culture from speakers and writers to listeners validates the importance of listening within a Jewish context. This starts the exploration of the terrain of listening as a distinct and important cultural practice.

The article compares Yiddish and Ladino culture. Engaging in a comparative study of Yiddish and Ladino provides a benefit from which to desentimentalize Jewish languages. Ninety-seven percent of about five million Jews in the Russian Empire identified Yiddish as their native language. One of the factors that impeded the proliferation of such culture is the evolution of Jews' educational and class status.

Yiddish book culture did and does exist in Western Canada, even outside the vibrant Jewish culture of Winnipeg, in communities whose geographic isolation from the Yiddish-speaking centers may seem extreme. Two libraries may serve as examples of the variety of manifestations of Yiddish reading in these localities: the library of the farm community of Edenbridge, Saskatchewan, which may be said to be emblematic of cultural organization in these rural colonies, which existed from before World War I until the 1960s; and the Kirman Library at the Vancouver Peretz Centre for Secular Jewish Culture, itself an unusual example of a Yiddish secular school, which is now the last specifically Yiddish library in Western Canada. Finally, the meaning of Yiddish books in these independent libraries, far from institutional support or a critical mass of Jews, is examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the trends in the literary scholarship of the Yiddish language and culture. Decline in the secular education in Yiddish; Fragmentation of the Yiddish culture; Focus of Yiddish studies.

The article discusses on the new Zionist society that was evolving in Palestine during the first half of the twentieth century, emerging dominant Hebrew culture that controlled the public stage. A derogative term "jargon" was used by the early Jewish and non-Jewish proponents of the Enlightenment, which includes the Yiddish-speakers who continued to denote Yiddish, the one that was perceived as an integral part of the negative character of the diasporic Jew. Moreover, the Yiddish, the language and emblem of the Diaspora, was being deserted in favor of the Hebrew, the once and future language.

The article presents a commentary from Hannah Kliger, who writes about a scene in a classroom where students have been together in the beginning Yiddish course for half of the first semester. The chapter discussed in class is called Yidn in Geto. Although he was worried about singling about Warsaw Ghetto to students in the public forum, in private he described this incident to colleagues and friends who wonder about the kinds of students who come to study Yiddish at universities today. And he deliberately and consciously taken note of our approaching Chapter 8, YkIn in Geto. he pointed out that they must prepare for a turning point in the course, as they reach a level of seriousness both in language acquisition and in content. The scene he depicted forced him to consider the weight borne by students registering for a Yiddish course. On the surface, they come to study Yiddish language. Yet, they are required to confront Yiddish culture and creativity, and Jewish history. It is hard to escape the fact that the students' first glimpse of that challenge is there, in Chapter Eight.

This article compares the development of the Jewish American culture through the Yiddish and English language during the period of the Holocaust. It was said that the spheres of cultural possibilities in which Yiddish- and English-language writers and readers lived were radically different during World War II. An examination of American cultural journals in Yiddish and English during 1939-45 yields a number of observations, including the sheer volume of publication. There were more Yiddish publications than the English ones. English journals, making a particularist claim to Jewish interest, proclaimed their particularism in their very titles. Yiddish journals, needing no such affirmation of their identity, were more apt to make eponymous claims to broader cultural concerns.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the status of Yiddish as a language associated with European culture for Jews. What was its status in the past and what is its status now? What aspects have led to Yiddish becoming a minority language in Europe? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Religion & Popular Culture is the property of University of Toronto Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)