Twenty-First Century Yiddishism

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Twenty-First Century Yiddishism
Language, Identity, and the New Jewish Studies

Tatjana Soldat-Jaffe

Tatjana Soldat-Jaffe holds a PhD from University of Illinois, and is currently a professor at University of Louisville, Kentucky, where she supervises the linguistics program. Her research and teaching interest focus on Yiddish studies, language & culture, and language & ideology.

Drawing on sociolinguistics and cultural studies, Twenty-First Century Yiddishism examines transnational critical debates about teaching Yiddish over the last hundred years. It looks at the ways a contested pedagogical terrain comes to define a minority language’s on-going resources of cultural and ideological resilience. From the inaugural international academic conference on the language held in 1908 in the Austro-Hungarian empire to the rise of Yiddish home-schooling and the surge of interest as a subject of secondary language study in recent years, the status, turf-sharing conflicts and pedagogical frictions surrounding the shuttling of Yiddish back-and-forth reveal a fraught yet surprisingly dynamic situation.
… Through historical and comparative analysis – including archival work, surveys, interviews, close textual reading, discourse analysis, and ideological critique – the author reports on three critical case-studies for the language’s futurity: ultra-orthodox Jewry in the UK, “heritage” learners in the US, and “multi-cultural” non-Jewish learners in Germany. The volume addresses several timely preoccupations in the fields of both Jewish Studies and Linguistics, pulling together multiple strands from the humanities and the social sciences concerning the evolving politics of language, pedagogy, transnationalism and diaspora, the meaning of heritage languages, and religious and ethnic identity in the modern era. Twenty-First Century Yiddishism will be of keen interest to all who study these disciplines academically, as well as other readers in literary and cultural studies, literary and cultural theory, anthropology, and history.


Acknowledgements Introduction: Yiddish Goes On Chapter One: Yiddishism and Its Discontents Language Purity, Past and Present Returning to the Scene of Yiddishism Cultural Nationalism In Defense of Hybridism Reclaiming Cultural Autonomy The Legacy of Czernowitz Chapter Two: Anti-Yiddishism and the Erlikhe Yidn in the United Kingdom Yiddish as a Cultural Trait Jewish Education, Yiddish Education Erlikhe Yidn Home-study Language as an Ethnic Marker Chapter Three: Complexity and Contradiction in American Yiddishland Visions and Revisions of Yiddishland Yiddish as a School of Thought, Yiddish as a School for Thought Making Use of Yiddish The Yiddish Academic Postmodern Chapter Four: Yiddishism or Yidishkayt: Can Yiddish “Revive” in Germany? The Life and Death Paradigm Aspirational Self-Fashioning German Yiddishland Conclusion: Heritage Learning Notes Works Cited Index
“Tatjana Soldat-Jaffe’s Twentieth-First Century Yiddishism is a risky yet engaging tour through the post-Holocaust social history of Yiddish in Israel, Europe — especially Germany — and the United States. It is a parallel history of the status of the Jewish imaginary, Jews in the imagination of non-Jews, Jews as historical figures, and Jews as self-creators of a new / old Jewish identity. Well researched and well written, it is both first-rate socio-linguistics and social history, of importance to scholars of American, Israeli, and German Jewry.” Sander L. Gilman, Distinguished Professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences, Professor of Psychiatry, Emory University

Publication Details

	Hardback ISBN:		978-1-84519-406-2

	Page Extent / Format:		246 pp. / 229 x 152 mm
	Release Date:		January 2012
	Illustrated:		No
	Hardback Price:		£35.00 / $59.50


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