Jewish People, Yiddish Nation

Jewish People, Yiddish Nation
Author: Kalman Weiser
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2011-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0802099904

Noah Prylucki (1882-1941), a leading Jewish cultural and political figure in pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe, was a proponent of Yiddishism, a movement that promoted secular Yiddish culture as the basis for Jewish collective identity in the twentieth century. Prylucki's dramatic path - from russified Zionist raised in a Ukrainian shtetl, to Diaspora nationalist parliamentarian in metropolitan Warsaw, to professor of Yiddish in Soviet Lithuania - uniquely reflects the dilemmas and competing options facing the Jews of this era as life in Eastern Europe underwent radical transformation. Using hitherto unexplored archival sources, memoirs, interviews, and materials from the vibrant interwar Jewish and Polish presses, Kalman Weiser investigates the rise and fall of Yiddishism and of Prylucki's political party, the Folkists, in the post-World War One era. Jewish People, Yiddish Nation reveals the life of a remarkable individual and the fortunes of a major cultural movement that has long been obscured.

Yiddish Paris

Yiddish Paris
Author: Nick Underwood
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2022-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 025305981X

Yiddish Paris explores how Yiddish-speaking emigrants from Eastern Europe in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s created a Yiddish diaspora nation in Western Europe and how they presented that nation to themselves and to others in France. In this meticulously researched and first full-length study of interwar Yiddish culture in France, author Nicholas Underwood argues that the emergence of a Yiddish Paris was depended on "culture makers," mostly left-wing Jews from Socialist and Communist backgrounds who created cultural and scholarly organizations and institutions, including the French branch of YIVO (a research institution focused on East European Jews), theater troupes, choruses, and a pavilion at the Paris World's Fair of 1937. Yiddish Paris examines how these left-wing Yiddish-speaking Jews insisted that even in France, a country known for demanding the assimilation of immigrant and minority groups, they could remain a distinct group, part of a transnational Yiddish-speaking Jewish nation. Yet, in the process, they in fact created a French-inflected version of Jewish diaspora nationalism, finding allies among French intellectuals, largely on the left.

YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture

YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture
Author: Cecile Esther Kuznitz
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2014-04-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 1139867385

This book is the first history of YIVO, the original center for Yiddish scholarship. Founded by a group of Eastern European intellectuals after World War I, YIVO became both the apex of secular Yiddish culture and the premier institution of Diaspora Nationalism, which fought for Jewish rights throughout the world at a time of rising anti-Semitism. From its headquarters in Vilna, Lithuania, YIVO tried to balance scholarly objectivity with its commitment to the Jewish masses. Using newly recovered documents that were believed destroyed by Hitler and Stalin, Cecile Esther Kuznitz tells for the first time the compelling story of how these scholars built a world-renowned institution despite dire poverty and anti-Semitism. She raises new questions about the relationship between Jewish cultural and political work, and analyzes how nationalism arises outside of state power.

Jews and Diaspora Nationalism

Jews and Diaspora Nationalism
Author: Simon Rabinovitch
Publisher: UPNE
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2012
Genre: History
ISBN: 1611683629

An anthology of Jewish diaspora nationalist thought across the ideological spectrum

Defining the Yiddish Nation

Defining the Yiddish Nation
Author: Itzik Nakhmen Gottesman
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2003
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780814326695

"Defining the Yiddish Nation examines the evolution of Yiddish folklore and the pioneering work of three important folklore circles in independent Poland: the Warsaw group led by Noyekh Prilutski, the S. Ansky Vilne Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society, and the YIVO Ethnographic Commission. Much more than a study of one particular folklore tradition, however, Defining the Yiddish Nation reveals how the work of the Yiddish folklorists sought to connect Jewish identity with the past, while simultaneously contributing to an autonomous Jewish national culture that would help reshape the present and create a future."--BOOK JACKET.

Yiddish Civilisation

Yiddish Civilisation
Author: Paul Kriwaczek
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2007-12-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 0307430332

Paul Kriwaczek begins this illuminating and immensely pleasurable chronicle of Yiddish civilization during the Roman empire, when Jewish culture first spread to Europe. We see the burgeoning exile population disperse, as its notable diplomats, artists and thinkers make their mark in far-flung cities and found a self-governing Yiddish world. By its late-medieval heyday, this economically successful, intellectually adventurous, and self-aware society stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Kriwaczek traces, too, the slow decline of Yiddish culture in Europe and Russia, and highlights fresh offshoots in the New World.Combining family anecdote, travelogue, original research, and a keen understanding of Yiddish art and literature, Kriwaczek gives us an exceptional portrait of a culture which, though nearly extinguished, has an influential radiance still.

Jewish People, Yiddish Nation

Jewish People, Yiddish Nation
Author: Kalman Weiser
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2011-08-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1442662107

Noah Prylucki (1882-1941), a leading Jewish cultural and political figure in pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe, was a proponent of Yiddishism, a movement that promoted secular Yiddish culture as the basis for Jewish collective identity in the twentieth century. Prylucki's dramatic path - from russified Zionist raised in a Ukrainian shtetl, to Diaspora nationalist parliamentarian in metropolitan Warsaw, to professor of Yiddish in Soviet Lithuania - uniquely reflects the dilemmas and competing options facing the Jews of this era as life in Eastern Europe underwent radical transformation. Using hitherto unexplored archival sources, memoirs, interviews, and materials from the vibrant interwar Jewish and Polish presses, Kalman Weiser investigates the rise and fall of Yiddishism and of Prylucki's political party, the Folkists, in the post-World War One era. Jewish People, Yiddish Nation reveals the life of a remarkable individual and the fortunes of a major cultural movement that has long been obscured.

The Tragedy of a Generation

The Tragedy of a Generation
Author: Joshua M. Karlip
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 399
Release: 2013-06-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674074947

The Tragedy of a Generation is the story of a failed ideal: an autonomous Jewish nation in Europe. It traces the origins of two influential strains of Jewish thought—Yiddishism and Diaspora Nationalism—and documents the waning hopes and painful reassessments of their leading representatives against the rising tide of Nazism and the Holocaust.