Yiddishland: A Culture without Borders

Catalog description

This course surveys the Jewish diasporic experience over five centuries through the lens of the Yiddish language and its many cultural, political, and religious expressions. The majority of Jews today speak either Hebrew or English, but before the Nazi Holocaust, most Jews in the world, wherever they lived, spoke Yiddish. A one-thousand-year-old language, Yiddish was, and remains, more than a vernacular; in the late 19th and early 20th century, it was a site of contestation over the very meaning of Jewish identity in the modern world. For many, Yiddish was a kind of non-territorial homeland, a national culture without a nation-state or borders. Using methods of cultural history, students will access this global ‘Yiddishland’ through a range of primary sources in translation, from early modern women’s prayer books to political manifestos and modernist fiction and poetry. Our multi-century excursion through the lost worlds of Yiddishland will take us to estate towns of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth and the rise of a mystical current known as Hasidism; to worker strikes and barricades in the borderlands of the Russian Empire; to the shores of Ellis Island and the Lower East Side of New York; and to the bustling interwar centers of Yiddishland in Vilna, Warsaw, New York, and Moscow. We will look also at the fate of Yiddish language and culture in the wake of Nazi genocide during WWII, and the ways in which Yiddish was discouraged in favor of Hebrew in the early state of Israel. Finally, we will examine the many ways in which Yiddishland has been pronounced dead from the late 20th century to the present, only to reinvent itself anew. Along the way, we will think about big ideas like diaspora and nationalism, as well as questions relating to language preservation, the politics of language, multilingualism, translation, and the practice of digital humanities. Satisfies…