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7 books match the query 'Yiddish language'

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Becoming Frum

How Newcomers Learn the Language and Culture of Orthodox Judaism

Sarah Bunin Benor

Rutgers University Press, 2012

Winner, 2013 Sami Rohr Choice Award for Jewish Literature

When non-Orthodox Jews become frum (religious), they encounter much more than dietary laws and Sabbath prohibitions. They find themselves in the midst of a whole new culture, involving matchmakers, homemade gefilte fish, and Yiddish-influenced grammar. Becoming Frum explains how these newcomers learn Orthodox language and culture through their interactions with community veterans and other newcomers. Some take on as much as they can as quickly as they can, going beyond the norms of those raised in the community. Others maintain aspects of their pre-Orthodox selves, yielding unique combinations, like Matisyahu’s reggae music or Hebrew words and sing-song intonation used with American slang, as in “mamish (really) keepin’ it real.”

Sarah Bunin Benor brings insight into the phenomenon of adopting a new identity based on ethnographic and sociolinguistic research among men and women in an American Orthodox community. Her analysis is applicable to other situations of adult language socialization, such as students learning medical jargon or Canadians moving to Australia. Becoming Frum offers a scholarly and accessible look at the linguistic and cultural process of “becoming.”

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From that Place and Time

A Memoir, 1938-1947

Dawidowicz, Lucy

Rutgers University Press, 2008

From that Place and Time is the memoir of Lucy S. Dawidowicz, an American-Jewish historian who set out to study Yiddish language and Jewish history at YIVO, the Jewish Scientific Institute in Vilna, Poland, in 1938. Escaping Poland only days before the Nazi onslaught, she worked in the New York YIVO during the war, and returned to Europe from 1946 to 1947 to aid Jewish displaced persons in Munich and Belsen with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Dawidowicz's memoir not only describes her pre-war year in Jewish Eastern Europe, but also treats the ghostly post-war period, and her role in salvaging what remained of Vilna's scorched Jewish archives and libraries.

Nancy Sinkoff's new introduction explores the historical forces, particularly the dynamic world of secular Yiddish culture, which shaped Dawidowicz's decision to journey to Poland and her reassessment of those forces in the last years of her life.

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Jerusalem of Lithuania

A Reader in Yiddish Cultural History

Jerold C. Frakes

The Ohio State University Press, 2011

Yerusholayim d’lite: di yidishe kultur in der lite (Jerusalem of Lithuania: A Reader in Yiddish Cultural History) by Jerold C. Frakes contains cultural, literary, and historical readings in Yiddish that vividly chronicle the central role Vilnius (Lithuania) played in Jewish culture throughout the past five centuries. It includes many examples of Yiddish literature, historiography, sociology, and linguistics written by and about Litvaks and includes work by prominent Yiddish poets, novelists, raconteurs, journalists, and scholars. In addition, Frakes has supplemented the primary texts with many short essays that contextualize Yiddish cultural figures, movements, and historical events.

Designed especially for intermediate and advanced readers of Yiddish (from the second-year of instruction), each text is individually glossed, including not only English definitions, but also basic grammatical information that will enable intermediate readers to progress to an advanced reading ability.

Because of its unique content, Yerusholayim d’lite will be of interest not only to university students of Yiddish language, literature, and culture, but it will be an invaluable resource for scholars and Yiddish reading groups and clubs worldwide, as well as for all general readers interested in Yiddish-language culture.

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Jewish Rhetorics

History, Theory, Practice

Edited by Michael Bernard-Donals and Janice W. Fernheimer

Brandeis University Press, 2014

This volume, the first of its kind, establishes and clarifies the significance of Jewish rhetorics as its own field and as a field within rhetoric studies. Diverse essays illuminate and complicate the editors’ definition of a Jewish rhetorical stance as allowing speakers to maintain a “resolute sense of engagement” with their fellows and their community, while also remaining aware of the dislocation from the members of those communities. Topics include the historical and theoretical foundations of Jewish rhetorics; cultural variants and modes of cultural expression; and intersections with Greco-Roman, Christian, Islamic, and contemporary rhetorical theory and practice. In addition, the contributors examine gender and Yiddish, and evaluate the actual and potential effect of Jewish rhetorics on contemporary scholarship and on the ways we understand and teach language and writing. The contributors include some of the world’s leading scholars of rhetoric, writing, and Jewish studies.

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Languages of Modern Jewish Cultures

Comparative Perspectives

Edited by Joshua L. Miller and Anita Norich

University of Michigan Press, 2016

This collection of essays brings to Jewish Language Studies the conceptual frameworks that have become increasingly important to Jewish Studies more generally: transnationalism, multiculturalism, globalization, hybrid cultures, multilingualism, and interlingual contexts. Languages of Modern Jewish Cultures collects work from prominent scholars in the field, bringing world literary and linguistic perspectives to generate distinctively new historical, cultural, theoretical, and scientific approaches to this topic of ongoing interest. Chapters of this edited volume consider from multiple angles the cultural politics of myths, fantasies, and anxieties of linguistic multiplicity in the history, cultures, folkways, and politics of global Jewry. Methodological range is as important to this project as linguistic range. Thus, in addition to approaches that highlight influence, borrowings, or acculturation, the volume represents those that highlight syncretism, the material conditions of Jewish life, and comparatist perspectives.

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Polacos in Argentina

Polish Jews, Interwar Migration, and the Emergence of Transatlantic Jewish Culture

Mariusz Kalczewiak

University of Alabama Press, 2020

Winner of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association Best Book Award 2020

An examination of the social and cultural repercussions of Jewish emigration from Poland to Argentina in the 1920s and 1930s

Between the 1890s and 1930s, Argentina, following the United States and Palestine, became the main destination for Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews seeking safety, civil rights, and better economic prospects. In the period between 1918 and 1939, sixty thousand Polish Jews established new homes in Argentina. They formed a strong ethnic community that quickly embraced Argentine culture while still maintaining their unique Jewish-Polish character. This mass migration caused the transformation of cultural, social, and political milieus in both Poland and Argentina, forever shaping the cultural landscape of both lands.

In Polacos in Argentina: Polish Jews, Interwar Migration, and the Emergence of Transatlantic Jewish Culture, Mariusz Kałczewiak has constructed a multifaceted and in-depth narrative that sheds light on marginalized aspects of Jewish migration and enriches the dialogue between Latin American Jewish studies and Polish Jewish Studies. Based on archival research, Yiddish travelogues on Argentina, and the Yiddish and Spanish-language press, this study recreates a mosaic of entanglements that Jewish migration wove between Poland and Argentina.

Most studies on mass migration fail to acknowledge the role of the country of origin, but this innovative work approaches Jewish migration to Argentina as a continuous process that took place on both sides of the Atlantic. Taken as a whole, Polacos in Argentina enlightens the heterogeneous and complex issue of immigrant commitments, belongings, and expectations. Jewish emigration from Poland to Argentina serves as a case study of how ethnicity evolves among migrants and their children, and the dynamics that emerge between putting down roots in a new country and maintaining commitments to the country of origin.

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Yiddish & English

The Story of Yiddish in America

Sol Steinmetz

University of Alabama Press, 2001

This is the only book to seriously treat the intriguing linguistic and cultural phenomenon of the intimate contact between Yiddish and English over the past 120 years.

Yiddish arrived in America as the mother tongue of millions of Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe. Not only did this language without a homeland survive in the great American melting pot, it infiltrated the majority language, English, with a wide variety of new words and expressions and helped to establish a new ethnic language called "Jewish English." New Yorkers, in particular, have adopted a long list of Yiddish words, including the well-known "kosher," "chutzpah," "klutz," "yenta," "nosh," "mavin," "schlep," and "shmo."

Yiddish had first developed from language sharing as Jews of northern France and northern Italy migrated into the German-speaking region of the Rhine Valley in the Middle Ages. Sol Steinmetz traces the development of such words as bonhomme from the Old French meaning "good man" to the Yiddish of bonim, or shul for synagogue derived from the German schuol, meaning "school," which had come originally from the Latin schola, for example. With a rich collection of quotations from literature and the press, Steinmetz documents the unusually high lexical, semantic, and intonational exchanges between Yiddish and English in America. He offers more than 1,200 Yiddish words, expressions, idioms, and phrases that have melted into the English vernacular.

Yiddish and English is important for Judaica collections with its two appendixes-one on the romanization of Yiddish and another of Yiddish-origin words, a Jewish-English glossary, a selected bibliography, and an index. But this slim volume is so entertaining and informative for the general reader that it is recommended for anyone who delights in word derivations and language.

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