Yiddish and the Left: Papers of the Third Mendel Friedman International Conference on Yiddish

by Estraikh; Gennady

• ISBN13: 9781900755481
• ISBN10: 1900755483
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2001-07-30
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

For over a century, Yiddish served as a major vehicle for expressing leftwing ideas and sensitivities. A language without country, an 'ugly jargon' despised by the assimilationist Jewish bourgeoisie and nationalist Zionists alike, it was embraced as a genuine folk idiom by Jewish adherents of socialism and communism worldwide. Following the Holocaust, Yiddish was the primary language of education, culture and propaganda for millions of people on five continents. The present volume examines the rich diversity of relationships between Yiddish and the Left, from the attitude of Yiddish writers to apartheid in South Africa to the vicissitudes of the Yiddish communist press in the Soviet Union and the USA.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Contributors	x
PART I: Politics
The Question of Human Rights in American Yiddish Journalism: The Example of Di tsukunft	2	(22)
Steven Cassedy
Socialism with a Jewish Face: The Origins of the Yiddish-Speaking Communist Movement in the United States, 1907-1923	24	(32)
Tony Michels
Abraham Cahan's Travels in Jewish Homelands: Palestine in 1925 and the Soviet Union in 1927	56	(24)
Daniel Soyer
Diaspora, Ethnicity and Dreams of Nationhood: American Jewish Communists and the Birobidzhan Project	80	(29)
Henry Srebrnik
The Left Poalei Zion in Inter-War Poland	109	(20)
Samuel D. Kassow
The History of `The Truth': Soviet Jewish Activists and the Moscow Yiddish Daily Newspaper	129	(15)
David Shneer
Metamorphoses of Morgan-frayhayt	144	(23)
Gennady Estraikh
Yiddish in Poland after 1945	167	(11)
Eleonora Bergman
PART II: Culture
The Cult of Self-Sacrifice in Yiddish Anarchism and Saul Yanovsky's The First Years of Jewish Libertarian Socialism	178	(17)
Karen Rosenberg
Abraham Golomb's `Integrated Jewishness'	195	(13)
Thomas Soxberger
Inscribing the Yiddish Past: Inter-War Explorations of Old Yiddish Texts	208	(18)
Barry Trachtenberg
Soviet Literary Theory in the Search for a Yiddish Canon: The Case of Moshe Litvakov	226	(16)
Mikhail Krutikov
From Exile to Exile: Bergelson's Berlin Years	242	(17)
Dafna Clifford
Chaim Sloves and the Soviet Union: An Essay on the Jewish People in one of its Peregrinations	259	(21)
Annette Aronowicz
The Status of Yiddish in Jewish Educational Systems in Argentina and Mexico	280	(19)
Efraim Zadoff
The Image of Apartheid in South African Yiddish Prose Writing	299	(16)
Joseph Sherman
Index	315