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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.)

Robert's "Der Pavian" parodies Beer's play by setting a learned, well-spoken baboon in the place of the Indian pariah. Engelsberg publishes Robert's text here for the first time, theorizing that the extant manuscript, held today in the Varnhagen collection, Biblioteka Jagiellonska, in Krakow, was likely sent directly by Robert to his sister. On January 26, 2022, Leora Batnitzky and Vivian Liska presented at the Center's Second Annual Naharaim Symposium, addressing the theme of "Carl Schmitt and the Theological-Political Predicament: Affirmations and Antidotes in Jewish Political Thought.". [Extracted from the article]

As noted, Rojanski also aims to use this investigation of Yiddish culture's trajectories in Israel to rethink key aspects of Israeli culture and the socialist Zionist imaginary more generally. Probably of greatest interest to readers of I EEJA i is the first of these dimensions, the history of Yiddish culture in the young state of Israel, which was, needless to say, overwhelmingly the creation of cultural producers transplanted from the shattered East European Yiddish scene. Given this generally correct impression, it has been easy for scholars of Yiddish culture and of Israel to further assume that the history of Yiddish culture in early Israel is largely one of state-led, ideologically coherent, and successful suppression. [Extracted from the article]

The Garden of the Righteous, a program presented by Naye Strunes, a Minneapolis-based Yiddish music ensemble, weaves together original Yiddish music and stories of fearless individuals from among the thousands of non-Jews who risked their lives to save innocent people during the Holocaust. The program gives audience members an opportunity to reflect on the extent of courage and compassion during dark times. All proceeds are given to Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders), a contemporary humanitarian organization that provides medical assistance to populations experiencing crises. This article explores the concept of righteousness among the nations, particularly in the context of partnership scholarship; the history and present-day renaissance of Yiddish language, music, and culture; and Médecins Sans Frontières as a contemporary example of living courageously.

With the Shoah, the number of speakers of Yiddish was brutally reduced; thus, Yiddish culture was destroyed. In the immediate post-war period, there were initiatives in Poland to preserve and revive the remnants. The article deals with various such manifestations, in particular with the Yiddish programs of the Polish Radio. In the 1950s they increasingly faced attempts of political influence that involved conveying ideological messages. Under these conditions, the Yiddish language played an identity-determining role and became an important cultural carrier, in which the situation in Poland differed from that in other states.

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Yiddish has served the English language as a comparatively minor donor language of words and meanings over the course of time. However, Yiddish has provided English with a number of borrowings that have become fairly common in present-day usage. This paper provides a rounded overview of the different lexical domains to which Yiddish contributed in the form of new words and expressions over the centuries, which has been relatively neglected in existing studies. The focus of linguistic concern is on those Yiddish-derived terms that have become established in current English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Osteuropa is the property of Berliner Wissenschaftsverlag GmbH 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.)

Copyright of Osteuropa is the property of Berliner Wissenschaftsverlag GmbH 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.)

Landes' anthropological theorizing, highlighting the connections between race, gender, sexuality and class, expressed an Eastern European Jewish female praxis well-established by the late 1920s and early '30s when Landes began her research career. Landes' changing Jewish identification through her life resulted from gendered aging and the reformulation of Jewish racialization processes in the U.S. Her late life reflections are evidence of what Susan Watkins calls 'gendered late-style' as well as Jewish conceptions of time as anti-linear and counter-normative. I investigate how her Jewish socialist Yiddish-speaking family background inflected her interpersonal and professional networks and her writings on anti-racist, class and gender-based themes. Abbreviations: RLP: Ruth Landes Papers; NAA: National Anthropological Archives; SI: Smithsonian Institution; RBP: Ruth Benedict Papers; ASC: Archives and Special Collections Library; VCL: Vassar College Libraries [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the Jews language and Jewish reading which anyone can read a language without knowing it. It cites on the tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization according to Arjun Appadurai, an American anthropologist. The article also discusses the survival and the flourishment of language and balance between heterogenization and homogenization in appropriation of idioms.

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]

The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (1992) seeks to protect and promote regional and minority languages in Europe. The objectives and principles defined by the Charter include the recognition of regional and minority languages as cultural assets. The Charter also commits the signatories to promote the study of, and research on, regional and minority languages. Bosnia and Herzegovina signed the Charter in 2005 and officially ratified it in 2010, applying it to seventeen regional and minority languages including Ladino and Yiddish. This paper examines the disparity between the obligations entered into and the actual state of affairs. It also investigates the linguistic repertoire and language ideologies of the Jewish community in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the extent and nature of its interest in revitalizing Ladino. [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 paper examines three apparent exceptions to general processes in the phonology and morphology of standard Yiddish. These are 1) the resistance of several potentially syllabic final consonants to syllabication; 2) the insertion of an extra consonant [n] in some infinitives; and 3) the absence of some diminutive patterns from some nouns. All three cases are resolved by showing that some phonetically short segments are in fact underlyingly long ones, created by morpheme concatenation. The analysis, conducted within Strict CV (Lowenstamm 1996), thus argues for virtual, or "non surface‐true" length. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Actress and singer Nina Sibirtzeva (1899, Russia–1957, Buenos Aires) developed her inconspicuous career in the popular Jewish theater in Russia and Eastern Europe and moved to Buenos Aires in 1938, where she adapted her repertoire and from where she toured other cities in the Americas, always performing on circuits that were removed from mainstream entertainment. What can we make of her obscure journey? This article attempts to understand Sibirtzeva's artistic choices and, through them, some structural but unexplored aspects of the globalization of popular music in the twentieth century. Based on evidence rescued from the almost destroyed archives of the IWO (Idisher Visnshaftlejer Institut or Yiddish Research Institute) in Buenos Aires, the article focuses on the meaning of the words popular and populism in music; the engagement of popular artists with musical technologies, markets, migration, and politics; and the conceptual and historiographical question of how to deal with biographies that do not match the cultural mainstream, operating instead at the intersection of different cultural streams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on stories of Ashkenazic Jews written in Yiddish language about dealing with the violence and creativity prompted by changes in policies of documentation, travel and visibility by the Russia's empire in the 19th-century. It discusses the rule by the authorities that Jews could not leave the Congress Kingdom and the Pale of Settlement, the comic stories of these Jews written by Russian writer Sholem Aleichem.

This article relies on an interdisciplinary approach, delineating criteria for classifying Ashkenazic Hebrew, and showing that written varieties of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries should be clearly distinguished from that of the nineteenth century. Close investigation of the language of Pinkasim shows the correlation between regional written Hebrew and the local variety of spoken Yiddish. Thus, Hebrew texts from Poland exhibit distinctive phonological features related to Mid-Eastern Yiddish - for example, a merger of the vowels /u/ and /i/ as exemplified by the interchangeable use of the masculine and feminine pronouns - while texts from Lithuania display other characteristics attributable to influence from North-Eastern Yiddish. This article concludes with a consideration of how one should take into account not only the geographical dimension but also the social background of the writer, the presence of the standardization process, and the type of text under investigation in the analysis of Ashkenazic Hebrew. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study offers a focused analysis of the complicated interface of Yiddish and Hebrew in Hasidic preaching and writing, exploring the unique crevasse between written and oral cultures that Hasidism has occupied since the eighteenth century. We argue that scholarship on Hasidism has not fully appreciated the linguistic element of the remarkable success of this socioreligious movement that has shaped the course of Jewish modernity. This lacuna is particularly acute in research dealing with Hasidic sermons and their theological and ideational message. It is our contention that those engaged in the study of the Hasidic homily must not forget that the original moment, transformed only later into a text, was a dramatic oral event that took place in Yiddish. Hasidic literature published in Hebrew is the result of a long process of translation (literal and figurative), a textual artifact whose linguistic form shapes the sermon and its ideational core in a variety of significant ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attitudes towards language and language education policy (LEP) interact with groups’ identities, internal dynamics and intergroup relations. Combining quantitative and qualitative measures, we focused on the Habad community—a Jewish ultra-Orthodox (UO) minority in Israel—exploring its LEP and community attitudes toward languages meaningful to them—Hebrew, Loshen Koydesh, Yiddish and English. Our analysis revealed varying views concerning the main languages associated with their actual and symbolic functions and gender differences regarding ideal LEP and LEP implementation. English emerged as occupying a unique position in Habad, reflecting this group’s distinctiveness within the broader UO community and its greater openness. We found that language perceptions, curriculum, and ideology are closely intertwined—the state curriculum is implemented only partially, textbooks are mostly developed especially for Habad pupils, and community members and educators view the superiority of the community’s values over the state curriculum as almost axiomatic. Our findings may be extrapolated to other contexts wherein minority groups develop their LEPs and adjust the curriculum to strike a balance between integration and the wish to maintain a distinctive identity. Languages (and LEPs in particular) are a powerful prism for the investigation of these issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The initiator of the establishment of Yiddish broadcasts in postwar Poland was Jonas Turkow. The first program in Yiddish was broadcasted by the Polish Radio (Polskie Radio) from the city of Lublin on January 6, 1945. For the first time in Poland's history Yiddish could be heard on the airwaves. It was also the first attempt to revive Yiddish and, most importantly, it came from a state institution before any Jewish organizations and institutions came to existence after World War II. After Jonas Turkow had left Poland, this activity was taken over by the Department of Culture and Propaganda in the Central Committee of Jews in Poland (CKŻP) in Warsaw. Between 1950 and 1958 the broadcasts were aired by the Jewish Section of the Polish Radio External Service and they could be heard only abroad. In January 1958, the Jewish Section of the Polish Radio was closed down by the decision of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers' Party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an attempt to understand Isaac Bashevis Singer's blatant preoccupation in his stories with offensive and outrageous characters and actions that can simply be defined as vulgar. It is best exemplified in stories that depict a recurring theme in his fiction: the expulsion of the female outcast from and by her patriarchal community. Even though the vulgar characteristics of these female outcasts were construed by several Yiddish-speaking intellectuals as an assault both on Jewish women and on Yiddish language and culture, Singer's stories utilize their vulgar style and crude content as a direct attack on the Jewish Maskilim and their twentieth-century successors. This essay discusses his short story "Di makhsheyfeh" ("The Witch") from a feminist perspective, specifically in accordance with Julia Kristeva's theorization of the abject, in order to address Bella Zilberstein (the witch) as an allegorical affirmation of the same vulgar qualities that were projected upon Yiddish since the formation of the Haskalah movement in the eighteenth century. In identifying Yiddish as an abject source of shame on behalf of modernized Jews, Singer deliberately creates an "ugly" story about an "ugly" character. "Di makhsheyfeh" and its outright vulgarity will therefore be discussed both as a critique of the self-destructing delusion of modern Jews in their assimilatory ambitions, and as a celebration of Yiddish folklore characteristics, a passionate embrace of its irrational and "disgraceful" virtues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

S. Yizhar’s literary persona is known to be central in the making of the Sabra identity. This article offers an interpretation of the role played by his poetics of space in shaping both the spatial and social boundaries of this new elitist identity. These boundaries are read as driven by poetic interests in a Zionist literary context. For Zionist literature, representing the land of Israel as real is the literary equivalent of the theopolitical shift from myth to history. The Sabra generation is expected to overcome Jewish strangeness and to capture the land both politically and literarily. But Yizhar’s poetics refuses to grasp the land; it follows modern philosophy and sees the full representation of reality as impossible, hence he creates boundaries for the poetic self. This refusal to fully represent is portrayed here as creating the political sense of boundaries out of poetics. Yizhar’s poetics of space is demonstrated in the short stories included in Sipurei mishor and the story “The Prisoner” as well as in his spatial stance both in Jewish-Arab conflict and in questions of nature preservation. His point of view appears as kernel that can explain sociopolitical trends in modern Israel and its quasireligious motivation. [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]

S. Yizhar’s literary persona is known to be central in the making of the Sabra identity. This article offers an interpretation of the role played by his poetics of space in shaping both the spatial and social boundaries of this new elitist identity. These boundaries are read as driven by poetic interests in a Zionist literary context. For Zionist literature, representing the land of Israel as real is the literary equivalent of the theopolitical shift from myth to history. The Sabra generation is expected to overcome Jewish strangeness and to capture the land both politically and literarily. But Yizhar’s poetics refuses to grasp the land; it follows modern philosophy and sees the full representation of reality as impossible, hence he creates boundaries for the poetic self. This refusal to fully represent is portrayed here as creating the political sense of boundaries out of poetics. Yizhar’s poetics of space is demonstrated in the short stories included in Sipurei mishor and the story “The Prisoner” as well as in his spatial stance both in Jewish-Arab conflict and in questions of nature preservation. His point of view appears as kernel that can explain sociopolitical trends in modern Israel and its quasireligious motivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses an organized name-change process that occurred in the 1930s in the Jewish community of Helsinki. Between 1933 and 1944 in approximately one fifth of the Helsinki Jewish families (c. 16 %) someone had their family name changed. We argue that the name changes served two purposes: on the one hand they made life easier in the new nation state. It was part of a broader process where tens of thousands of Finns translated and changed their Swedish names to Finnish ones. On the other hand, the changed family names offered a new kind of Jewish identity. The name-changing process of the Helsinki Jews opens a window onto the study of nationalism, antisemitism, identity politics and visions of a Jewish future from the Finnish perspective.

Broadcasts aired by the Polish Radio in the Yiddish language in the 1950s were listened to all over the world. All the audience felt that for them, due to numerous reasons, the broadcasts were a matter of high value, and it is confirmed in letters sent to the station. It is also confirmed by negative reaction of the audience to the programme’s closure in 1958. The majority of letters was written in the Yiddish language, and in some cases other languages were used too – Russian, Polish, German. The letters contained many different personal traits, while reflecting the condition of preserved the Yiddish language, after the loss of homeland. The condition of Yiddish language that was used in the letters, for example informs about whether the author was subject to socialization in the original Jewish community (family home, school), whether they were present in the Jewish community, or whether they were affected by linguistic alienation in the country of their residence. Sometimes the audience would tackle the subject of their language deficiencies and point out to the forceful interruption of their Jewish education or the conditions in the country of their asylum.

The article presents selected translations of Yiddish literature into English, focusing on the influence of translator’s choices on forming the topography and realities of life in Poland before the Second World War. Elements related to material culture and multilingual quality of represented world are often eliminated or simplified. One of the main problems for translators, who usually do not know Polish, are Polish words and expressions, which are frequent in Yiddish literature written by authors of Polish extraction. Additional problems occur when Polish is used as intermediary between Yiddish and Polish. A reader who knows Eastern European realities receives an image of reality, which has been purposefully modified to facilitate reception in America, so that represented reality turns out to be more alien and exotic than in direct translation from Yiddish into Polish. This phenomenon occurs not only in fiction, but also in documentary texts, e.g. in the memorial books, which have been popular in Poland recently, and which are often translated from English intermediary texts. All this leads to important discrepancies and tensions between reality as it is imagined, remembered, and documented. Examples presented in the article come from texts by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Shalom Asch, and the Zgierz memorial book.

Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish as Determinants of Identity: As Illustrated in the Jewish Press of the First Half of the Twentieth Century The paper shows an image and functions of Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish languages among Jewish Diaspora groups – the Balkan Sephardim and the Ashkenazim (the Ostjuden group) – in the period from the beginning of the twentieth century until the outbreak of World War II. The study is based on the articles from Jewish weeklies, magazines and newspapers from pre-war Bosnia and Hercegovina and from Germany/Poland. It demonstrates a double-sided attitude towards the languages. On the one hand – an image of the languages as determinants of Jewish identity. Touching on this theme, the authors of the paper also try to highlight the images of Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish and as determinants in a narrower sense – of the Sephardi/Ashkenazi identity in that period. On the other hand, the paper shows a tendency to treat the languages as “corrupted” and “dying” languages, and as factors slowing down the assimilation of Jewish groups and also as an obstacle for Zionist ideologies. Języki jidysz i żydowsko-hiszpański jako wskaźniki tożsamości – na przykładzie żydowskich tekstów prasowych pierwszej połowy XX wieku Artykuł ukazuje obraz i funkcje języków jidysz i żydowsko-hiszpańskiego wśród żydowskich grup diasporowych – bałkańskich Sefardyjczyków oraz Aszkenazyjczyków (Ostjuden) – w okresie od początków wieku XX do wybuchu II wojny światowej. Opis oparty jest na artykułach z żydowskich magazynów, tygodników, prasy codziennej z przedwojennej Bośni i Hercegowiny oraz Niemiec/Polski. Ukazany jest ambiwalentny stosunek wobec języków. Z jednej strony – obraz języków jako wskaźników żydowskiej tożsamości, jak również obraz jidysz i żydowsko-hiszpańskiego jako wskaźników tożsamości w węższym ujęciu: tożsamości sefardyjskiej/aszkenazyjskiej w omawianym okresie. Z drugiej strony zaś – artykuł zwraca uwagę także na to, że oba języki były traktowane jako „zepsute”, „umierające” i stanowiące czynniki spowalniające asymilację grup żydowskich oraz przeszkodę dla idei syjonistycznych.