History of Yiddish
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Lecture
Yiddish Civilization 101 Series Admission: Free |
In celebration of YIVO's 101st year, join us for our Yiddish Civilization 101 series. Each program will highlight key topics in Ashkenazi history and culture, including shtetl life, film, and Ashkenazi foodways, amongst others. Guided by expert scholars, each lecture will provide a greater understanding of Jewish life in Eastern Europe and its diasporas.
There are many public misconceptions about the origins and history of Yiddish, however much consensus has emerged on a lot of the basics. This lecture by Dovid Katz will start with the Jewish scene in Europe just over a thousand years ago and survey the new European Jewish culture areas, focusing in on Ashkenaz, Ashkenazim, and all three of their Jewish languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, and Yiddish), setting the table for understanding the contextual rise and early history of Yiddish, its eastward trek, role in society, and dramatic growth. The lecture will also focus on the language and dialect, cultural orientations, literature, and the 19th century rise of Yiddish modernity in Eastern Europe.
The lecture will conclude by considering the internal diversity of Yiddish culture—from ultra-Orthodox to revolutionary secular movements—as well as touch on debates over linguistic standardization of the language.
Those interested in reading more on Dovid Katz’s perspectives are welcome to look at his book Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish, which is available free online as a PDF.
About the Speaker
Dovid Katz is a Brooklyn-born, Vilnius-based Yiddish scholar, author, and educator, and a researcher and advocate in the field of the Holocaust in the Baltic lands. He founded and led Yiddish Studies at Oxford (1978-1997), and after a stint at Yale as visiting professor (1998-1999) relocated to Vilnius where he founded Yiddish studies at Vilnius University, where he was professor from 1999 to 2011. From 2016 to 2020, he taught philosophy and creative writing at Vilnius Gediminas Technical University. His Yiddish books include a work on Yiddish stylistics (1993) and four volumes of Yiddish fiction (1992, 1993, 1996, 2020). In English, his books include Grammar of the Yiddish Language (1987), Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish(2nd revised edition 2007), Windows to a Lost Jewish Past (2008), Seven Kingdoms of the Litvaks (2009), Lithuanian Jewish Culture (2nd revised edition 2010), and Yiddish and Power (2015). He is currently at work on A Yiddish Cultural Dictionary, a free online English-Yiddish dictionary comprising to date a million Yiddish words of text and around 25,000 entries, and an in-progress translation of the Bible into Lithuanian Yiddish. His recent online teaching has included pioneering courses on current Hasidic Yiddish publications, Ashkenazic Hebrew, and study of 1920s editions of New York’s leftist daily Frayhayt. He is putting online his evolving Lithuanian Yiddish Video Archive (LYVA), comprising to date around 675 videos from his three decades of expeditions to the Lithuanian (Litvak) Yiddish lands (Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, northeastern Poland and eastern Ukraine), to seek out the last in-situ survivors and preserve for posterity their language and culture. In autumn 2022, he began to put online a multimedia Yizkor Book project for his ancestral village in the Vilna area. His website is www.dovidkatz.net.