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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]

AbstractBackgroundAimsMethodsResultsConclusionSoteria houses and peer respites, collectively called Healing Houses, are alternatives to psychiatric hospitalisation.The aim of this research is to review Healing Houses in relation to design characteristics (architectural and service), sustainability and development opportunities and barriers.This systematic review followed a PROSPERO protocol (CRD42022378089). Articles were identified from journal database searches, hand searching websites, Google Scholar searches, expert consultation and backwards and forward citation searches.Eight hundred and forty-nine documents were screened in three languages (English, German and Hebrew) and 45 documents were included from seven countries. The review highlights 11 architectural design characteristics (atmosphere, size, soft room, history, location, outdoor space, cleanliness, interior design, facilities, staff only areas and accessibility), six service design characteristics (guiding principles, living and working together, consensual treatment, staff, supporting personal meaning making and power), five opportunities (outcomes, human rights, economics, hospitalization and underserved) and four types of barriers (clinical, economic and regulatory, societal and ideological). The primary sustainability issue was long-term funding.Future research should focus on operationalizing a “home-like” atmosphere and the impact of design features such as green spaces on wellbeing of staff and service users. Future research could also produce design guidelines for Healing Houses. [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]

Students in Yiddish supplementary schools used texts produced by educators steeped in a diaspora nationalist pedagogy that reflected the ideological coupling of Yiddish and Yiddishkeit: the Yiddish language informed one's sense of Jewishness. By the 1960s, doodles students left in their schoolbooks challenged this coupling of language and identity. Though it is generally supposed that Yiddish primers ultimately tell us more about the aspirations of adults than they do about the experiences of children, reading these texts together reveals that children evolved their own relationship between Yiddish and Jewishness that was far more subtle than what they encountered in their textbooks. Postwar primers emphasize maintaining the Yiddish language on American soil, to the exclusion of the external culture; children's doodles argue that more important than preserving the language was locating Yiddishkeit in the culture around them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Yiddish-language memoirs of the journalist Getzel Zelikovits (1855-1926), published in New York in 1919-1920, present a version of his life that deviates considerably from the version one might glean from other contemporary testimony, such as newspaper articles and institutional records. This paper examines how Zelikovits constructed a counterfactual narrative in which he seeks to present his readership with his life as it should have been. As well as Zelikovits's sense of injustice at how he had been treated by European and American academia, and by the British and French establishments, another reason for his deviation from the truth is that he was guilty of a number of serious offences: academic fraud, false accusation of murder, and likely sexual assault. I conclude by exploring what is at stake for a biographer, from an ethical and scholarly standpoint, in exposing Zelikovits's misdeeds and untruths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the history of the pre-state Zionist judiciary, focusing on Sammy Gronemann's instrumental role as its high judge and chief architect from 1911 to 1946. In doing so, it addresses a significant gap in existing research. Despite extensive attention that has been paid to his contributions to German and Hebrew literature, Gronemann's legal profession and judicial endeavors within the World Zionist Organization (WZO) have been largely overlooked in academic discourse. To provide context and illuminate Gronemann's influential role, the first section of this article offers a concise historical account of the pre-state Zionist judiciary's genesis. The second section delves into Gronemann's disillusionment and suppressed critique of the WZO's democratization initiatives. This is evident in his private writings, including a hitherto unknown letter correspondence with Theodor Heuss, the first president of West Germany. The exploration undertaken unveils the moral authority of Gronemann as representative of the institutionalized Zionist conscience, a role he embodied as the chief judge and architect of the Zionist pre-state judiciary. [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]

Abraham Sutzkever was a renowned Yiddish poet who was deeply connected to Vilna, also known as the "Jerusalem of Lithuania." Despite the decline of Yiddish in other areas, it thrived in Vilna. During World War II, Sutzkever and his wife were forced back into the city after attempting to escape the Nazis. He clung to poetry throughout the war, even writing about his own experiences of hiding and the murder of his child. Sutzkever played a significant role in the cultural life of the Vilna ghetto, participating in public poetry readings and working with youths. He was a member of the FPO, the main armed resistance group in the ghetto, but left when it became clear that most of Vilna's Jews did not support active resistance. Sutzkever and his wife were eventually flown out of the partisan zone to Moscow, where his poetry gained attention. He was asked to be a witness at the Nuremberg trials in 1946. However, he was disillusioned by the Soviet authorities' refusal to allow a Jewish Museum and the destruction of Jewish books, leading him to smuggle valuable manuscripts to YIVO in New York. Sutzkever settled in Mandatory Palestine and continued to promote Yiddish literature through his journal, Di Goldene Keyt. Justin Cammy's translation of Sutzkever's memoir provides valuable insights into the poet's life and experiences in the Vilna ghetto, shedding light [Extracted from the article]

Al-Ḥarīrī's sixth/twelfth-century story collection (the Maqāmāt , or Impostures) is famous for its rhymes, obscure vocabulary, and complex wordplay. Despite its difficulty, it was used as a text to teach Arabic, a function it continued to serve even after it was introduced to Europe in the seventeenth century CE. After a reverent reception at the hands of early Dutch and English scholars, it was condemned by later French readers as emblematic of "Oriental decadence." Of the various translations, the most successful are those into Hebrew and German, both of which celebrate the ludic element of the original. The recently published English translation attempts to work from the same principle. [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]

This article explores linguistic imitation as a strategy of socialization. It focuses on the ethnographic context of New Mexico's Jewish community, which some Hispanic New Mexicans are beginning to join after discovering their Sephardic, or Iberian Jewish, ancestry. Although several are choosing to formally 'return,' or convert, to Judaism, they often feel unwelcome in the community and, therefore, do not always have interlocutors who might help to linguistically integrate them. In this context, they adopt various strategies for learning community language norms, including imitating the speech of veteran community members and reproducing Jewish English as learned from books and internet resources, even if doing so results in non-normative usages. They may also use elements of Yiddish to mirror language used within the local Jewish community, positioning themselves as Sephardic through the use of an Ashkenazi language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There couldn't be a better speaker than Liora Bing-Heidekker to convey the sensuousness, the spiritual complexity and the emotional and intellectual depth of the role dance plays in Lasker-Schüler's oeuvre. Dance, the topic of this fourth annual Else Lasker-Schüler lecture, perfectly expresses the joy of meeting again in person after two years in which this event could only be held virtually. Bringing together dance, poetry, philosophy and politics, the present lecture reveals the synesthetic core of Lasker-Schüler's writings. [Extracted from the article]

This article examines the German poem inserted in Leah Goldberg's debut novel Mikhtavim minesi'ah medumah (Letters From an Imagined Journey 1936/37). I argue that the novel serves as a framework through which Goldberg can momentarily become a German poet, stretching the limits of her Jewish subjectivity and of the monolingual Hebrew literary sphere. Whereas studies have addressed the intertextual references in Goldberg's novel, scholarly discussions have failed to attend Goldberg's German poem, overlooking her non-Hebrew poetic voice and the literary genealogy to which she ascribes herself. To understand this moment, I attend Ruth's intercultural relations with Erich Kästner and Rainer Maria Rilke, whom she quotes over the course of her travels. In so doing, Goldberg points to Ruth's imagined literary genealogy while putting herself into this tradition as a way to form her voice as a German poet. Written by the protagonist, the poem is recalled and recited in German by Shnithalel, Ruth's friend from India. This German poem, I argue, offers a key to understanding Goldberg's prose as a dialogic mode of writing that grapples with Jewish subjectivity and voice, emerging poetically between self and other (Ich and Sie) and interlinguistically between Hebrew and German. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The book "Antisemitism in Language" by Ronen Steinke deals with the significance of word choice in relation to antisemitism. The author examines the negative connotations of the word "Jew" and the discriminatory use of terms associated with Judaism. Steinke also considers the use of Yiddish in the German language and the ambivalent meaning of some Yiddish expressions. He emphasizes the necessity of sensitive language and warns against problematic rebranding. The book also includes comments from various personalities on the topic of antisemitism and provides suggestions for further discussions and research. [Extracted from the article]

In the humanities, text comparison is essential for scholarly editing the traditions of a text with its different witnesses under study. For the computer-aided creation of a critical apparatus, there have been established approaches and tools for many years. However, they mainly focus on subsentences or sentences. An efficient and easy-to-use automatic comparison of entire chapters or books still represents a research desideratum. The Locate, Explore, Retrace and Apprehend complex text variants (LERA) working environment presented here solves this issue. It is based on a two-stage collation approach: an efficient, fully automatic alignment of text segments, which can be paragraphs, subparagraphs or sentences, with interactive post-processing options, followed by the detailed comparison at segment level. Because aligning text segments, such as paragraphs, for more than two text witnesses is algorithmically challenging, we discuss the heuristics we developed in more detail. LERA combines the entire process of document management, tokenization/segmentation, normalization, alignment, and visualization with interactive control options and exploratory tools. It has already been and is being successfully applied in several Digital Humanities projects of different languages, e.g. for Arabic, French, Hebrew as well as German and English texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I explore negotiations of alternative Jewish identities as a response to the Holocaust in two alternative histories by the Jewish American writers Michael Chabon and Simone Zelitch. Both engage in very different ways with the destruction of a physical Yiddishland in central and eastern Europe and explore notions of Jewish guilt and the projection of Jewish identities into the future. In The Yiddish Policemen's Union (2007), Chabon explores the imaginary persistence of Yiddish language and culture in a Yiddishland that, after a mitigated Holocaust, has been transferred to Alaska. The Yiddishland in Zelitch's Judenstaat (2016) is divested of its Yiddishness. Jewish statehood after the Holocaust is conceived in her novel in retributive guilt and relies upon a potent imaginary of Jewish Germanness which, extends to culture, language, and territory in an illusory continuation of a mythical Ashkenaz and eventually ends in the dissolution of Jewish sovereignty. [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]

In juxtaposing Kafka's sounds and cinema, she is not primarily interested in the ways that particular contemporary films may have influenced Kafka's literary approach. In passages such as this, where Gellen draws wider conclusions from her analysis of sound in Kafka for his conception of writing, the benefits of her trans-medial approach become fully apparent. Even though Kafka himself enjoyed reading his texts out loud, both to his family and in public, his diary entries show his deep-seated ambivalence towards this art form, which he regarded as potentially manipulative and parasitical, a threat to the supposed purity of the written text. [Extracted from the article]

I present the American Yiddish writer Sarah B. Smith and the unstable ground her serialized fiction occupies between the daily Yiddish press and popular English-language American culture. Smith wrote sensationalist fiction in Yiddish for an Americanizing Jewish immigrant audience during the intewar period. Smith's novels move in multiple directions at once, translating American cultural vocabularies into Yiddish while also clinging to vernacular difference, named as Yiddish or Jewish, that itself is hardly a stable thing. By considering Smith within and against Yiddish and American literary historiographies, I seek to push the study of Yiddish literature beyond nationalist and ethnocentric limitations while also promoting the comparative study of US culture. Focusing on her 1922 serialized novel Looking for Luck (Zukhndik glik), and situating Smith's writing in both the context of the Yiddish press and the rise of "women's culture" in the United States, I argue that the uncertainty of Smith's fiction provides a model for rethinking the boundaries of American and Yiddish popular cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early twentieth century, the Jewish community in Montreal created its own religious, cultural and intellectual spaces, including synagogues, schools, a library, and a Yiddish language daily, the Keneder Adler. Behind these varied but complementary institutions was a group of remarkable people who collectively built a Jewish community with considerable cultural creativity. One of the most interesting among them was Chaim Kruger (1877-1933). He was a shoḥet [kosher slaughterer], rabbi, teacher, and journalist on the staff of the Keneder Adler. He was also a serious scholar of Jewish philosophy. In the Keneder Adler, Kruger shared the results of his deep and extensive reading and study. He wrote series of articles on widely-ranging subjects such as Philo Judaeus, Saadia Gaon, Moses Maimonides, Isaac Luria, and Ḥayyim of Volozhin. His columns on Maimonides were collected into a book, Der Rambam, zayn leben un shafn [Maimonides: His Life and Works], published in 1933. The Maimonides book forms the basis of our analysis of Kruger's thought. This article examines Kruger's attempt to popularize Maimonides' philosophy and make a thinker noted for the esoteric nature of his thought into someone accessible to the readership of the Keneder Adler. It also investigates Kruger's attempt to compare Maimonides with modern philosophers, especially Kant and Nietzsche, in the context of contemporary attempts to incorporate modern philosophy into the task of understanding Judaism. Kruger's work contributes to our understanding of the intellectual milieu of the Montreal Jewish community as well as the reception history of Maimonides in the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the political and identity dynamics of early twentieth century Jewish anarchism in Winnipeg, a local movement situated at the intersection of two gravitational poles. One of these poles was the Jewish left and, in particular, its socialist (Marxist) current, represented by the Arbeiter Ring ("Workmen's Circle"). The other was the Jewish anarchist mutual aid network of North America, centred on the East Coast of the United States but extending its activity throughout the continent. Using a prosopographical ("collective biography") approach to highlight the relational patterns of the radical Jewish community of Winnipeg, this article assesses the movement's unique effort to balance between the two larger ideological frameworks from which its members drew. The article identifies the factors which determined this midway stance--namely, the close connection that the local activists maintained with the Yiddish language and culture--demonstrating how the latter contributed to compromising the movement's viability in the long term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper proposes a usage-based account of a largely productive pattern of dative experiential sentences in Modern Hebrew that stand in contra-distinction to their parallels in Indo-European languages. In the pattern under consideration, the dative-Experiencer is non-topical, following an invariable predicate in masculine singular form. The paper seeks to prove that the construction in Hebrew is essentially a subjectless construction. Its origin is traced back to Biblical Hebrew, but its proliferation in present-day language is assumed to be contact-facilitated by a parallel subject-like dative-Experiencer construction widespread in Slavic and Yiddish languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Yiddish Lives On: Strategies of Language Transmission" by Rebecca Margolis is a book that explores the survival and persistence of the Yiddish language in Canada. The author highlights the rich history and present of Yiddish in Canada, emphasizing its cultural significance and the hope for its continued transmission. Despite the decline of Yiddish as a spoken language, the book showcases the creativity and cultural production that has taken place in Yiddish over the years. The author also examines various cultural spaces where Yiddish is still alive and in transmission, such as theater, writing, singing, and media. The book serves as an ode to Yiddish and a call to preserve and transmit the language through evolving language transmission practices. [Extracted from the article]

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]

I will attempt to integrate my remarks about the musical creativity of the East Ashkenazim in response to recent historical paradigms about the Jewish people worldwide. The key concept is the distinction between the many numerically small and geographically local "embedded" Jewish communities, as opposed to the much larger and geographically widespread Jewish cultures, which can be defined as "transnational." Since the later sixteenth century only two such transnational Jewish cultures existed—the Ashkenazim and the Sephardim. The Ashkenazim of Eastern Europe constituted the largest portion of the Jewish people in modern times, and their musical creativity shows far deeper internal connections and developments than that of any other Jewish ethnos. Through recent linguistic research into the origin of the Yiddish language, plus musicological paradigms addressing genre, musical articulation, intonatsia, and "ethno-hearing," I will suggest how these facts and concepts can help to explain the saliant musical patterns of the East Ashkenazic Jews. [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]

In this study I confront the work of Thomas Mann with the Jewish question in order to examine the relationship between literary (human) agency and the inferior margins that enable it: those creatures who do not share the language of (the European and civilized) man. Through a reading of several of Mann's narratives that concern the relationship between human beings and animals as well as texts by Jewish authors, Kafka in German and Agnon in Hebrew, I seek to shed light on the concept of 'animality,' a term that implies continuity between the human and the animal, thereby laying bare man's political precariousness and fragility and aligning the human with the creature by exposing the body. Based on my reading of Mann's figuration of the dog in the early story "Tobias Mindernickel" (1898), the novella Herr und Hund (1917), and his Jewish mythical depiction of the biblical Joseph as a dog in Joseph und seine Brüder (1933–1943), I argue that Mann's humanism is limited in that it guards against the mimetic alignment of man with other creatures by portraying the (often muted) creaturely object of the literary depiction as an inferior – albeit frequently admirable – being. By contrasting Mann's treatment of this question with Jewish literature's complete immersion in the animal, I suggest how descriptive speech identifies orientalism as a form of descriptive knowledge, thus clarifying as well the process whereby the modern European nation-state was consolidated by its invisible margins. The article thus suggests that literary description is a means to differentiate and gain agency by adhering to language's elevated and hierarchical terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to shed light on two principle subjects relating to language and culture in the Jewish community in Palestine before the rise of Zionism. First, it attempts to describe and to deepen our understanding of the Yiddish of the Ashkenazi community spoken in Historical Palestine in the 18th and 19th centuries. This dialect of Yiddish, referred to in this article as 'Palestinian Yiddish', was permeated with Arabic influences. Secondly, and in conjunction with addressing this dialect, the article explores various facets of the knowledge of Arabic among the Ashkenazi community in the country. In this respect, it highlights that the increased knowledge of Arabic in the Ashkenazi community indicates not only acquaintance with the language itself, but also encompasses broader insights about the relations between the Ashkenazi community and the Arab-Palestinian people which challenges the traditional research on the topic. Based on socio-linguistic analysis, as well as inslights from language contact and language and society, this article claims that the language parameter can highlight the social and political routes in which the Ashkenazi Palestinian community was paving, including those of acclimation, integration and being part of the general hegemonic Arab culture. As I argue, this is not unconnected to Zionism's strenuous recoil from both of these languages—Yiddish and Arabic. 'Palestinian Yiddish' and 'Ashkenazi Arabic', therefore, jointly reveal a period as it once was and is no more: language skills and social relations that posed a threat to separatist practices that were to be pushed forward by the Zionist movement. [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]

By focusing on two actresses in the State Jewish Theatre of Bucharest, this essay endeavors to capture the broader implications of the role of women in building a landmark cultural institution and, at the same time, the place, role and impact of this Yiddish-language theatre as one of the disseminators of Jewish and Yiddish-language culture in Romania's changing national reality since the late nineteenth century. A diachronic view of the institution's history is combined with an intimate account of a member of my family whose life has become intricately linked with the Jewish community and the Jewish theatre in the Romanian capital. [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]

The author explains that each Jewish language could, in fact, be considered as "a I professional discourse or register i vis-à-vis its base language" (p. 46) used for specific purposes within Jewish society. We also find five useful indexes (Hebrew Bible, Mishna, and Talmud passages; language groups, languages, dialects, and varieties; groups and persons; linguistic subjects; cultural/religious and historical subjects) to facilitate searching in this impressive amount of information. The Ashkenazi Jews tended, for example, to transform the linguistic substratum, Middle High German, common to both Jews and Christians, into an autonomous and independent Yiddish language. [Extracted from the article]

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