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This article explores body–voice entanglements in TikTok through the prism of ventriloquism. It suggests that TikTok is an app of network ventriloquism, that is, an audiovisual technology–based web of dissociations and reconfigurations of users' bodies and voices. Yiddish serves as a case study for how TikTok's features build an infrastructure for language, heritage, and cultural activism. We analyze YiddishToks as an instantiation of the ways TikTokers embody actual technolinguistic and ventriloquistic interconnections as well as bond with past generations. YiddishTokers interlace times and spaces and recontextualize Yiddish media history. TikTok's algorithm participates in this reanimation of Yiddish's past; it is a transparent, audible director that prompts the network off-stage. TikTok is an algorithmic network ventriloquism app that mediates between human and non-human voices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The musical orality of the lyric voice constitutes one of the most formidable and persistent facets of the ideology of German Romanticism, one that is further bequeathed to the arts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Taking the musicality of the voice and the ineffability of "absolute" music as its point of departure, this essay investigates a series of primarily German-Jewish figures—Kafka, Schoenberg, Straub-Huillet, and Celan—who stage a radical confrontation with the political aestheticization of the voice. Premonitions and reverberations of these figures' vocal "destruction" are further traced in Adorno, Kraus, and Maimonides. At stake is not only a comparative study of the voice at the intersection of various media (music, literature, opera, film, and public performance) but also the kind of majoritarian–minoritarian dynamics (between Yiddish and German, German and Hebrew) that arise internal to a single language and its linguistic politics. German-Jewish cultural poetics ultimately develops as a response to the tensions between nation and empire emergent in the dappled political landscape of Central and Eastern Europe—and amends the dominant Romantic paradigm accordingly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Yiddish Scientific Institute, known by its Yiddish acronym YIVO, was funded in Vilna in 1925. The institute had four sections: Philology, History, Psychology-Pedagogy, and Economics-Statistics. Its principal goal was not only to produce scholarship concerning Eastern European Jewish populations but also to promote Yiddish as a scientific language. This article analyzes the tensions associated with using Yiddish in academia generally and in social science particularly. It demonstrates how this linguistic commitment to Yiddish led to certain compromises dictated by the need to share academic research, expand readership, and secure financial support. It aims to explore these linguistic matters by focusing on the activities and scholarly production of the Economic-Statistical section—the "ekstat" section—from its first meeting in 1926 to 1939. This section offers a particularly relevant case study because of its highly specific situation within YIVO. Located in Berlin and then in Warsaw, the Economic-Statistical section was relatively autonomous from the central headquarters in Vilna. More importantly, the section had closer ties to German academia, which explains its greater openness toward foreign (non-Yiddish) languages. Drawing upon sources including published materials, the administrative records of YIVO, and the personal archives of the section's key members, I document the ways in which this linguistic commitment toward Yiddish informed both the scholarly output of the section and its day-to-day activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The British Yiddish writer Katie Brown wrote humorous stories and sketches for the London Yiddish newspapers Di post (The Post) in the 1930s and Di tsayt (The Times) in the 1940s. The stories, set in London’s Jewish East End, concern the day-to-day effects of immigration, poverty, and Jewish culture in Britain. After the Second World War, in a bombed-out East End where Jewish migration to the suburbs was accelerating, Brown did not write entirely new sketches, but rather edited versions of her prewar stories. Looking at the earlier and later stories together, we get a sense of the changes happening to London’s Jewish community: the decline of Jewish culture and religious practice, the changing relationship with the Eastern European homeland, and the decline of the Yiddish language. Through close reading and analysis, this article gives historical background to Brown and the social, cultural, and political context of her stories. It situates Brown as the only female journalist writing regularly for the press and identifies her unique perspective in making poignant interventions into Jewish debates of the day through stories of small incidents in family life. She raises questions around how to maintain a Jewish identity in England and visibility as a Jew in a Christian world, and traces change through two decades by describing the tension between the immigrant generation and their children. Using a range of neglected source material in Yiddish, this article throws new light on the Jewish East End in its twilight years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the phenomenon of the translation of scientific works from European languages into Yiddish from the early sixteenth century through the late eighteenth century. By following the trajectory of texts and ideas from the non-Jewish realm to the Ashkenazi Jewish vernacular, it draws attention to the ways in which cultural and scientific innovations reached Jewish readers of various classes, spaces, and genders well beyond the narrow elite of rabbinically or university-trained Jews. The essay challenges the notion that there existed in early modern Europe a neat division of labor between Hebrew, the language of the learned elite, and Yiddish, the language of the Jewish masses. It also contributes to recent scholarship calling into question the prominence of the Jewish Enlightenment (the Haskalah) as a harbinger of Ashkenazi interest in non-Jewish knowledge in general, and science in particular. Mapping the hitherto overlooked interactions between Yiddish readers and writers and early modern scientific thought, this essay opens avenues into new research on the complex relationships between the interrelated corpora of early modern Jews and Christians, physicians and rabbis, scholars and laypeople. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The YidTakNL dataset is a thorough bibliography of Yiddish regulations and announcements by the Ashkenazi Jewish community in Amsterdam between 1708 and 1846. All items are related to social, political and administrative aspects of community life. Most of the corpus scans are fully available online, and the regulations are being transcribed using a Transkribus PyLaia HTR model developed by the authors for Yiddish printed in the Vaybertaytsh typeface. The Transkribus model will be made public during 2023 and transcriptions will be made available within a few years. The dataset can be utilised for longitudinal research on government - nonprofit relations, the effect of religion on welfare provision and community resilience. Moreover, the dataset is highly relevant for the development of Yiddish typesetting during the 18th-19th centuries and the linguistic evolution of Dutch Yiddish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In postwar Europe the remembrance of the Holocaust (קאַטאַסטראָפע Katastrofe in Yiddish) endows the continent's societies and politics with a clear-cut moral dimension. All agree that remembering about and researching the Holocaust is necessary for preventing a repeat of the murderous past in the future. Yet, no reflection is really devoted to the most revealing fact that the wartime genocide's main victims – Jews – exist no longer in Europe as a community with their specific Yiddish language and culture. Due to the twin-like closeness between Yiddish and German, prior to the war, Yiddish speakers ensured a world-wide popularity for the German language. After 1945, Yiddish-speaking Holocaust survivors and Jewish poets exorcised and reinvented the then-murderers' language of German, so that poetry could be written in it again. In reciprocation, Germany and Europe – shockingly and quite incomprehensibly – abandoned their duty to preserve and cultivate Yiddish language and culture as a necessary "inoculation" against another genocide. Forgetting about this duty imperils Europe and its inhabitants; the danger now is sadly exemplified by Russia's ongoing genocidal-scale war on Ukraine. Not a single Yiddish library exists in today's Europe, which is an indictment in itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article highlights the activities of the Jewish Socialist Workers' Party «Poale Zion» (Workers of Zion) in the 1920s and 1930s, which aimed at forming a network of bilingual private Jewish educational institutions with Yiddish and Hebrew as languages of schooling. It is argued that in the interwar Poland the development of Jewish schooling was hampered by a number of factors, such as piecemeal implementation of international and domestic regulations on minority schooling by the Polish authorities; assimilation policies of the Polish government; attempts at undermining the position of Jewish community in the economic and educational spheres; and linguistic heterogeneity of the Jewish population. Public Jewish primary schools with Polish as the language of instruction were not popular, as they allegedly provided unsatisfactory schooling and were criticized by the Jewish community as an attempt at assimilation. As a result, in the 1920s and 1930s Jewish political parties and culture and education associations joined in for the sake of development of private Jewish educational institutions. The research shows that an important role in the establishment and support of bilingual schools with both Hebrew and Yiddish used in schooling, belongs to the Jewish Socialist Workers' Party «Poale Zion» and to Shul-Kult (school and culture organization), founded through the influence of the Party and supported by it. It was with the help of the Party and Shul-Kult members that primary schools with Yiddish and Hebrew languages of teaching were established, in-service teacher training courses were organized, and courses for the illiterate population were organized. In addition, public universities, libraries, theatres, museums, orphanages, etc. were established. The party members published and distributed textbooks, academic and pedagogical journals in Yiddish, Hebrew and Polish. In the Shul-Kult educational institutions, the main emphasis was placed on the study of the Yiddish language and Judaic subjects, as well as on the proper mastery of Hebrew and Hebrew literature. This was meant to contribute to the establishment of national consciousness and preservation of the national identity of the Jewish youth. However, due to the complexity of the curriculum, limited funding, and opposition from the Polish ruling circles, the party members failed to create an extensive network of bilingual primary schools with Yiddish and Hebrew as languages of instruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This paper demonstrates that the language of the post-War generations of adult Haredi (that is, strictly Orthodox), primarily Hasidic, speakers of Yiddish in the major Hasidic centers worldwide lacks morphological case and gender. Elicited spoken and written data from native Haredi speakers of Yiddish from Israel and the United States, aged 18–87, and limited additional evidence from Canada and Belgium, reveal a complete absence of distinction between masculine, feminine, and neuter genders as well as between the nominative, accusative, and dative cases. While some speakers make use of a variety of morphological definite determiner and attributive adjective forms, their use is not determined by case or gender distinctions. Most of the speakers in our study have an invariable determiner pronounced as /dɛ/ or /di/, whereas the earlier case and gender suffixes on attributive adjectives have been reanalyzed as a single attributive marker, /ɛ/. These findings are consistent with our previous work on the loss of case and gender in the Hasidic Yiddish of London's Stamford Hill and support our proposal that the Yiddish spoken in (primarily Hasidic) Haredi communities can be considered a distinct variety of the language known as Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Standardization is a focus of language maintenance efforts in many, but not all, minority language communities. What is the impact of this choice on interspeaker variation in maintained languages? This study investigates variable number agreement in Yiddish, a minority language spoken by two distinct communities in the New York area: (1) Hasidic Jews, who maintain the language without standardization, and (2) Yiddishists, who are overtly committed to maintaining a "correct" Yiddish. An analysis of data from 40 sociolinguistic interviews shows that Yiddishists have significantly higher rates of normative agreement than Hasidim do. The Yiddishists' standard language ideology has also contributed to a leveling of the differences across grammatical constructions, a predictor that is more robust among the Hasidic speakers. These community‐based differences in speech reflect differences in speakers' prescriptive judgments, which were elicited through a novel postinterview text editing task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Franz Kafka first saw Yitzhak Löwy's Yiddish theater troupe perform in Prague in 1911, he was enthralled with this unabashed expression of Jewishness from the actors, which lead to an almost yearlong study of Yiddish language and theater. This study culminates in Kafka's speech on Yiddish, in which he claims that Yiddish had no fixed grammar, was made up entirely of loanwords, but that his audience would be able to understand more than they realize through their knowledge of German. In the speech, Kafka promotes speaking a faux Yiddish, imitating the sounds and structures of Yiddish speech, in German. In several letters to friends, Kafka includes quotes from Löwy. This article discusses a particularly long quote which has not been widely examined. in which Löwy's writing style features a blend of Yiddish and archaic, poetic German. Though Kafka expresses appreciation for Löwy's playfulness with German grammar, he also smugly states that it was difficult to understand. Kafka's own fixation with 'proper' German grammar did not allow him to replicate this way of speaking in his own works, which are famously free of regionalisms and which make only oblique references to Jewish culture and worldview. As editor of an article that Löwy wanted to publish in the magazine Der Jude, Kafka strikes a balance between maintaining 'proper' German grammar, while imitating features of Yiddish, such as the interspersion of Hebrew words within the German and, in one case, imitating Yiddish speech patterns. In this article, Kafka, as editor, is able to overcome his long-internalized anti-Semitic sentiments, which compel him to avoid regionalisms and direct references to Jewish culture, and his interest in Yiddish, which for him allows for an unabashed expression of that culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Wortfolge. Szyk Słów is the property of Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Slaskiego 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.)

When Franz Kafka first saw Yitzhak Löwy's Yiddish theater troupe perform in Prague in 1911, he was enthralled with this unabashed expression of Jewishness from the actors, which lead to an almost yearlong study of Yiddish language and theater. This study culminates in Kafka's speech on Yiddish, in which he claims that Yiddish had no fixed grammar, was made up entirely of loanwords, but that his audience would be able to understand more than they realize through their knowledge of German. In the speech, Kafka promotes speaking a faux Yiddish, imitating the sounds and structures of Yiddish speech, in German. In several letters to friends, Kafka includes quotes from Löwy. This article discusses a particularly long quote which has not been widely examined. in which Löwy's writing style features a blend of Yiddish and archaic, poetic German. Though Kafka expresses appreciation for Löwy's playfulness with German grammar, he also smugly states that it was difficult to understand. Kafka's own fixation with 'proper' German grammar did not allow him to replicate this way of speaking in his own works, which are famously free of regionalisms and which make only oblique references to Jewish culture and worldview. As editor of an article that Löwy wanted to publish in the magazine Der Jude, Kafka strikes a balance between maintaining 'proper' German grammar, while imitating features of Yiddish, such as the interspersion of Hebrew words within the German and, in one case, imitating Yiddish speech patterns. In this article, Kafka, as editor, is able to overcome his long-internalized anti-Semitic sentiments, which compel him to avoid regionalisms and direct references to Jewish culture, and his interest in Yiddish, which for him allows for an unabashed expression of that culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the evolving manifestations of Yiddish in the work of contemporary artist Mel Bochner. A founding figure of American conceptual art, Bochner has continuously re-examined the unstable nature of language. Yet, as the following paper will argue, Bochner's postvernacular invocation of Yiddish calls into crisis this central contention of his work. Beginning with an analysis of selected works from his post-2000 Thesaurus Paintings, I suggest that Yiddish first served Bochner as a tool to confirm the instability of language by highlighting the futility of the idea of the synonym. I then turn to the multi-site work The Joys of Yiddish, which was mounted in Chicago (2006) and Munich (2013), to demonstrate the shift that occurs in Bochner's subsequent Yiddish-themed art. Analyzing The Joys of Yiddish, I show that Bochner deploys a vision of Yiddish that is based on a set of received assumptions and stereotypes promulgated in twentieth-century American popular culture. As will become clear, Bochner's conception of Yiddish produces a surfeit of questions not about the language's complexity or instability but about its superficiality and anticipated signification. Extending Bochner's painterly assertion that "language is not transparent," this article asks: What about Yiddish? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compared to the Habsburg era, when Yiddish writings were hardly printed in Bukovina - due to the centralized policy of Vienna and the openness towards integration and assimilation on the part of numerous Bukovinian Jews, as well as because of the status of Yiddish as the language of uneducated Jews - the Yiddish printing industry, as well as the Yiddish libraries didn't develop until the early 1920s, simultaneously with the emergence of national identity concepts. This paper is based on descriptive research and discusses the importance of these institutions in shaping trajectories of cultural, national and linguistic identities. [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]

Yiddish was the everyday language spoken by most Central and East European Jews during the last millennium. As a result of the extreme loss of speakers during the Holocaust, subsequent geographic dispersal, and lack of institutional support, Yiddish is now an endangered language. Yet it continues to be a native and daily language for Haredi (strictly Orthodox) Jews, who live in close-knit communities worldwide. We have conducted the first study of the linguistic characteristics of the Yiddish spoken in the community in London's Stamford Hill. While Krogh (in: Aptroot, Aptroot et al. (eds.) Leket: Yiddish studies today, Düsseldorf University Press, Düsseldorf, pp 483–506, 2012), Assouline (in: Aptroot, Hansen (eds.) Yiddish language structures, De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin, pp 39–62, 2014), and Sadock and Masor (J Jew Lang 6(1):89–110, 2018), investigating other Hasidic Yiddish-speaking communities, observe what they describe as morphological syncretism, in this paper we defend the claim that present-day Stamford Hill Hasidic Yiddish lacks morphological case and gender completely. We demonstrate that loss of morphological case and gender is the result of substantial language change over the course of two generations: while the case and gender system of the spoken medium was already beginning to undergo morphological syncretism and show some variation prior to World War II, case and gender distinctions were clearly present in the mental grammar of both Hasidic and non-Hasidic speakers of the relevant Yiddish dialects at that stage. We conclude the paper by identifying some of the language-internal, sociolinguistic and historical factors that have contributed to such rapid and pervasive language change, and compare the developments in Stamford Hill Hasidic Yiddish to those of minority German dialects in North America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shows how the concept of cultural intimacy can help scholars better analyze ethnoracial identity politics in the United States. It draws on ethnographic research with Yiddish language activists, or "Yiddishists." Yiddishists define their engagement with the language through a discourse of "seriousness"—marked by hard work and intensive study. Seriousness, as a kind of affective orientation and cultural aspiration, offers Yiddishists a powerful, if subtle, resource to contest power relations in the American Jewish community. Through everyday discourses and performances of seriousness, Yiddishists set themselves apart from an American Jewish "mainstream," or "establishment," while simultaneously critiquing the grounds on which mainstream American Jewish institutions and individuals claim to speak on behalf of the community. Seriousness does this, I contend, by resignifying dominant American Jewish language ideologies about Yiddish as signs of American Jewish cultural intimacy—specifically, communal embarrassment over perceived deficits in knowledge about Jewishness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is dedicated to those Jews from Romania who established themselves as international filmmakers or important figures of the international cinema industry with remarkable film contributions in Turkey, Germany, France, and the USA, where they won four Oscars and eight nominations. Therefore, we can talk about Romanian Jews as personalities who left a mark on the cinema field and whose work entered world film culture. The article will document how, until WWII, Jews were a large minority in Romania, able to create a distinct culture with by establishing the world's first Yiddish language theatre, while also having an important contribution to Klezmer music. The article also looks at documentaries mirroring the emigration of Romanian Jews to Israel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How Enlightenment eradicated a language: About the disappearance of Yiddish in the Netherlands This study discusses the disappearance of Yiddish in the Netherlands. At the end of the 18th century a small group of progressive Jews, inspired by the French Revolution and the ideas of the Jewish Enlightenment Haskalah, tried to implement changes in the Jewish community of Amsterdam. One of the innovations they proposed was giving up Yiddish in favor of Dutch. Their arguments were threefold: Yiddish was a corrupted language in which it was impossible to think clearly. Secondly, by using Yiddish the Jews isolated themselves, which led to their backwardness and poverty. Thirdly, by not mastering the national language, the Jews were unable to make full use of their newly acquired civil rights. The initiative of this small group of forerunners met with fierce resistance in the Jewish community. With the help of two successive kings, who sought centralization and the creation of a common national identity, the progressive liberal group finally gained victory. After about a century, it turned out that Yiddish had disappeared from the Netherlands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines debates in Poland since the 1860s concerning Jews' naming practices and attempts to resolve the practical and social problems they engendered. Polemics within the Jewish press in Poland, particularly in Warsaw's Yiddish dailies, reveal competing conceptions of what constitutes an authentic and socially appropriate Jewish name. They also reflect changing perceptions of Yiddish, which had left its stamp on the inventory of names used by Ashkenazic Jews, and its growing place in urban life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a brief language history of the Hungarian Jewish community since their establishment in the Carpathian Basin to the present, with a special focus on Yiddish. Between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century, Yiddish became the group's majority language; after the 1850s, the Hungarian Jewry started a process of language substitution. By the 1930s, the use of Yiddish was mostly limited to the ultra- Orthodox communities of Eastern Hungary, while the rest mainly adopted Hungarian. In this research, a pilot study of the current situation of Yiddish has been mapped using several methods, including a questionnaire answered by a hundred and thirty individuals and unstructured interviews with linguists. Although this study's results confirm the earlier research by Matras (2010) and Shandler (2006) in establishing that Yiddish is generally a post-vernacular language while Hungarian has acquired the role of an ethnic language, it was found that a considerable percentage of those living in the Carpathian Basin still preserve Yiddish. This paper aims to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the group dynamics in bilingual communities and, specifically, to provide a clearer view of the language situation among the Hungarian Jewry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During and immediately after World War II, East European Jewish intellectuals perceived a radical transformation in the Yiddish language. This perception inspired some to create dictionaries or glossaries that could map and decode these new linguistic developments. While these glossarists approached the Holocaust Yiddish vocabulary from different conceptual and political positions, their texts nonetheless point to common words, themes, and pressure-points from within this catastrophe-inflected dialect. Of these prominent themes, this essay investigates three: theft, animals, and the sexual body. Based on the way that these themes are addressed, I argue that the glossaries not only explain the meaning of new Yiddish words; they also reveal new types of verbal practice and new ways in which Yiddish speakers behaved toward language. In sum, the glossaries testify to a specific sensation of speech and offer a new lens through which to read Yiddish works on and from the Holocaust. [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.)

This essay offers an original tool, eroto‐philology, in order to explore the crucial role that linguistic particularities play in the study of sexuality, and the role sexuality plays in the study of language, focusing on the unique case of modern Yiddish. In the case of Yiddish, the sexual and the linguistic, the erotic and the philological, shared a similar positioning: where Jewish sexuality was considered deviant, so too the language itself was considered abnormal and deviant. This article will begin a larger project of reversing the dominant perspective, by exploring how Jews formulated their own notions of their language and bodies, writing philology and sexology in their own tongue. The focus of this article will be the role of sexuality in Yiddish linguistic projects spanning 1913–1990, and each of these projects will be treated as an incomplete archive, first because Yiddish was emerging and later because of its imminent decline. Taking into account the shifting historical realities of Yiddish and its speakers, eroto‐philology will serve as a methodological mediation between body and text, activating the materiality of reading each, and both, together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sefer Shivhei ha-Besht is considered the central collection of hagiographic tales regarding Israel Ba'al Shem Tov (c. 1700-1760). It was first printed in Hebrew in Kopys in the latter part of 1814, and includes hundreds of stories that circulated orally and were heard by the author. The work was soon translated into Yiddish with significant changes, and three such translations have survived, each one very different to the others. The first translation, published in Ostróg in 1815, was believed lost. This article offers a brief description of the recently discovered edition, discussing its uniqueness in the context of the work's printing history and on the background of Jewish publishing in Eastern Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1936 and 1938, Jewish Communists in Paris began a formal campaign to encourage children to participate in their Yiddish community-building project, as a means of engaging whole families, especially women. The use of both Yiddish and French in the Communist Yiddish-language daily newspaper Naye preseand the work of children's poet Dovid Pliskin shows how Jewish Communists in Paris, surprisingly, tried to expose a wide range of Yiddish speakers in Paris to what might be seen as a particular and distinctive sort of diaspora nationalism. Additionally, the study of Jewish children in interwar Paris sheds new light on intersections and overlap between Yiddish-speaking immigrant Jews and the French left. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This ethnographic research examines language socialization practices and language ideologies in secular Yiddish "metalinguistic communities," communities of positioned social actors shaped by practices that view language as an object. "Metalinguistic community" is a framework for diverse participants who can experience both distance from and closeness to the language and its speakers, due to historical, personal, and/or communal circumstances. Through an examination of classroom interactions in California, this article shows how simultaneous distancing and closeness experienced by metalinguistic community members can manifest in "contested stance practices," public demonstrations of language ideologies that reveal both internal and external tensions. Contested stance practices reveal how members' perceptions of language are shaped by their personal histories and those of their imagined communities; these practices become a fertile means through which individuals negotiate their relationships with language as a symbol of identity, ideology, and community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the production and use of the rise-fall contour by three Yiddish/English bilinguals in a small American Jewish community. Acoustic analysis shows that the Yiddish rise-falls have higher peaks, larger rise spans, and later Tonal Centers of Gravity compared to a similar intonational contour in English. These results hold for all three speakers despite their diverse linguistic histories. Additionally, evidence is provided that rise-falls with higher peaks have social meaning in both languages. English rise-falls are produced with higher peaks during meetings of a local Yiddish club than during one-on-one interviews, and rise-falls with high peaks are used in both Yiddish and English during an exchange in which one of the speakers discusses his relationship to Passover. The social meaning of the phonetically extreme rise-falls is posited to be the reason why all three speakers have either successfully acquired or maintained phonetic distinctiveness between their English and Yiddish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until the Holocaust in Lithuania annihilated 90% of its community between 1941 and 1944, Yiddish was a fully lived language with its own rich history and literature. David Fram escaped the genocide, having left his shtetl, the market town of Ponevezh in 1927. Once in South Africa, committed to the preservation of his mameloshn, his mother tongue, he created a rich body of Yiddish poetry. Though little known, his poems offer insights into the understanding of a particular Jewish survivor testimony as well as into the Lithuanian Holocaust more generally. Through detailed analysis of specific poems, this paper argues for their continued relevance, providing a valuable space for an account of aspects of memory and postmemory. In making them available to a wider audience through my own translations and transliterations in this small act of retrieval, my hope is to preserve a literary heritage and to memorialize a lost world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, the geographical origins of Ashkenazic Jews (AJs) and their native language Yiddish were investigated by applying the Geographic Population Structure (GPS) to a cohort of exclusively Yiddish-speaking and multilingual AJs. GPS localized most AJs along major ancient trade routes in northeastern Turkey adjacent to primeval villages with names that resemble the word "Ashkenaz". These findings were compatible with the hypothesis of an Irano-Turko-Slavic origin for AJs and a Slavic origin for Yiddish and at odds with the Rhineland hypothesis advocating a Levantine origin for AJs and German origins for Yiddish. We discuss how these findings advance three ongoing debates concerning (1) the historical meaning of the term "Ashkenaz;" (2) the genetic structure of AJs and their geographical origins as inferred from multiple studies employing both modern and ancient DNA and original ancient DNA analyses and (3) the development of Yiddish. We provide additional validation to the non-Levantine origin of AJs using ancient DNA from the Near East and the Levant. Due to the rising popularity of geo-localization tools to address questions of origin, we briefly discuss the advantages and limitations of popular tools with focus on the GPS approach. Our results reinforce the non-Levantine origins of AJs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic biographies seldom go into details about motivation, but in the case of Joshua Fishman, we have his statement that much of his career was directed by the question posed to him by his father, "What did you do for Yiddish today?" Answering this question did not just lead to his personal decision to speak Yiddish with his wife and children, but also to make sure that his grandchildren would be fluent speakers. But as he explains, his pioneering academic work in the sociology of language had a similar purpose: to explore the nature of language maintenance and shift and to build a scientific basis to support language activists who wished, like him, to fight what seems to be the inevitable evolutionary forces leading to the endangerment and loss of minority languages. His scholarly work included many pioneering contributions to the study of Yiddish sociolinguistics, but it expanded to include not just other threatened languages but also to build a solid academic basis for studying what happens when stronger languages meet weaker. Thus he was the creator of the field of the sociology of language and provided support for language minority activists, all the time making sure he was doing something for Yiddish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does a scholar of endangered languages and the sociology of language write to his own people in their language? A review of Joshua (Shikl) Fishman's column in the Yiddish quarterly Afn shvel from 1982-2002 reveals the repeated theme of urging his secular Yiddish readers to establish residential enclaves of young families who speak Yiddish with their children. He shared his knowledge of the language revitalization and standardization efforts of other groups, including ultra-Orthodox Hasidim, Frieslanders, Irish, Norwegians, and Welsh. These heartfelt pleas reflected his own bereavement following the decimation of the East European Yiddish heartland during the Holocaust and the disappearance of a vibrant Yiddish secular life in America. Nevertheless, Fishman applauded and supported the efforts of young people aimed at revitalizing Yiddish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on the relationship between Jewish languages and Hebrew. It includes a short discussion of a number of topics dealt with in the research literature since the beginning of the study of these languages, with a presentation of my perspective on these issues. Due to space constraints I will deal with only eight of these topics: A. The functional division between Jewish languages and Hebrew in Jewish communities; B. The distinction between ancient and new Jewish languages; C. The special status of Aramaic; D. The Hebrew and Aramaic component in Jewish languages and its extent; E. Semantic fields where the Hebrew component is used; F. Secret languages; G. The Hebrew component's contribution to the study of Hebrew language traditions; H. Hebrew as a living language in Jewish languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 Yiddish language is over 1,000yearsold and incorporates German, Slavic, and Hebrewelements. The prevalent view claims Yiddish has a German origin, whereas the opposing view posits a Slavic origin with strong Iranian and weakTurkic substrata. One of the major difficulties in deciding between these hypotheses is the unknown geographical origin of Yiddish speaking Ashkenazic Jews (AJs). An analysis of 393 Ashkenazic, Iranian, and mountain Jews and over 600 non-Jewish genomes demonstrated that Greeks, Romans, Iranians, andTurksexhibitthe highest geneticsimilaritywith AJs. The Geographic Population Structure analysis localized most AJsalong major primeval trade routes in northeastern Turkey adjacent to primeval villages with names that may be derived from "Ashkenaz." Iranian and mountain Jews were localized along trade routes on theTurkey's eastern border. Loss of maternal haplogroups was evident in non-Yiddish speaking AJs. Our results suggest that AJs originated from a Slavo-Iranian confederation, which the Jews call "Ashkenazic" (i.e., "Scythian"), though these Jews probably spoke Persian and/or Ossete. This is compatible with linguistic evidence suggesting that Yiddish is a Slavic language created by Irano-Turko-Slavic Jewish merchants along the Silk Roads as a cryptic trade language, spoken only by its originators to gain an advantage in trade. Later, in the 9th century, Yiddish underwent relexification by adopting a new vocabulary that consists of a minority of German and Hebrew anda majority of newly coined Germanoid and Hebroid elements that replaced most of the original Eastern Slavic and Sorbian vocabularies, while keeping the original grammars intact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]