2015 Winter Program

Course List · January 5 – 23, 2015

The World of Our Mothers: Jewish Women in Eastern Europe

Instructor: Elissa Bemporad

How and why did Jewish women experience history differently from Jewish men in Eastern Europe? This course will explore the different roles that women came to play in the religious, social, cultural and political spheres of Jewish society in modern Eastern Europe. Drawing from memoirs, diaries and letters, students will a focus on traditional society; the family; marriage and divorce; organized religion and folk-religion; economic life and literacy; radical political movements, and the gendered experience of the Holocaust in the ghettos of Eastern Europe.

Sensationalism and Socialism: Abraham Cahan & the Jewish Daily Forward

Instructor: Gennady Estraikh

Established as a daily in 1897, the Forverts became the largest circulation newspaper in the entire history of the Yiddish press. It still comes out both in internet and in a printed form. Gennady Estraikh, the lecturer of the course, has been its contributor for the last twenty five years. New York preserves in its toponyms several grand names associated with the Forverts. Abraham Cahan (1860-1951), the legendary editor of the Forverts, a talented prose writer and journalist, also played the role of a national leader, who devoted seven decades of his life to finding for his readership a short cut way to their American Jewish dream. The ideological framework of the dream gradually transformed from socialism to liberalism, reflecting the social and cultural change of Yiddish-speaking Americans and of America itself.The course will be based on reading Cahan's writings (in English), as well as works which describe and analyze the life of this outstanding (and controversial) Jewish writer-cum-leader. Special attention will be paid to Cahan's views and activities during the world wars, and to his changing attitude to Zionism and Communism, to Yiddish and religion.

Yiddish Culture in Wartime, 1939-1945

Instructor: Samuel Kassow

This course will consider essays, diaries, songs and poetry written during the Holocaust. It will focus on writings from the ghettos of pre-war Poland and Lithuania and, in keeping with the purposes of the YIVO, on materials written originally in Yiddish. Authors will include Avrom Sutzkever, Emanuel Ringelblum, Peretz Opoczynski, Joseph Zelkowicz, Yitshak Katznelson, Rachel Auerbach and many others.

YIVO and the Making of the Yiddish Nation

Instructor: Cecile Kuznitz

This class will explore the history of the YIVO Institute from its founding to its relocation in New York in the wake of World War II. We will discuss the origins of the plan to create an institute devoted to Yiddish scholarship; the main characteristics and tensions of YIVO's work in the interwar period; the fate of YIVO's staff and collections during the Holocaust; and the institute's relocation to New York and adjustment to the post-war American environment.

Avraham Reisen and the Art of the Yiddish Story

Instructor: Curt Leviant

Avraham Reisen (1876-1953) is among the great Yiddish short story writers, a culture hero on a par with Sholom Aleichem. Influenced by Chekhov, whose stories we will also read, Reisen writes wonderfully direct, humorous and poignant stories about shtetl Jews with insight and compassion. During the three weekly sessions we will read, analyze and discuss a group of his representative tales and learn how he shapes character, theme and plot.

Translating Yiddish Literature: An Introductory Workshop

Instructor: Curt Leviant

During the three sessions we will discuss the art of translation and look at the differences between literal and literary translation. Must a translator always say what the author says? We will begin with simple passages and then move on to classic writers like Sholom Aleichem, I.L. Peretz, Avraham Reisen, Chaim Grade, and the poet/fabulist, Eliezer Shtaynbarg. Reading knowledge of Yiddish mandatory.

A Feeling For Place: Yiddish, Ethnography, and New York's Jewish Neighborhoods

Instructor: Rakhmiel Peltz

The American Jewish experience for more than four centuries has largely been a history of Yiddish-speaking Jews and their descendants. This course will explore the attachment of Yiddish-speakers to New York City and its neighborhoods, ethnographic studies in print and film of staying put in urban surroundings for those who enjoy staying put, most especially in New York, and a final project in which participants will attempt to record and share an ethnographic life history of a New Yorker bound to her Jewish neighborhood.

Vatican II and the History of Jewish-Catholic Relations

Instructor: Magda Teter

2015 is the 50th anniversary of "Nostra Aetate," a document issued by the Vatican during the II Vatican Council that redefined the relationship between the Catholic Church and the Jews. As scholar John Connelly called it, the transformation was "From Enemy to Brother." This course will offer a necessarily brief overview of the history of the Catholic Church's attitude toward Jews. We will look at the foundational texts, from the biblical to modern, to understand the historical transformations and continuities of the theological and political views of the Church about Jews.

Honey on the Page: Yiddish Children's Literature and Yiddish Culture

Instructor: Miriam Udel

Emerging during the second decade of the twentieth century and flourishing until the khurbn, Yiddish children's literature constitutes a truly trans-national corpus reaching from Warsaw and Vilna, to Kharkov and Moscow, to New York, Detroit and Montreal, to Tel Aviv, Buenos Aires and Havana. Writing for children, as almost every canonical Yiddish author did at some point, necessarily stakes claims on a vision for the future. Surely it is no accident that a vibrant Yiddish literary children's culture arose at a moment of bracing ideological ferment, when socialism, Soviet communism, and Zionism all appeared as lively and plausible potentialities for Jewish communal expression and actualization. Shaping future citizens of a Yiddishland that would eventually come to be everywhere and nowhere, children's literature played an important role in negotiating the tensions between traditional and emerging forms of Jewish identity. Organized thematically, this overview will consider the following: secularist representations of the Jewish Sabbath, Soviet communism, American socialism, Jews as world citizens, and the perennial challenge of teaching the alef-beys and Yiddish literacy.

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