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While widely considered an endangered language, Yiddish has emerged as a vehicle for young people to engage with their heritage and identity, and as a site for creative renewal in the Jewish world and beyond. Yiddish Lives On explores diverse stories and strategies of resistance to language decline.

Looking at Montreal's Jewish community during the first half of the twentieth century, Margolis explores the lives and works of activists, writers, scholars, performers, and organizations that fuelled a still-thriving community. She also considers the foundations and development of Yiddish cultural life in Montreal in its interaction with broader issues of diasporic Jewish culture. An illuminating look at the ways in which Yiddish culture was maintained in North America, Jewish Roots, Canadian Soil is the story of how a minority culture was transplanted and transformed.

In 1931, ninety-nine percent of Montreal's sixty thousand Jews reported that Yiddish was their mother tongue. In the succeeding decades, Yiddish culture has continued to have a prominent place in Montreal's social landscape. In Jewish Roots, Canadian Soil, Rebecca Margolis shows that the city's vibrant Yiddish culture is the legacy of a driven group of the city's Jews who devoted themselves to the revitalization of the Jewish community, creating a long-lasting infrastructure and institutions that have bolstered Yiddish identity.Looking at Montreal's Jewish community during the first half of the twentieth century, Margolis explores the lives and works of activists, writers, scholars, performers, and organizations that fuelled a still-thriving community. She also considers the foundations and development of Yiddish cultural life in Montreal in its interaction with broader issues of diasporic Jewish culture.An illuminating look at the ways in which Yiddish culture was maintained in North America, Jewish Roots, Canadian Soil is the story of how a minority culture was transplanted and transformed.

After years of internet prohibitions, the 2020 coronavirus pandemic ushered in a new age of digital Hasidic Yiddish screen production. In addition to existing list-servs, Hasidic Yiddish speakers have increasingly employed new media platforms to produce and disseminate screen production, including comedy sketches and shorts; behind-the scenes for feature films; music videos; and videocasts. Intended for Hasidic audiences, these express and promote the social and religious mores of their communities. By the same token, today’s professionalized production is widely accessible to both Hasidic and broader audiences via video sharing, streaming, and social media. This article examines Yiddish-language screen production among emerging and established Hasidic content creators as a dramatic shift in Haredi cultural production across production, content, language, and distribution. In doing so, it considers what “kosher entertainment” entails in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic.

The self-isolation and social distancing associated with the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic added a new dimension to a multifaceted and transnational secular Yiddish social landscape. The widespread use of digital communication technologies facilitated new forms of virtual participation in a heterotopic Yiddishland via lectures, concerts, classes and conversation groups. This study examines engagement with secular Yiddish mediated by digital technologies during the early lockdowns and restrictions from March to May 2020. It investigates the expansion of a cybervernacular mode of Yiddish in a virtual secular Yiddishland encompassing learners, speakers, activists and performers worldwide, and the roles that secular Yiddish social spaces played for their participants during the crisis.

Although Australia is home to a mid-sized Jewish community with a rich cultural life, the study of Australian Jewish literature lags far behind scholarship by historians and sociologists. In this paper, we begin to think about what might constitute a canon of Australian Jewish writing, focusing particularly on writing since the turn of the new century. We examine five texts by some of Australia’s most celebrated Jewish authors. In examining these works, we show the centrality of the Holocaust to Australian Jewish literature. This is not surprising, given that the Holocaust, as scholars have long established, serves as a kind of foundational narrative for the local Jewish community. The writers we examine—second- and third-generation authors whose works are consistent with many of the major features of second- and third-generation writing—clearly situate the Holocaust as the most defining experience in shaping what Australian Jewry has become.