Author: Cecile Esther Kuznitz Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1139867385 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 325
Book Description
This book is the first history of YIVO, the original center for Yiddish scholarship. Founded by a group of Eastern European intellectuals after World War I, YIVO became both the apex of secular Yiddish culture and the premier institution of Diaspora Nationalism, which fought for Jewish rights throughout the world at a time of rising anti-Semitism. From its headquarters in Vilna, Lithuania, YIVO tried to balance scholarly objectivity with its commitment to the Jewish masses. Using newly recovered documents that were believed destroyed by Hitler and Stalin, Cecile Esther Kuznitz tells for the first time the compelling story of how these scholars built a world-renowned institution despite dire poverty and anti-Semitism. She raises new questions about the relationship between Jewish cultural and political work, and analyzes how nationalism arises outside of state power.
Author: Cecile Esther Kuznitz Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 9781316634837 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
This book is the first history of YIVO, the original center for Yiddish scholarship. Founded by a group of Eastern European intellectuals after World War I, YIVO became both the apex of secular Yiddish culture and the premier institution of Diaspora Nationalism, which fought for Jewish rights throughout the world at a time of rising anti-Semitism. From its headquarters in Vilna, Lithuania, YIVO tried to balance scholarly objectivity with its commitment to the Jewish masses. Using newly recovered documents that were believed destroyed by Hitler and Stalin, Cecile Esther Kuznitz tells for the first time the compelling story of how these scholars built a world-renowned institution despite dire poverty and anti-Semitism. She raises new questions about the relationship between Jewish cultural and political work and analyzes how nationalism arises outside of state power.
Author: Eliyahu Stern Publisher: Yale University Press ISBN: 0300179308 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 338
Book Description
Elijah ben Solomon, the "Genius of Vilna,” was perhaps the best-known and most understudied figure in modern Jewish history. This book offers a new narrative of Jewish modernity based on Elijah's life and influence. While the experience of Jews in modernity has often been described as a process of Western European secularization—with Jews becoming citizens of Western nation-states, congregants of reformed synagogues, and assimilated members of society—Stern uses Elijah’s story to highlight a different theory of modernization for European life. Religious movements such as Hasidism and anti-secular institutions such as the yeshiva emerged from the same democratization of knowledge and privatization of religion that gave rise to secular and universal movements and institutions. Claimed by traditionalists, enlighteners, Zionists, and the Orthodox, Elijah’s genius and its afterlife capture an all-embracing interpretation of the modern Jewish experience. Through the story of the “Vilna Gaon,” Stern presents a new model for understanding modern Jewish history and more generally the place of traditionalism and religious radicalism in modern Western life and thought.
Author: Rachel Rojanski Publisher: Indiana University Press ISBN: 0253045169 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 334
Book Description
“A pioneering study” of how two languages have coexisted in the Jewish state, with “a wealth of information” on Yiddish newspapers, theater, and more (AJS Review). Yiddish in Israel: A History challenges the commonly held view that Yiddish was suppressed or even banned by Israeli authorities for ideological reasons, offering instead a radical new interpretation of the interaction between Yiddish and Israeli Hebrew cultures. Rachel Rojanski tells the compelling unknown story of how Yiddish, the most widely used Jewish language in the pre-Holocaust world, fared in Zionist Israel, the land of Hebrew. Following Yiddish in Israel from the proclamation of the State until today, Rojanski reveals that although Israeli leadership made promoting Hebrew a high priority, it did not have a definite policy on Yiddish. The language’s varying fortune through the years was shaped by social and political developments, as well as the cultural atmosphere in Israel. Public perception of the language and its culture, the rise of identity politics, and political and financial interests all played a part. Using a wide range of archival sources, newspapers, and Yiddish literature, Rojanski follows the Israeli Yiddish scene through the history of the Yiddish press, Yiddish theater, early Israeli Yiddish literature, and high Yiddish culture. With compassion, she explores the tensions during Israel’s early years between Yiddish writers and activists and Israel’s leaders, most of whom were themselves Eastern European Jews balancing their love of Yiddish with their desire to promote Hebrew. Finally Rojanski follows Yiddish into the twenty-first century, telling the story of the revived interest in Yiddish among Israeli-born children of Holocaust survivors as they return to the language of their parents.
Author: Ruth R. Wisse Publisher: University of Washington Press ISBN: 0295805676 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 147
Book Description
I. L. Peretz (1852–1915), the father of modern Yiddish literature, was a master storyteller and social critic who advocated a radical shift from religious observance to secular Jewish culture. Wisse explores Peretz’s writings in relation to his ideology, which sought to create a strong Jewish identity separate from the trappings of religion.
Author: Ruth R. Wisse Publisher: Wicked Son ISBN: 1642939714 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 381
Book Description
First came parents with the good sense to flee Europe in 1940 and the good fortune to reach the land of freedom. Their daughter, Ruth, grew up in the shadow of genocide—but in tandem with the birth of Israel, which remained her lodestar. She learned that although Jewishness is biologically transmitted, democracy is not, and both require intensive, intelligent transmission through education in each and every generation. They need adults with the confidence to teach their importance. Ruth tried to take on that challenge as dangers to freedom mounted and shifted sides on the political spectrum. At the high point of her teaching at Harvard University, she witnessed the unraveling of standards of honesty and truth until the academy she left was no longer the one she had entered.
Author: Gershon David Hundert Publisher: ISBN: Category : History Languages : en Pages : 1224
Book Description
This unprecedented reference work systematically represents the history and culture of Eastern European Jews from their first settlement in the region to the present day. More than 1,800 alphabetical entries encompass a vast range of topics, including religion, folklore, politics, art, music, theater, language and literature, places, organizations, intellectual movements, and important figures. The two-volume set also features more than 1,000 illustrations and 55 maps. With original and up-to-date contributions from an international team of 450 distinguished scholars, the Encyclopedia covers the region between Germany and the Ural Mountains, from which more than 2.5 million Jews emigrated to the United States between 1870 and 1920. Even today the majority of Jewish immigrants to North America arrive from Eastern Europe. Engaging, wide-ranging, and authoritative, this work is a rich and essential reference for readers with interests in Jewish studies and Eastern European history and culture. Published in cooperation with YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
Author: Elissa Bemporad Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 0190466456 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 253
Book Description
"Pogroms and blood libels constitute the two classical and most extreme manifestations of tsarist antisemitism. They were often closely intertwined in history and memory, not least because the accusation of blood libel, the allegation that Jews murder Christian children to use their blood for ritual purposes, frequently triggered anti-Jewish violence. Such events were and are considered central to the Jewish experience in late tsarist Russia, the only country on earth with large scale anti-Jewish violence in the early twentieth century. Boasting its break from the tsarist period, the Soviet regime proudly claimed to have eradicated these forms of antisemitism. But, alas, life was much more complicated. The phenomenon and the memory of pogroms and blood libels in different areas of interwar Soviet Union-including Ukraine, Belorussia, Russia and Central Asia-as well as, after World War II, in the newly annexed territories of Lithuania, Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia are a reminder of continuities in the midst of revolutionary ruptures. The persistence, the permutation, and the responses to anti-Jewish violence and memories of violence suggest that Soviet Jews (and non-Jews alike) cohabited with a legacy of blood that did not vanish. This book traces the "afterlife" of these extreme manifestations of antisemitism in the USSR, and in doing so sheds light on the broader question of the changing position of Jews in Soviet society. One notable rupture in manifestations of antisemitism from tsarist to Soviet times included the virtual disappearance-at least during the interwar period-of the tight link between pogroms and blood allegations, indeed a common feature in the waves of anti-Jewish violence that erupted during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries." --
Author: Cecile Esther Kuznitz
Author: Cecile Esther Kuznitz
Author: Cecile Esther Kuznitz
Author: Eliyahu Stern
Author: Rachel Rojanski
Author: Ruth R. Wisse
Author: Ruth R. Wisse
Author: Gershon David Hundert
Author: Elissa Bemporad
Author: Brendan McGeever