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This book is about Jewish language. The fact that Jews speak and write in distinctive ways is well known. (The journalist Mike Royko called it \"Hebonics.\") These forms of expression actually draw from many sources and have been employed in popular culture from Henry Roth's Call It Sleep to the novels of Saul Bellow to contemporary television. What has received less attention is what allowed these modern forms to flow from a rich body of Yiddish literature. This book fills that gap by exploring the language of modern Yiddish literature, addressing emblematically why Jews answer a question with a question. Through a series of case studies, A Rhetorical Conversation explores various distinctive aspects of Yiddish literature to explain the nature and importance of Jewish discourse: the way of speaking, writing, arguing, and thinking developed by Yiddish culture based on prolonged and intimate contact with traditional texts.

When non-Orthodox Jews becomefrum(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 Frumexplains 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 Frumoffers a scholarly and accessible look at the linguistic and cultural process of \"becoming.\"

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.

The Yiddish Scientific Institute, known by its Yiddish acronym YIVO, was funded in Vilna in 1925. The institute had four sections: Philology, History, Psychology-Pedagogy, and Economics-Statistics. Its principal goal was not only to produce scholarship concerning Eastern European Jewish populations but also to promote Yiddish as a scientific language. This article analyzes the tensions associated with using Yiddish in academia generally and in social science particularly. It demonstrates how this linguistic commitment to Yiddish led to certain compromises dictated by the need to share academic research, expand readership, and secure financial support. It aims to explore these linguistic matters by focusing on the activities and scholarly production of the Economic-Statistical section—the “ ekstat ” section—from its first meeting in 1926 to 1939. This section offers a particularly relevant case study because of its highly specific situation within YIVO. Located in Berlin and then in Warsaw, the Economic-Statistical section was relatively autonomous from the central headquarters in Vilna. More importantly, the section had closer ties to German academia, which explains its greater openness toward foreign (non-Yiddish) languages. Drawing upon sources including published materials, the administrative records of YIVO, and the personal archives of the section’s key members, I document the ways in which this linguistic commitment toward Yiddish informed both the scholarly output of the section and its day-to-day activities.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Yiddish was widely viewed, even by many of its speakers, as a corrupt form of German that Jews had to abandon if they hoped to engage in serious intellectual, cultural, or political work. Yet by 1917 it was the dominant language of the Russian Jewish press, a medium for modern literary criticism, a vehicle for science and learning, and the foundation of an ideology of Jewish liberation. The Revolutionary Roots of Modern Yiddish, 1903-1917 investigates how this change in status occurred and three major figures responsible for its transformation.

Writing in Tonguesexamines the complexities of translating Yiddish literature at a time when the Yiddish language is in decline. After the Holocaust, Soviet repression, and American assimilation, the survival of traditional Yiddish literature depends on translation, yet a few Yiddish classics have been translated repeatedly while many others have been ignored. Anita Norich traces historical and aesthetic shifts through versions of these canonical texts, and she argues that these works and their translations form an enlightening conversation about Jewish history and identity.

This series offers a wide forum for work on contact linguistics, using an integrated approach to both diachronic and synchronic manifestations of contact, ranging from social and individual aspects to structural-typological issues. Topics covered by the series include child and adult bilingualism and multilingualism, contact languages, borrowing and contact-induced typological change, code switching in conversation, societal multilingualism, bilingual language processing, and various other topics related to language contact. The series does not have a fixed theoretical orientation, and includes contributions from a variety of approaches.

Adventures in Yiddishlandexamines the transformation of Yiddish in the six decades since the Holocaust, tracing its shift from the language of daily life for millions of Jews to what the author terms a postvernacular language of diverse and expanding symbolic value. With a thorough command of modern Yiddish culture as well as its centuries-old history, Jeffrey Shandler investigates the remarkable diversity of contemporary encounters with the language. His study traverses the broad spectrum of people who engage with Yiddish-from Hasidim to avant-garde performers, Jews as well as non-Jews, fluent speakers as well as those who know little or no Yiddish-in communities across the Americas, in Europe, Israel, and other outposts of \"Yiddishland.\"

Organized into six thematic rubrics, this book demonstrates that Yiddish, always a border-crossing language, continues to puch boundaries with vigorous disciplinary exchange.

Between 1917 and 1921, as revolution convulsed Russia, Jewish intellectuals and writers across the crumbling empire threw themselves into the pursuit of a \"Jewish renaissance.\" Here is a brilliant, revisionist argument about the nature of cultural nationalism, the relationship between nationalism and socialism as ideological systems, and culture itself, the axis around which the encounter between Jews and European modernity has pivoted over the past century.