[Live on Zoom] Confronting Hitler's Professors: Yiddish Scholarship and the Nazis

Max Weinreich Fellowship Lecture The Workers Circle/Dr. Emanuel Patt Visiting Professorship in Eastern European Jewish Studies Admission: Free Registration is required. Watch the video

In 1946 YIVO’s head Max Weinreich published Hitler’s Professors. The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes against the Jewish People. That same year, Franz Beranek implored Weinreich and linguist Solomon Birnbaum for help after his library and Yiddish research were irretrievably confiscated during his expulsion as an ethnic German from Czechoslovakia. What he failed to mention were his extensive Nazi affiliations, as did his colleague Heinz Kloss, the author of a guidebook to the Jews of North America found in Hitler’s personal library.

The encounter with colleagues who had served the Third Reich confronted surviving Jewish scholars of Yiddish with moral quandaries that each sought to resolve in his own way. This talk will explore how Beranek in particular presented himself to Jewish colleagues and how Jewish colleagues sought to respond to him as a person and to his scholarship in the aftermath of the Holocaust. All four went on to prominent careers involving Yiddish in North America and Europe – three as professors of Yiddish and one as a leader in the field of minority language rights. The relationship between the scholars from the 1920s to the 1960s tells a fascinating story about the history of Yiddish research and the changing meaning of Yiddish for Jewish and German researchers against the backdrop of two world wars and the Holocaust.

About the Speaker

Kalman Weiser is the Silber Family Professor of Modern Jewish Studies at York University and the author of several studies about Jewish nationalism and Yiddish linguistics and culture, especially in Eastern Europe. His study Jewish People, Yiddish Nation: Noah Prylucki and the Folkists In Poland won the 2012 Canadian Jewish Book Award for scholarship. Most recently, he co-edited a revised and expanded edition of a seminal work of Yiddish scholarship, Solomon Birnbaum’s Yiddish: a Survey and a Grammar. Weiser is the co-editor of Key Concepts in the Study of Antisemitism (Palgrave, forthcoming 2020).