Politics of Yiddish

University of Oxford

The geolinguistic aspects are obvious, especially in terms of preserving the culture 'of our fathers,' government language policies and social developments antithetical to Yiddish, and so on....It is undeniable that Yiddish serves as a busy battleground for liguists with strong opinions and also as a subject for non-Jewish siciolinguists interested in the conflicts between favored and less favored languages growing and others fading in popularity or prestige, etc. The Yinglish if I may call it that, in which this book is now and then written, Yiddish words and expressions popping up with great regularity in a basically English text, is also fascinating. That is still another linguistic phenomenon in which sociolinguists ought to take more interest than they have heretofore done.

• Part 1 IntroductionChapter 2 On the Politics of YiddishPart 3 Politics, Ideology, and ScholarshipChapter 4 Yiddishism and JudaismChapter 5 Yiddish language politics in the Ukraine (1930-1936)Chapter 6 What was going on at the 1935 Yivo Conference?Chapter 7 The Czernowitz Conference in retrospectChapter 8 The politics of research on spoken YiddishPart 9 Communities, Centres, and CitiesChapter 10 Yiddish socialist press in New York, 1880s-1920sChapter 11 Yiddish in orthodox communities of JerusalemChapter 12 Shloyme Mikhoels and his theatreChapter 13 Writers must eat: the New York City Yiddish Writers Group of the Work Progress AdministrationChapter 14 Petticoat Lane and the North-West Passage (London, 1880-1940)Chapter 15 Art and politics: the case of the New York Artef Theatre (1925-1940)Part 16 Language, Folklore, and LiteratureChapter 17 Zmires Purim—the third phase of Jewish carnavalistic folk-literatureChapter 18 Dovid Bergelson's Bam Dnieper: a passport to MoscowChapter 19 Dovid Holfstein—our first wonderChapter 20 The Aston corpus of Soviet Yiddish lexiconChapter 21 A Vilna folklorist's collection: Structural analysis of Yiddish riddlesChapter 22 Mr Khauruchenka, Miss Shaihets, Mrs Hoika and others: the origin of some other unusual family namesChapter 23 List of contributors