1.On the estimated percentage of Jews who are Ashkenazim, see, e.g., Joël Zlotogora, “Mendelian Disorders among Jews and Population Screening for Reproductive Purposes,” in Focus on Genetic Screening Research, ed. Sandra R. Pupecki (New York: Nova Science, 2006), 59. In 2001 sociolinguist Joshua A. Fishman estimated that there were about 250,000 Yiddish speakers in the United States, approximately the same number in Israel, and another approximately 100,000 elsewhere in the world. Paul Glasser, email message to author, May 14, 2003. Fishman discusses the challenge of determining the number of Yiddish speakers in “How Many Jews Speak Yiddish?” [Yiddish], Afn shvel 316 (October–December 1999): 22.
1.See Johann Gottfried Herder, “Treatise on the Origin of Language,” in Herder: Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. M. N. Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 152. See also Jeffrey A. Grossman, The Discourse on Yiddish in Germany from the Enlightenment to the Second Empire (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2000), 28–74.
2.As cited in Solomon A. Birnbaum, Yiddish: A Survey and a Grammar, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 46.
3.Ruth von Bernuth, How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 81. See also Aya Elyada, A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish: Christians and the Jewish Language in Early Modern Germany (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2012), 1–2.
4.Elyada, A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish, 189.
5.Grossman, Discourse on Yiddish in Germany, 107, 106.
6.Jerold C. Frakes, The Politics of Interpretation: Alterity and Ideology in Old Yiddish Studies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 28–29.
7.See Steven E. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982).
8.Cited in Wolf Moscovich, “Postwar Soviet Theories on the Origins of Yiddish,” in Origins of the Yiddish Language: Winter Studies in Yiddish, vol. 1, ed. Dovid Katz (Oxford: Pergamon, 1987), 105.
9.Birnbaum, Yiddish, 57. On Birnbaum’s life and work, see essays by David and Eleazar Birnbaum, Kalman Weiser, and Jean Baumgarten, ix–lxxviii.
10.Birnbaum, Yiddish, 13.
11.Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, ed. Paul Glasser, trans. Shlomo Noble and Joshua A. Fishman, vol. 1 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), 3.
12.See Philippe Wolff, Western Languages AD 100–1500, trans. Frances Partridge (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971).
13.Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, 1:45.
14.Max Weinreich, “The Reality of Jewishness versus the Ghetto Myth: The Sociolinguistic Roots of Yiddish,” in To Honor Roman Jakobson: Essays on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday (The Hague: Mouton, 1967), 2204.
15.On Dubnow, see Sophie Dubnov-Erlich, The Life and Work of S. M. Dubnov: Diaspora Nationalism and Jewish History, trans. Judith Vowles (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); on Medem, see Vladimir Medem, The Life and Soul of a Legendary Jewish Socialist, ed. and trans. Samuel A. Portnoy (New York: Ktav, 1979).
16.Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, 1:2–3.
17.Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, 1:6.
18.On proto-Yiddish, see Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, 2:658–718; for a more concise overview, as well as discussion of the critique of conceptualizing proto-Yiddish, see Neil G. Jacobs, Yiddish: A Linguistic Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 22–40.
19.Leo Fuchs, “The Romance Elements in Old Yiddish,” in Katz, Origins of the Yiddish Language, 23–25.
20.Robert D. King, “Early Yiddish Vowel Systems: A Contribution by William G. Moulton to the Debate on the Origins of Yiddish,” in Field of Yiddish: Studies in Language, Folklore, and Literature, Fifth Collection, ed. David Goldberg (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 88–89.
21.Dovid Katz, “The Proto Dialectology of Ashkenaz,” in Katz, Origins of the Yiddish Language, 54.
22.David L. Gold, “Has the Textbook Explanation of the Origins of Yiddish and of Ashkenazic Jewry Been Challenged Successfully?” Mankind Quarterly 26, nos. 3–4 (1986): 339–363.
23.Erika Timm, “The Early History of the Yiddish Language,” in The Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages (Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries), ed. Christoph Cluse (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2004), 354, 356.
24.Alexander Beider, Origins of Yiddish Dialects (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), xxxi–xxxiii.
25.Charles Nydorf, “The Role of Crimean Gothic in the Formation of the Eastern Yiddish Dialects,” Gothic Yiddish (blog), December 2, 2014, http://gothicyiddish.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-role-of-crimean-gothic-in-formation.html.
26.Paul Wexler, Two-Tiered Relexification in Yiddish: Jews, Sorbs, Khazars, and the Kiev-Polessian Dialect (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2002), 64, 9, 7, 67.
27.Charles Nydorf, “Spectacular Genomic Confirmation of Max Weinreich’s Babylonian Renaissance,” Gothic Yiddish (blog), July 31, 2017, http://gothicyiddish.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-13th-century-pivot-genomic.xhtml. On Weinreich’s notion of a “Babylonian renaissance” in Ashkenaz, see his History of the Yiddish Language, 2:376–377.
28.Ranajit Das, Paul Wexler, Mehdi Pirooznia, and Eran Elhaik, “Localizing Ashkenazic Jews to Primeval Villages in the Ancient Iranian Lands of Ashkenaz,” Genome Biology and Evolution 8, no. 4 (April 2016): 1132.
29.Pavel Flegontov et al., “Pitfalls of the Geographic Population Structure (GPS) Approach Applied to Human Genetic History: A Case Study of Ashkenazi Jews,” Genome Biology and Evolution 8, no. 7, (July 2016): 2259–2265; Marion Aptroot, “Yiddish Language and Ashkenazic Jews: A Perspective from Culture, Language, and Literature,” Genome Biology and Evolution 8, no. 6 (June 2016): 1948–1949. For response in the general press, see, e.g., Jordan Kutzik, “Don’t Buy the Junk Science That Says Yiddish Originated in Turkey,” Forward, April 28, 2016.
30.Cherie Woodworth, “Where Did the East European Jews Come From? An Explosive Debate Erupts from Old Footnotes,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, n.s., 11, no. 1 (Winter 2010): 110.
31.Uriel Weinreich, William Labov, and Marvin Herzog, “Empirical Foundations for a Theory of Language Change,” in Directions for Historical Linguistics, ed. W. P. Lehmann and Y. Malkiel (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968), 188.
1.Lily Kahn and Aaron D. Rubin, eds., Handbook of Jewish Languages (Leiden: Brill, 2015), has entries on twenty-three languages; Bernard Spolsky, The Languages of the Jews: A Sociolinguistic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), also lists twenty-three languages; a list of thirty Jewish languages appears in Joshua L. Miller and Anita Norich, eds., Languages of Modern Jewish Cultures: Comparative Perspectives (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), xi–xii. The Jewish Language Research Website lists entries or links to entries for twenty-six languages (https://www.jewish-languages.org, accessed February 25, 2018).
2.On Judezmo, see Bryan Kirschen, ed., Judeo-Spanish and the Making of a Community (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015).
3.See Paul Wexler, “Terms for ‘Synagogue’ in Hebrew and Jewish Languages: Explorations in Historical Jewish Interlinguistics,” Revue des études juives 140, nos. 1–2 (1981): 123–127; Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, ed. Paul Glasser, trans. Shlomo Noble and Joshua A. Fishman, vol. 1 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), 106.
4.Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, 1:30.
5.Alexander Beider, Origins of Yiddish Dialects (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), xxxi.
6.On translating Haskalah as “Jewish Enlightenment,” see Olga Litvak, Haskalah: The Romantic Movement in Judaism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 26–28.
7.“Introspectivism [Manifesto of 1919],” trans. Anita Norich, in American Yiddish Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology, ed. Barbara Harshav and Benjamin Harshav (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 774, 775, 780.
8.Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, 1:29–30.
9.Robert D. King, “Early Yiddish Vowel Systems: A Contribution by William G. Moulton to the Debate on the Origins of Yiddish,” in Field of Yiddish: Studies in Language, Folklore, and Literature, Fifth Collection, ed. David Goldberg (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 87–98; Beider, Origins of Yiddish Dialects, xxxii, 52.
10.See Tal Hever-Chybowski, “The Semitic Component in Yiddish and Its Ideological Role in Yiddish Philology,” Philological Encounters 2 (2017): 368–387.
11.For more information on Yiddish grammar, see Neil G. Jacobs, Yiddish: A Linguistic Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Dovid Katz, Grammar of the Yiddish Language (London: Duckworth, 1987); Solomon A. Birnbaum, Yiddish: A Survey and a Grammar, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016).
12.R. J. Zwi Werblowsky and Geoffrey Wigoder, eds., The Encyclopedia of the Jewish Religion (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966), 409.
13.Morris Rosenfeld, Songs from the Ghetto (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1900). The glossary was prepared by Leo Wiener.
14.On davenen, see Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, 2:650; David L. Gold, “More on the Etymology of Yiddish doynen/davnen/davenen,” Jewish Language Review 5 (1985): 162–178, 173–180. Beider writes that davenen “is of uncertain, most likely Hebrew, origin” (Origins of Yiddish Dialects, 337).
15.See Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language 2:351–354; Jacobs, Yiddish, 41–44; Dovid Katz, “The Phonology of Ashkenazic,” in Hebrew in Ashkenaz: A Language in Exile, ed. Lewis Glinert (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 46–87.
16.Jacobs, Yiddish, 296.
17.Benjamin Harshav, The Meaning of Yiddish (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 40.
18.Hirsz Abramowicz, Profiles of a Lost World: Memoirs of East European Jewish Life before World War II, trans. Eva Zeitlin Dobkin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999), 69, 70. Bracketed text in original.
19.Maurice Samuel, In Praise of Yiddish (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1971), 124, 128.
20.Jacobs, Yiddish, 19.
21.H. L. Mencken, The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States, 2nd ed. (New York: Knopf, 1921), 405, 406.
22.Mordecai Kosover, Arabic Elements in Palestinian Yiddish: The Old Ashkenazic Community in Palestine, Its History and Its Language (Jerusalem: Rubin Mass, 1966), 252, 256, 162, 168, 271.
23.Miriam Isaacs, “Contentious Partners: Yiddish and Hebrew in Haredi Israel,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 138 (1999): 114.
24.Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, 2:418.
25.This expression was used by both Noah Prylucki and Max Weinreich. See, e.g., Maks Vaynraykh, “There’s No Need for Germanicisms” [Yiddish], Yidish far ale [Yiddish for everyone] 1 (1938): 105.
26.Raymond Pearson, National Minorities in Eastern Europe 1848–1945 (London: Macmillan, 1983), 26.
27.Noyekh Prilutski, “Methodological Remarks on the Problem of Germanicisms” [Yiddish], Yidish far ale [Yiddish for everyone] 1 (1938): 201–209; Vaynraykh, “There’s No Need for Germanicisms,” 97–106. See also Steffen Krogh, “Dos iz eyne vahre geshikhte . . . On the Germanization of Eastern Yiddish in the Nineteenth Century,” in Jews and Germans in Eastern Europe: Shared and Comparative Histories, ed. Tobias Grill, New Perspectives on Modern Jewish History 8 (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2018), 88–114, and Martina Niedhammer, “Codified Traditions? YIVO’s filologishe sektsye in Vilna and Its Relationship to German Academia,” in Grill, Jews and Germans in Eastern Europe, 115–124.
28.See Rakhmiel Peltz, “The Undoing of Language Planning from the Vantage of Cultural History,” in Undoing and Redoing Corpus Planning, ed. M. Clyne (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1997), 339–348.
29.Harshav, Meaning of Yiddish, 61, 73.
1.On Jewish life in German lands during the Middle Ages, see Elisheva Baumgarten, Practicing Piety in Medieval Ashkenaz: Men, Women, and Everyday Religious Observance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). On Jewish settlement in Poland and Lithuania, see Bernard D. Weinryb, The Jews of Poland: A Social and Economic History of the Jewish Community in Poland from 1100–1800 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1972).
2.On demographics, see Weinryb, Jews of Poland, 308–320.
3.On eastern European Jewish surnames, see Alexander Beider, A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire (Teaneck, N.J.: Avotaynu, 1993); Alexander Beider, A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Kingdom of Poland (Teaneck, N.J.: Avotaynu, 1996).
4.Steven Lowenstein, “The Shifting Boundary between Eastern and Western Jewry,” Jewish Social Studies, n.s., 4, no. 1 (1997): 60–61.
5.Solomon A. Birnbaum, Yiddish: A Survey and a Grammar, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 34.
6.Maks Vaynraykh, “Yidish,” Algemeyne entsiklopedye [General encyclopedia], vol. Yidn: beys (Paris: Dubnov-fond, 1940), col. 25; Birnbaum, Yiddish, 41.
7.See, e.g., statistics for interwar Poland in Lucjan Dobroszycki and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Image before My Eyes: A Photographic History of Jewish Life in Poland, 1864–1939 (New York: Schocken, 1977), 257–263.
8.Mikael Parkvall, Sveriges språk: Vem talar vad och var? [Sweden’s languages: Who speaks what and where?], RAPPLING 1. Rapporter från Institutionen för lingvistik vid Stockholms universitet (Stockholm: Institutionen för lingvistik, Stockholms universitet, 2009), 68–72; see also “National Minorities and Minority Languages” [Yiddish] Faktablad, Justitiedepartamentet, November 2004, http://www.manskligarattigheter.se/dynamaster/file_archive/050216/24a99c86fd734f15c9f722b343cc152e/FaktaJu_0415ji.pdf, accessed July 7, 2018.
9.Central Bureau of Statistics, “Selected Data from the 2011 Social Survey on Mastery of the Hebrew Language and Usage of Languages,” http://www.cbs.gov.il/reader/newhodaot/hodaa_template.html?hodaa=201319017, accessed July 7, 2018. On Yiddish in Israel, see Rachel Rojanski, Yiddish in Israel: A History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020).
10.On interwar travel, see Daniel Soyer, “Revisiting the Old World: American-Jewish Tourists in Inter-War Eastern Europe,” in Forging Modern Jewish Identities; Public Faces and Private Struggles, ed. Michael Berkowitz, Susan L. Tananbaum, and Sam W. Bloom (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2003), 16–38.
11.Kh[ayem] Zhitlovski, “In a Jewish/Yiddish Nation” [Yiddish], in Geklibene verk [Selected works], ed. Yudl Mark (New York: CYCO, 1955), 321–323. This essay was first printed in Yidishe velt [Jewish/Yiddish world] in 1913, with the subtitle “How I became a Yiddishist.” My translation.
12.See Jeffrey Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 33–34.
13.Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 68.
14.A. Almi, “Yidish” [Yiddish], in Far yidish: a zamlbukh [For Yiddish: An anthology], ed. Sh. Edberg (New York: National Council of Young Israel, 1930), 59–60. My translation.
15.Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 14, 10.
16.J. Hoberman, Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film between Two Worlds (New York: Schocken, 1991), 5.
17.On doikeyt and the concept of diaspora nationalism generally, see Ezra Mendelsohn, On Modern Jewish Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
18.Samuel Kassow, “Travel and Local History as a National Mission: Polish Jews and the Landkentenish Movement in the 1920s and 1930s,” in Jewish Topographies: Visions of Space, Traditions of Place, ed. Julia Brauch et al. (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 248.
19.See Gabriel Davidson, Our Jewish Farmers: The Story of the Jewish Agricultural Society (New York: L. B. Fischer, 1943); Jonathan Dekel-Chen, Farming the Red Land: Jewish Agricultural Colonization and Local Soviet Power, 1924–1941 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005).
20.On Birobidzhan, see Robert Weinberg, Stalin’s Forgotten Zion: Birobidzhan and the Making of a Soviet Jewish Homeland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
21.On recent travel to Birobidzhan, see, e.g., Shelley I. Salamensky, “‘Jewface’ and ‘Jewfaçade’ in Poland, Spain, and Birobidzhan,” in The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Jewish Cultures, ed. Laurence Roth and Nadya Valman (London: Routledge, 2015), 213–223; Yale Strom, dir., L’chayim, Comrade Stalin! (Los Angeles: Blackstream Films, 2002).
22.On yizker-bikher, see Jack Kugelmass and Jonathan Boyarin, eds., From a Ruined Garden: The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry (New York: Schocken, 1983).
23.Kalman Weiser, Jewish People, Yiddish Nation: Noah Prylucki and the Folkists in Poland (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 187–188.
24.Mordecai Veinger, Forsht yidishe dialektn!: Program farn materyalnklayber [Research Yiddish dialects!: Guide for collectors] (Minsk: Yidopteyl fun Invayskult, 1925).
25.Marvin Herzog et al., The Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry, vol. 3: The Eastern Yiddish–Western Yiddish Continuum (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2000), 156–157, 304–305.
26.On the questionnaire, see Marvin Herzog et al., The Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry, vol. 1: Historical and Theoretical Foundations (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1992), 6. For a list of interviewee locations, see Marvin Herzog et al., The Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry, vol. 2: Research Tools (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1995), 95–100.
27.Other scholars of Yiddish dialectology distinguish additional regions of Yiddish speech. For example, see Birnbaum, Yiddish, 94–105.
28.Herzog et al., Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry, 1:114.
29.Herzog et al., Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry, 1:107.
30.Herzog et al., Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry, 1:64.
31.Uril Vaynraykh, “On a New Yiddish Language and Culture Atlas” [Yiddish], Di goldene keyt [The golden chain] 37 (1960): 5.
32.Uriel Weinreich, “Mapping a Culture,” Columbia University Forum 6, no. 3 (1963): 18.
33.An early example is the innkeeper Reb Shmuelke Troyniks in Solomon Ettinger’s early nineteenth-century maskilic comedy Serkele. See Alyssa Pia Quint, “The Currency of Yiddish: Ettinger’s ‘Serkele’ and the Reinvention of Shylock,” Prooftexts 24, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 106.
34.James A. Matisoff, Blessings, Curses, Hopes, and Fears: Psycho-Ostensive Expressions in Yiddish (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1979), 44; see also Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, ed. Paul Glasser, trans. Shlomo Noble and Joshua A. Fishman, vol. 1 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), 180–181.
35.Lowenstein, “Shifting Boundary between Eastern and Western Jewry,” 62.
36.Uriel Weinreich, “Is a Structural Dialectology Possible?,” Word 10, no. 2–3 (1954): 388–400.
37.Weinreich, “Mapping a Culture,” 17–19.
38.See Ruth von Bernuth, How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition (New York: New York University Press, 2016).
39.Sholem Aleichem, Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories, trans. Hillel Halkin (New York: Schocken, 1987), 1–131; Perets Markish, Nit gedayget: poeme [No worries: Narrative poem] (Kharkov: Tsentrfarlag, Alukrainishe opteylung, 1931); Perets Markish, Erd: Dramatishe varyant fun der poeme “Nit gedayget” [Earth: Dramatic version of the narrative poem “No worries”] (Moscow: Emes, 1933).
40.Herzog et al., Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry, 1: *12; questionnaire page 007, questions 080–085.
41.See Max Weinreich, “The Reality of Jewishness versus the Ghetto Myth: The Sociolinguistic Roots of Yiddish,” in To Honor Roman Jakobson: Essays on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday (The Hague: Mouton, 1967), 2199–2211.
42.See, e.g., Louis Wirth, The Ghetto (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928).
43.See Daniel B. Schwartz, Ghetto: The History of a Word (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2019).
44.Dan Miron, The Image of the Shtetl and Other Studies of Modern Jewish Literary Imagination (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2000), xii.
45.See Jeffrey Shandler, Shtetl: A Vernacular Intellectual History (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2014).
46.Yiddish Farm, “About Us,” https://yiddishfarm.org/history/aboutus, accessed November 30, 2017.
47.See Joshua B. Friedman, “Yiddish Returns: Language, Intergenerational Gifts, and Jewish Devotion” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2015).
48.Tsvi Sadan, “Yiddish on the Internet,” Language and Communication 30, no. 2 (May 2011): 105.
1.Jerold C. Frakes, The Politics of Interpretation: Alterity and Ideology in Old Yiddish Studies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 23.
2.See Jerold C. Frakes, Early Yiddish Texts, 1100–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 1–3.
3.Other biblical references to Ashkenaz: Jeremiah 51:27; 1 Chronicles 1:6. How Ashkenaz came to be the Jewish term for German lands is uncertain, though theories abound; see, e.g., Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, ed. Paul Glasser, trans. Shlomo Noble and Joshua A. Fishman, vol. 1 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), A4.
4.Israel Zinberg, A History of Jewish Literature, vol. 7: Old Yiddish Literature from Its Origins to the Haskalah Period, trans. Bernard Martin (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1975), 49–50.
5.Ruth H. Sanders, German: Biography of a Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 93.
6.Zinberg, History of Jewish Literature, 7:148; 7:21n60.
7.Zinberg, History of Jewish Literature, 7:87. See also Jean Baumgarten, Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature, ed. and trans. Jerold C. Frakes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 69.
8.Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, 1:317–318.
9.Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, 1:315.
10.Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, 1:317.
11.Nokhem Stutshkov, Oytser fun der yidisher shprakh [Thesaurus of the Yiddish language] (New York: YIVO, 1950), section 369.
12.Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, 1:322.
13.E.g., Johann Heinrich Callenberg, Kurtze Anleitung zur Jüdischteutschen Sprache [Short guide to the Judeo-German language] (Halle, 1733); Wilhelm Christian Just Chrysander, Jüdisch-Teutsche Grammatik [Judeo-German grammar] (Leipzig & Wolfenbüttel, 1750); Carl Wilhelm Friedrich, Unterricht in der Judensprache und Schrift: Zum Gebrauch für Gelehrte und Ungelehrte [Instruction in Jewish speech and writing: For use by the educated and uneducated] (Prentzlow, 1784).
14.Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, 1:69.
15.See Sander L. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 140–141; Jeffrey Grossman, The Discourse on Yiddish in German Literature from the Enlightenment to the Second Empire (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2000), 139.
16.Dan Miron, A Traveler Disguised: A Study in the Rise of Modern Yiddish Fiction in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Schocken, 1973), 34–66.
17.Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, 1:285.
18.Dovid Katz, Yiddish and Power (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 116.
19.Emanuel S. Goldsmith, Architects of Yiddishism at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century: A Study in Jewish Cultural History (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1976), 77–78.
20.E.g., Y. Y. Inditski, Ha-metargem: Mikhtamim, pitgamim, ma’amre Hazal, ma’amarim ketsarim ve-divre hakhamim ve-hidotim la-safah ha-meduberet (zhargon) [The translator: Epigrams, proverbs, essays, and words of wisdom and riddles in the spoken language (Jargon/Yiddish)] (Warsaw, 1896); Derashah le-var mitsvah bi-shene halakim: Ha-helek ha-rishon ba-lashon ha-medubar benenu (zhargon) ve-ha-helek ha sheni bi-leshon ha-kodesh u-vi-leshon rusya ve-ashkenazit [Bar mitzvah sermons in two parts: First in the language spoken among us (Jargon/Yiddish) and second in Hebrew and Russian and German] (Vilna: Bi-defus Rozenkrants ve-Shriftzettser, 1914).
21.A. L. Bisko, Milon male ve-shalem zargoni-ivri [Comprehensive Jargon/Yiddish-Hebrew dictionary] (London: Bi-defuso shel Y. Naroditski, [1913]); A. G. Gordon, Milon tanakhi, ivrit-yahadut: Verterbukh oyf gants tanakh . . . [Bible dictionary, Hebrew-Yiddish: Dictionary for the entire Bible . . . ] (Warsaw: T. Jakobson & M. Goldberg, 1926).
22.Sholem Aleichem, ed., Di yidishe folks-biblyotek: A bukh far literatur, kritik un visnshaft [The Jewish people’s library: A book for literature, criticism, and scholarship], vol. 1 (Kiev, 1888).
23.Shimen Frug, “Poems in the Jewish Jargon” [Yiddish], Ale shriftn fun Sh. Frug [Complete works of S. Frug], vol. 3 (New York: Hebrew Publishing Company, 1910), 205–217.
24.Sophie Dubnov-Erlich, The Life and Work of S. M. Dubnov: Diaspora Nationalism and Jewish History, trans. Judith Vowles (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 196.
25.George Wolfe, “Notes on American Yiddish,” American Mercury, August 1933, 478.
26.Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, 1:322.
27.Jonathan Boyarin, Thinking in Jewish (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 1.
28.E.g., New Yiddish Jokes (Cleveland: Arthur Westbrook, [ca. 1900?]).
29.See, e.g., “Yiddish Dance,” http://aviamoore.com/yiddish-dance/, accessed September 14, 2017.
30.Gitl Schaechter-Viswanath and Paul Glasser, eds., Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary (Based on the Lexical Research of Mordkhe Schaechter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), 823.
31.Leo Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), xi, 49, 264.
32.Chaim M. Weiser, Frumspeak: The First Dictionary of Yeshivish (Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, 1995), xxxii.
33.Chaim Dalfin, LubavitchSpeak: A Dictionary of Chabad-Lubavitsh Hasidim: Words, Sayings, and Colloquialisms, 2nd ed. (Brooklyn: Jewish Enrichment Press, 2015), viii.
34.Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, 1:325, 324.
1.For more information on the gendering of nouns and the forming of diminutives, see Neil G. Jacobs, Yiddish: A Linguistic Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 166–168; Dovid Katz, Grammar of the Yiddish Language (London: Duckworth, 1987), 47–53; Solomon A. Birnbaum, Yiddish: A Survey and a Grammar, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 227–228.
2.Uriel Weinreich, “The Seven Genders of Yiddish” (typescript), paper delivered at the Linguistic Society of America, Chicago, December 29, 1961, available online at https://yivo.org/The-Seven-Genders-of-Yiddish.
3.Alexander Harkavy, Yiddish-English-Hebrew Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1928; repr., New York: Schocken/YIVO, 1988).
4.Steffen Krogh, “How Satmarish Is Haredi Satmar Yiddish?,” Yidishe shtudyes haynt / Jidistik heute / Yiddish Studies Today, vol. 1, ed. Marion Aptroot, Efrat Gal-Ed, Roland Gruschka, and Simon Neuberg (Düsseldorf: Düsseldorf University Press, 2012), 489.
5.Per email to author from Jordan Kutzik, December 27, 2017.
6.Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, ed. Paul Glasser, trans. Shlomo Noble and Joshua A. Fishman, vol. 1 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), 274, 277, 274.
7.Israel Zinberg, A History of Jewish Literature, trans. Bernard Martin, vol. 7: Old Yiddish Literature from Its Origins to the Haskalah Period (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1975), 157.
8.Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, 1:274.
9.Jean Baumgarten, “Listening, Reading and Understanding: How Jewish Women Read the Yiddish Ethical Literature (Seventeenth to Eighteenth Century),” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 16, no. 2 (2017): 257.
10.Zinberg, History of Jewish Literature, 7:124–125.
11.Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, 1:276. See also Chava Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women (Boston: Beacon, 1998), 38–44.
12.Miriam Stark, “Translator’s Preface,” in Tz’enah Ur’enah: The Classic Anthology of Torah Lore and Midrashic Comment, trans. Miriam Stark Zakon (Brooklyn: Mesorah, 1983), vii.
13.Jean Baumgarten, Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature, ed. and trans. Jerold C. Frakes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 80.
14.Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs, 9.
15.See Naomi Seidman, A Marriage Made in Heaven: The Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 40–53.
16.Iris Parush, Reading Jewish Women: Marginality and Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Eastern European Jewish Society (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2004), 146.
17.Seidman, Marriage Made in Heaven, 42.
18.See Dan Miron, A Traveler Disguised: The Rise of Modern Yiddish Fiction in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Schocken, 1973), 14; Seidman, Marriage Made in Heaven, 44–47.
19.Cited in Miron, Traveler Disguised, 18.
20.See Seidman, Marriage Made in Heaven, 31–35.
21.See, e.g., “I. L. Peretz’s Folksy Novel” [Yiddish], Der groyser kundes [The big prankster], June 16, 1911; “Ruvn Braynin in the Tageblat” [Yiddish], Der groyser kundes, November 3, 1916. See also Joshua A. Fishman, “Cartoons about Language: Hebrew, Yiddish, and the Visual Representation of Sociolinguistic Attitudes,” in Hebrew in Ashkenaz: A Language in Exile, ed. Lewis Glinert (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 151–166.
22.See, e.g., “The Mover of Our Movement: Dr. Chaim Zhitlowski” [Yiddish], Der groyser kundes, October 22, 1922; “Three in One: Mendele the Book Seller” [Yiddish], Der groyser kundes, December 29, 1916.
23.Y. Lerner, “The Yiddish Muse” [Yiddish], Hoyzfraynd [Home Companion] (St. Petersburg, 1889), as cited in Emanuel S. Goldsmith, Architects of Yiddishism at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century: A Study in Jewish Cultural History (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1976), 54.
24.See Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
25.Kathryn Hellerstein, A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish, 1586–1987 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2014), ch. 2.
26.See Glikl: Memoirs, 1691–1719, ed. Chava Turniansky, trans. Sarah Friedman (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2019).
27.Janet R. Hadda, Yankev Glatshteyn (Boston: Twayne, 1980), 13–14.
28.E. Korman, ed., Yidishe dikhterins: Antologye [Yiddish women poets: Anthology] (Chicago: L. M. Stein, 1928).
29.Anita Norich, introduction to Kadya Molodovsky, A Jewish Refugee in New York, trands. Anita Norich (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), xii–xiii.
30.Joanna Lisek, “Orthodox Yiddishism in Beys Yakov Magazine in the Context of Religious Jewish Feminism in Poland,” in Ashkenazim and Sephardim: A European Perspective, ed. Andrzej Katny, Izabela Olszewska, and Aleksandra Twardowska (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Edition, 2013), 135. See also the discussion of this literature, 148–152.
31.Kalman Weiser, “The Capital of ‘Yiddishland?’,” in Warsaw, The Jewish Metropolis: Essays in Honor of the 75th Birthday of Professor Antony Polonsky, ed. Glenn Dynner and François Guesnet (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 315. The appellation shmendrikizm was inspired by the title character of Avraham Goldfaden’s play Shmendrik of 1877; see also Alyssa Quint, The Rise of the Modern Yiddish Theater (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 99.
32.Asya Vaisman, “English in the Yiddish Speech of Hasidic Women,” Yiddish 15, no. 3 (2008): 17–28.
33.Ayala Fader, Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009), 128.
34.See Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs, 156–171.
35.For a bibliography of Yiddish female authors in English translation, see Amanda Siegel, “Women in Translation Month: Yiddish,” New York Public Library blog, August 17, 2016, https://www.nypl.org/blog/2016/08/17/women-translation-yiddish, accessed July 30, 2018. In addition to modern Yiddish poetry and prose, the list includes translations of tkhines.
36.Irena Klepfisz, Dreams of an Insomniac: Jewish Feminist Essays, Speeches and Diatribes (Portland, Ore.: Eighth Mountain, 1990), 156–157.
37.See Irena Klepfisz, A Few Words in the Mother Tongue: Poems Selected and New (1971–1990) (Portland, Ore.: Eighth Mountain, 1990), 213–236.
38.Vaybertaytsh website, “About,” http://www.vaybertaytsh.com/about-1/, accessed July 18, 2018.
39.See Klepfisz, Dreams of an Insomniac.
40.Alisa Solomon, “Notes on Klez/Camp,” Davka 1, no. 3 (Winter 1997): 29–31.
41.See Jeffrey Shandler, “Queer Yiddishkeit: Practice and Theory,” Shofar 25, no. 1 (2006): 90–113.
42.League for Yiddish, “ ‘Words of the Week’: Trans and Non-binary,” email, March 31, 2019.
1.Andreas Feininger, New York in the Forties (New York: Dover Publications, 1978), 126, 122.
2.See, e.g., Lajb Fuks and Chaim Gininger, “On the Oldest Dated Work in Yiddish Literature,” in The Field of Yiddish: Studies in Language, Folklore, and Literature, vol. 1, ed. Uriel Weinreich (New York: Linguistic Circle of New York, 1954), 267–274.
3.Solomon A. Birnbaum, Yiddish: A Survey and a Grammar, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 107–109.
4.Solomon A. Birnbaum, “Two Methods,” in Origins of the Yiddish Language: Winter Studies in Yiddish, vol. 1, ed. Dovid Katz (Oxford: Pergamon, 1987), 7–11.
5.On the fonts used for Yiddish in the early years of publishing, see Herbert C. Zafren, “Variety in the Typography of Yiddish: 1535–1635,” Hebrew Union College Annual 53 (1982): 137–163. On the names used for these fonts, see Neil G. Jacobs, Yiddish: A Linguistic Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 47.
6.Jacobs, Yiddish, 301.
7.On Soviet Yiddish language policy, see Gennady Estraikh, Soviet Yiddish: Language Planning and Linguistic Development (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999).
8.Takones fun yidishn oysleyg [Rules of Yiddish spelling] (Vilna: YIVO, 1937).
9.Birnbaum, Yiddish, 200–215. See Kalman Weiser, “The ‘Orthodox’ Orthography of Solomon Birnbaum,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 20 (2004): 275–295.
10.Joana Lisek, “Orthodox Yiddishism in Beys Yakov Magazine in the Context of Religious Jewish Feminism in Poland,” in Ashkenazim and Sephardim: A European Perspective, ed. Andrzej Katny, Izabela Olszewska, and Aleksandra Twardowska (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2013), 141–148.
11.See Sore-Rokhl Schaechter, “That Time We Picketed the Forward” [Yiddish], Yiddish Daily Forward, online edition, April 27, 2017, http://yiddish.forward.com/articles/203344/that-time-we-picketed-the-forward/?p=all#ixzz4xIeLwYsT.
12.Satoko Kamoshida, “The Variations of Yiddish Orthographical Systems in the Present Hasidic Newspapers,” European Journal of Jewish Studies 2, no. 2 (2009): 299–312.
13.Adele Kronick Shuart, Signs in Judaism: A Resource Book for the Jewish Deaf Community, illus. Ruth E. Peterson, ed. Muriel Strassler (New York: Bloch, 1986); Elena Hoffenberg, “Making Sense of Squiggles: Teaching and Learning Yiddish Stenography,” In geveb [In the network], October 2017, https://ingeveb.org/blog/making-sense-of-squiggles-teaching-and-learning-yiddish-stenography, accessed May 31, 2018.
14.David Efron, Gesture, Race and Culture: A Tentative Study of Some of the Spatio-Temporal and “Linguistic” Aspects of the Gestural Behavior of Eastern Jews and Southern Italians in New York City, Living under Similar as Well as Different Environmental Conditions (The Hague: Mouton, 1972), 98–99.
15.See Mark Slobin, Tenement Songs: The Popular Music of the Jewish Immigrants (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982).
16.Leo Wiener, The History of Yiddish Literature in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899). Wiener states that “the main intention of the present Chrestomathy is to give a transcription of the literary value of Judeo-German literature, and not of its linguistic development” (257).
17.Immanuel Olsvanger, ed., Rosinkess mit Mandlen: Aus der Volksliteratur der Ostjuden; Schwänke, Erzählungen, Sprichwörter, Rätsel [Raisins and almonds: From the folklore of eastern European Jews; Jokes, stories, sayings, riddles] (Basel: Verlag der Schweizerischen Gesellschaft für Volkskunde, 1920); Immanuel Olsvanger, ed., Rêjte Pomeranzen: Ostjüdische Schwänke und Erzählungen [Red oranges: Eastern European Jewish jokes and stories] (Berlin: Schocken, 1936). These collections were reissued, using a different Romanization system, in the United States in the 1940s and have been frequently reprinted.
18.On Zamenhof, see Esther Schor, Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2016), 68.
19.Jacobs, Yiddish, 303.
20.See Jeffrey Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), ch. 5.
1.See Aya Elyada, A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish: Christians and the Jewish Language in Early Modern Germany (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2012), 1–15.
2.Jeffrey A. Grossman, The Discourse on Yiddish in Germany from the Enlightenment to the Second Empire (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2000), 20.
3.See Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 70–81.
4.Elyada, Goy Who Speaks Yiddish, 13.
5.Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (excerpt), in Anson Rabinbach and Sander Gilman, The Third Reich Sourcebook (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 171.
6.Grossman, Discourse on Yiddish in Germany, 44.
7.Elyada, Goy Who Speaks Yiddish, 8.
8.On the history of Reform Judaism, see Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995).
9.See Grossman, Discourse on Yiddish in Germany, 77–79.
10.John M. Efron, German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2016), 58.
11.Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred, 17–19.
12.Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred, 279, 286.
13.Arnold Zweig, The Face of East European Jewry, ed. and trans. Noah Isenberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 20, 22, 27–28.
14.Benjamin Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 157.
15.Efron, German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic, 29.
16.Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution, 157.
17.See Arye L. Pilowsky, “Yiddish alongside the Revival of Hebrew: Public Polemics on the Status of Yiddish in Eretz Israel, 1907–1929,” in Readings in the Sociology of Jewish Languages, ed. Joshua A. Fishman (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1985), 104–124.
18.Yael Chaver, What Must Be Forgotten: The Survival of Yiddish in Zionist Palestine (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2004), 20.
19.Liora R. Halperin, Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920–1948 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2015), 17, 73, 56.
20.Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution, 160–161.
21.Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (New York: Dover Publications, 1971), 85.
22.On dialect humor, see, e.g., Esther Romeyn, Street Scenes: Staging the Self in Immigrant New York 1880–1924 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), ch. 6; on Henry Adams and Henry James, see Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 405–408.
23.Deborah Dash Moore, At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 90, 100.
24.See Baila R. Shargel, “The Texture of Seminary Life during the Finkelstein Era,” in Tradition Renewed: A History of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, ed. Jack Wertheimer, vol. 1 (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1997), 524–525.
25.Leo Wiener, The History of Yiddish Literature in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899), 12.
26.Michael Brenner and Gideon Reuveni, eds., Emancipation through Muscles: Jews and Sports in Europe (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 4.
27.See Dan Miron, A Traveler Disguised: The Rise of Modern Yiddish Fiction in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Schocken, 1973), 26–31.
28.Naomi Seidman, A Marriage Made in Heaven: The Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 42.
29.Roman Jakobson, preface to Uriel Weinreich, College Yiddish: An Introduction to the Yiddish Language and to Jewish Life and Culture (New York: YIVO, 1949), 7–8.
30.See Harald Haarmann, Language in Ethnicity (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1986), ch. 3.
31.Barry Trachtenberg, The Revolutionary Roots of Modern Yiddish, 1903–1917 (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2008), 122.
32.Maks Vaynraykh, “There’s No Need for Germanicisms” [Yiddish], Yidish far ale [Yiddish for Everyone] 1 (1938): 97–106.
33.Mordkhe Schaechter, “The ‘Hidden Standard’: A Study of Competing Influences in Standardization,” in Never Say Die! A Thousand Years of Yiddish in Jewish Life and Letters, ed. Joshua A. Fishman (The Hague: Mouton, 1981), 672.
34.Y. M. Lifshits, “The Four Classes” [Yiddish], Kol mevaser [Herald], 1863, no. 2., reprinted in Fishman, Never Say Die!, 259–265.
35.As cited in Emanuel S. Goldsmith, Architects of Yiddishism at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century: A Study in Jewish Cultural History (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1976), 143.
36.Jacobs, Yiddish, 17.
37.Uriel Weinreich, “Is a Structural Dialectology Possible?,” Word 10, no. 2–3 (1954): 388–400.
38.Dovid Katz, Yiddish and Power (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 272.
39.The term “fabulous invalid” comes from the eponymous 1938 play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, about the ongoing struggles of Broadway’s New Amsterdam Theatre.
1.See Miriam Isaacs, “Contentious Partners: Yiddish and Hebrew in Haredi Israel,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 138 (1999): 101–121.
2.See Chone Shmeruk, “The Versified Old Yiddish Blessing in the Worms ‘Mahzor,’” in Worms “Mahzor,” MS. Jewish National and University Library Heb 4° 781/1, ed. Malachi Beit-Arié (Jerusalem: Jewish National and University Library, 1985), 100–103.
3.Jerold C. Frakes, Early Yiddish Texts, 1100–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), nos. 37, 73.
4.See Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Haggadah and History (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1997), plates 19, 20, 34, 37, 51, 52, 62, 77, 79.
5.On the challenges of defining these early Yiddish texts as works of “popular religion,” see Michael Stanislawski, “Toward the Popular Religion of Ashkenazic Jews,” in Mediating Modernity: Challenges and Trends in the Jewish Encounter with the Modern World, ed. Lauren Strauss and Michael Brenner (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008), 93–106.
6.On early Bible translations into Yiddish, see Jean Baumgarten, Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature, ed. and trans. Jerold C. Frakes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), ch. 5; Israel Zinberg, A History of Jewish Literature, trans. Bernard Martin, vol. 7: Old Yiddish Literature from Its Origins to the Haskalah Period (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1975), 87–139.
7.See Morris M. Faierstein, ed. and trans., Ze’enah u-Re’enah: A Critical Translation into English (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017).
8.On the publishing history of Tsene-rene, see Dorothy Seidman Bilik, “Tsene-rene: A Yiddish Literary Success,” Jewish Book Annual 51 (1993): 96–111; Morris M. Faierstein, “The ‘Se’enah U-Re’enah’: A Preliminary Bibliography,” Revue des Études Juives 172, nos. 3–4 (2013): 397–427.
9.Jerold C. Frakes, ed. and trans., Early Yiddish Epic (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2014), 15.
10.See Zinberg, History of Jewish Literature, vol. 7, ch. 12; Baumgarten, Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature, 35–85.
11.On Hasidic practice, see Aaron Wertheim, Law and Custom in Hasidism, trans. Shmuel Himelstein (Hoboken, N.J.: Ktav, 1992); Jerome R. Mintz, Hasidic People: A Place in the New World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1994).
12.Jacob Katz, A House Divided: Orthodoxy and Schism in Nineteenth-Century Central European Jewry, trans. Ziporah Brody (Hanover, N.H.: Brandeis University Press / University Press of New England, 1998), 48.
13.See Gershon C. Bacon, The Politics of Tradition: Agudat Yisrael in Poland, 1916–1939 (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, 1996).
14.See Miriam Isaacs, “Haredi, Haymish and Frim: Yiddish Vitality and Language Choice in a Transnational, Multilingual Community,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 138 (1999): 99–130.
15.Samuel Heilman, Sliding to the Right: The Contest for the Future of American Jewish Orthodoxy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 211.
16.Di yidishe shprakh, undzer tsirung: Lern [un] leyen bukh [The Yiddish language, our jewel: Textbook and reader], part 1, rev. ed. (Brooklyn: Ohel Torah, 2002), 2. My translation.
17.See Mark Kligman, “On the Creators and Consumers of Orthodox Popular Music in Brooklyn,” YIVO Annual 23 (1996): 259–293.
18.See Isaacs, “Haredi, Haymish and Frim.”
19.“Mendel’s Haymish Brand” (promotional brochure) (Brooklyn, [1985?]). Collection of the author.
20.See Ayala Fader, Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009); Isaacs, “Haredi, Haymish and Frim”; Lewis Glinert, “We Never Changed Our Language: Attitudes to Yiddish Acquisition among Hasidic Educators in Britain,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 138 (1999): 31–52.
21.Fader, Mitzvah Girls, 98–99.
22.Collection of the author.
23.On Jewish English, see David Gold, “Jewish English,” in Readings in the Sociology of Jewish Languages, ed. Joshua A. Fishman (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1985), 280–298; Sarah Bunin Benor, “Echoes of Yiddish in the Speech of Twenty-First-Century American Jews,” in Choosing Yiddish: Studies in Language, Culture, and History, ed. Lara Rabinovitch, Shiri Goren, and Hannah Pressman (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012), 319–323.
24.“Letters to the Editor” [Yiddish], Mayles [Virtues] 6, no. 68 (2002): 3, my translation. On recent efforts to standardize Hasidic Yiddish in this publication, see Yeshue Kahane, “The First Magazine to Aim to Standardize Hasidic Yiddish” [Yiddish], yiddish.forward.com, January 31, 2019.
25.Adam Vardy, dir., Mendy (2003); Eve Annenberg, dir., Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish (2010), Pearl Gluck, dir., Where Is Joel Baum? (2012), Maxime Giroux, dir., Félix et Meira (2014), Joshua Weinstein, dir., Menashe (2017), Maria Schrader, dir., Unorthodox (2020).
26.Ayala Fader, “The Counterpublic of the J(ewish) Blogosphere: Gendered Language and the Mediation of Religious Doubt among Ultra-Orthodox Jews in New York,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, n.s., 23 (2017): 727. See also Ayala Fader, Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020).
27.Barry Trachtenberg, The Revolutionary Roots of Modern Yiddish, 1903–1917 (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2008), 57–58.
28.Anna Shternshis, Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006).
29.See Jeffrey Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 97.
30.English-language abstract for Khayem Spivak, “Old and New Words in Yehoash’s Yiddish Translation of the Bible” [Yiddish], in Filologishe shriftn [Philological studies], ed. Max Weinreich and Zalman Rejzen, vol. 2 (Vilna: B. Kletskin, 1928), xv; Yiddish article appears on pp. 55–68.
31.On American secular Yiddish culture, see, e.g., Tony Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005).
32.See Baumgarten, Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature, 162; Zinberg, History of Jewish Literature, 7:50, 51.
33.“Shira fun Yitskhok” [Song of Isaac], Max Weinreich, Bilder fun der yidisher literaturgeshikhte: Fun di onheybn biz Mendele Moykher-Sforim [Scenes from the history of Yiddish literature: From its beginnings to Mendele the Bookseller] (Vilna: Tomor, 1928), 134–138; “Akedas Yitskhok” [The binding of Isaac], in Early Yiddish Texts, 1100–1750, ed. Jerold Frakes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 316–328. A translation of the latter appears in Jerold C. Frakes, ed., Early Yiddish Epic (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2014), 149–155. I thank Sylvia Lissner Irwin for this insight; see her dissertation, “The Sacrifice of Isaac in Medieval and Early Modern German and Yiddish Works” (PhD diss., Rutgers University, 2014), ch. 5.
34.Yudisher Theriak: An Early Modern Yiddish Defense of Judaism, ed. and trans. Morris M. Faierstein (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016).
35.Elisheva Carlebach, “The Anti-Christian Element in Early Modern Yiddish Culture,” Braun Lectures in the History of the Jews in Prussia 10 (Ramat Gan, Israel: Bar-Ilan University, 2003), 9.
36.Marvin Herzog et al., eds., Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry, vol. 3: The Eastern Yiddish–Western Yiddish Continuum (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2000), 294–297(maps 118, 118S).
37.On Toledot Yeshu in Yiddish, see Claudia Rosenzweig, “When Jesus Spoke Yiddish,” PaRDeS: Zeitschrift der Vereinigung für Jüdische Studien 21 (2015): 199–214; Michael Stanislawski, “A Preliminary Study of a Yiddish ‘Life of Jesus’ (‘Toledot Yeshu’), in “Toledot Yeshu” (“The Life Story of Jesus”) Revisited, ed. Peter Schäfer et al. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 79–87.
38.Aya Elyada, A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish: Christians and the Jewish Language in Early Modern Germany (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2012), 24.
39.Yaakov Ariel, An Unusual Relationship: Evangelical Christians and Jews (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 26.
40.Elyada, Goy Who Speaks Yiddish, 24–27.
41.Ariel, Unusual Relationship, 128.
42.As cited in Yaakov Ariel, Evangelizing the Chosen People: Missions to the Jews in America, 1880–2000 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 91. For a discussion of this and other New Testament translations, see 88–92.
43.On The Nazarene and Asch’s other “Christological” novels, see essays by Anita Norich, Hannah Berliner Fischthal, and Matthew Hoffman in Sholem Asch Reconsidered, ed. Nanette Stahl (New Haven, Conn.: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 2004), 251–288.
44.Chaim Lieberman, The Christianity of Sholem Asch: An Appraisal from the Jewish Viewpoint (New York: Philosophical Library, 1953), 3.
45.See Moshe N. Rosenfeld, “The Origins of Yiddish Printing,” in Origins of the Yiddish Language: Winter Studies in Yiddish, vol. 1, ed. Dovid Katz (Oxford: Pergamon, 1987), 111–126.
46.See Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004).
47.See, e.g., Kh[ayem] Zhitlovski, “In a Jewish/Yiddish Nation” [Yiddish], Geklibene verk [Selected works], ed. Yudl Mark (New York: CYCO, 1955), 321–323. This essay was first printed in Yidishe velt in 1913, with the subtitle “How I Became a Yiddishist”; Sholem Aleichem, “Di groyse behole fun di kleyne mentshelekh” [The great confusion of the little people], in Ale verk fun Sholem-Aleykhem [Complete works of Sholem Aleichem], vol. 7 (New York: Forverts oysgabe, 1944), 157–210; Hirsz Abramowicz, Profiles of a Lost World: Memoirs of East European Jewish Life before World War II, trans. Eva Zeitlin Dobkin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999), 66.
48.Both of these phenomena circulate on YouTube; see, e.g., “Cagney Speaks Yiddish,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynpOEcPdjdk, uploaded July 17, 2012; “Colin Powell at Yeshiva University, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AX7n-tobc4w, uploaded July 20, 2010.
1.Ivan G. Marcus, Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996); Diane Roskies, “Alphabet Instruction in the East European Heder: Some Comparative and Historical Notes,” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 17 (1978): 21–53.
2.Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, ed. Paul Glasser, trans. Shlomo Noble and Joshua A. Fishman, vol. 1 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), 270.
3.See Jerold C. Frakes, ed., Early Yiddish Texts 1100–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 187–188, 266–267.
4.Jeffrey A. Grossman, The Discourse on Yiddish in Germany from the Enlightenment to the Second Empire (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2000), 136.
5.See also Ruth H. Sanders, German: Biography of a Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), ch. 5.
6.Steven E. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jews in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 11.
7.See Isidore Fishman, The History of Jewish Education in Central Europe: From the End of the Sixteenth to the End of the Eighteenth Century (London: Edward Goldston, 1944).
8.See Fishman, History of Jewish Education in Central Europe, 118–121; Eliyana R. Adler, In Her Hands: The Education of Jewish Girls in Tsarist Russia (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011), 133.
9.See Philip Friedman, “Joseph Perl as an Educational Activist and His School in Tarnopol” [Yiddish], YIVO-bleter [YIVO pages] 31–32 (1948): 157.
10.Mordechai Zalkin, Modernizing Jewish Education in Nineteenth Century Eastern Europe: The School as the Shrine of the Jewish Enlightenment (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 51.
11.See Kh. Sh. Kazdan, Fun kheyder un “shkoles” biz TSISHO: Dos ruslendishe yidntum in gerangl far shul, shprakh, kultur [From the kheyder and “Russian” school to the CYCO [Central Yiddish School Organization]: Russian Jewry’s struggle over schooling, language, culture] (Mexico City: Shloyme Mendelson-fond, 1956), 96.
12.Zalkin, Modernizing Jewish Education in Nineteenth Century Eastern Europe, 124.
13.Alice Nakhimovsky and Roberta Newman, Dear Mendel, Dear Reyzl: Yiddish Letter Manuals from Russia and America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014).
14.Cited in Nathan Cohen, “The Bund’s Contribution to Yiddish Culture in Poland between the Two World Wars,” in Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Bund at 100, ed. Jack Jacobs (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 112–113.
15.See Kazdan, Fun kheyder un “shkoles” biz TSISHO, 329.
16.See Kalman Weiser, Jewish People, Yiddish Nation: Noah Prylucki and the Folkists in Poland (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 127–133.
17.On secular Yiddish education in interwar Poland, see Jordana de Bloeme, “Creating a New Jewish Nation: The Vilna Education Society and Secular Yiddish Education in Interwar Vilna,” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 30 (2018): 221–236.
18.See Hirsz Abramowicz, Profiles of a Lost World: Memoirs of East European Jewish Life before World War II, trans. Eva Zeitlin Dobkin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999), 245–247.
19.See Naomi Seidman, Sarah Schenirer and the Bais Yaakov Movement: A Revolution in the Name of Tradition (Liverpool: Littman, 2019).
20.Joanna Lisek, “Orthodox Yiddishism in Beys Yakov Magazine in the Context of Religious Jewish Feminism in Poland,” in Ashkenazim and Sephardim: A European Perspective, ed. Andrzej Katny, Izabela Olszewska, and Aleksandra Twardowska (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Edition, 2013), 132, 130.
21.E.g., “Lenin and Stalin” and “Enemies” [Yiddish], in P. Burganski, Zay greyt! [Be prepared!], part 1 (Kharkov/Kiev: Melukhe-farlag far di natsyonale minderheytn in USRR, 1932), 39, 60.
22.On Soviet Yiddish schools, see Elias Schulman, A History of Jewish Education in the Soviet Union (New York: Ktav, 1971).
23.E.g., Israel Berlin, Ershtes bukh tsu erlernen di englishe shprakh: A methode far zelbst- lerner [First book for learning the English language: A method for self-study] (New York: A. Wasserman, [1907]); Joseph Bresler, Esperanto: A laykhte methode tsu lernen di internatsyonale hilfs shprakh [Esperanto: An easy method to learn the international language] (New York: Sh. Drukerman, 1909); F. Halperin, Ha-sefer: Lernbukh fun hebreish far yidishe shuln [The book: Textbook for Hebrew for Jewish schools], part 1 (Vilna: B. Kletskin, 1928); Naftali Hertz Neimanovitch, Der hoyzlehrer polnish [The Polish home teacher] (Warsaw: [n.p.], 1901); Hayim Keler, Lern arabish: A laykhte sisteme tsu erlernen di arabishe shprakh [Learn Arabic: An easy system for learning the Arabic language] (Tel Aviv: Mitspah, [1935]); M. Meriman, Portugezish-yidisher lernbukh: Mit a yidish-portugezishn verterbukh; ale gramatishe klolim un di oysshprakh in yidish [Portuguese-Yiddish textbook: With a Yiddish-Portuguese dictionary: All grammar rules and pronunciation in Yiddish] (Warsaw: A. Gitlin, 1929); Saul Roso, Der shpanisher lerer: A laykhte metode tsu lernen leyenen, shraybn un reydn shpanish [The Spanish teacher: An easy method to learn to read, write, and speak Spanish] (New York: Hebrew Publishing Company, 1929); H. Vanel, Der folks-lehrer: Eyn lehrbukh tsum zelbst-unterrikht in der russishen shprakhe . . . [The People’s teacher: A textbook for self-study of the Russian language . . .] (Vilna: Y. Pirozshnikov, [1904]); Shebach Walkowski, Unterrikhtsbrief: Far shprakhen un algemeynes visen . . . daytshe shprakhe [Study letters: For language and general knowledge of German] (Cracow: Nakładem Autora w Krakowie, [1915]).
24.“The Yiddish School Movement” [Yiddish], Algemeyne entsiklopedye [General encyclopedia], vol. Yidn: giml (New York: Dubnov-fond fun TSIKO, 1942), cols. 408–424.
25.See Fradle Pomerantz Freidenreich, Passionate Pioneers: The Story of Yiddish Secular Education in North America, 1910–1960 (Teaneck, N.J.: Holmes & Meir, 2010); Sandra Parker, Yiddish Schools in North America (Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House, 1978).
26.Z[almen] Yefroykin, “Yiddish Education in the United States” [Yiddish], Algemeyne entsiklopedye [General encyclopedia], vol. Yidn: hey (New York: Dubnov-fond, 1957), col. 209.
27.Frank V. Thompson, Schooling of the Immigrant (New York: Harper & Bros., 1920), 383, 5.
28.See Jenna Weissman Joselit, The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture, 1880–1950 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1994), 92–93.
29.See Jeffrey Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 96–97.
30.See, e.g., Leibush Lehrer, The Objectives of Camp Boiberik in the Light of Its History ([n.p.]: Camp Boiberik, 1962); Riv-Ellen Prell, Jewish Summer Camping and Civil Rights: How Summer Camps Launched a Transformation in American Jewish Culture (Ann Arbor: Jean and Samuel Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, University of Michigan, 2006).
31.Sholem Aleichem College, “Philosophy and Values,” http://www.sholem.vic.edu.au/about-us/philosophy-and-values/, accessed January 31, 2018.
32.Josh Nathan-Kazis, “Yiddish Kindergarten May Be Coming to a New York City Public School,” Forward, April 12, 2019.
33.See Ayala Fader, Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009).
34.Uriel Weinreich, College Yiddish: An Introduction to the Yiddish Language and to Jewish Life and Culture (New York: YIVO Institute, 1949), 30. My translation.
1.UNESCO, The Plurality of Literacy and Its Implications for Policies and Programmes (Paris: UNESCO, 2004), 13.
2.See Jerold C. Frakes, Early Yiddish Texts, 1100–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); for translations of several epics based on biblical and “secular” sources, see Jerold C. Frakes, ed., Early Yiddish Epic (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2014).
3.See Jean Baumgarten, Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature, ed. and trans. Jerold C. Frakes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), chs. 6, 7.
4.See Baumgarten, Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature, ch. 3; Moshe N. Rosenfeld, “The Origins of Yiddish Printing,” in Origins of the Yiddish Language: Winter Studies in Yiddish, vol. 1, ed. Dovid Katz (Oxford: Pergamon, 1987), 111–126.
5.Israel Zinberg, A History of Jewish Literature, trans. Bernard Martin, vol. 7: Old Yiddish Literature from Its Origins to the Haskalah Period (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1975), 160.
6.Zinberg, History of Jewish Literature, 7:185. See also Baumgarten, Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature, 298–299.
7.Zinberg, History of Jewish Literature, 7:185.
8.Zinberg, History of Jewish Literature, 7:217.
9.See Frakes, Early Yiddish Texts, 1100–1750, 89–91.
10.See In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov: The Earliest Collection of Legends about the Founder of Hasidism, trans. and ed. Dan Ben-Amos and Jerome R. Mintz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970); Nahman of Bratslav: The Tales, trans. Arnold Band (New York: Paulist Press, 1978).
11.See, e.g., introduction to Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, eds., A Treasury of Yiddish Stories (New York: Viking, 1954), 24.
12.Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, ed. Paul Glasser, trans. Shlomo Noble and Joshua A. Fishman (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), vol. 1, ch. 4.
13.Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, 1:199.
14.Marion Aptroot, “Creating Yiddish Dialogue for ‘The First Modern Yiddish Comedy,’” in Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon: Essays on Literature and Culture in Honor of Ruth R. Wisse, ed. Justin Cammy, Dara Horn, Alyssa Quint, and Rachel Rubinstein (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 435–436.
15.See, e.g., Leo Wiener, The History of Yiddish Literature in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899), 20.
16.See Nancy Sinkoff, Out of the Shtetl: Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands (Providence, R.I.: Brown Judaic Studies, 2004), 173–176.
17.Jan Doktór, “Jewish Publishing Houses and the Censorship of Jewish Publications in the Kingdom of Poland before 1862,” Kwartalnik Historii Zydów [Jewish history quarterly] 262 (2017): 169.
18.David G. Roskies, “An Annotated Bibliography of Ayzik Meyer Dik,” in The Field of Yiddish: Studies in Language, Folklore, and Literature, Fourth Collection, ed. Marvin I. Herzog, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Dan Miron, and Ruth Wisse (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1980), 117. See also David G. Roskies, A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), ch. 3.
19.[Ayzik Meyer Dik], Di kremerkes, oder Golde Mine di broder agune [The women shopkeepers, or Golde Mine, the abandoned wife from Brod] (Vilna: Fin-Rozenkrants, 1865), 8, 67.
20.On Goldfaden, see Alyssa Quint, The Rise of the Modern Yiddish Theater (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019).
21.See Benjamin Harshav, The Meaning of Yiddish (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), ch. 5.
22.Dan Miron, A Traveler Disguised: A Study in the Rise of Modern Yiddish Fiction in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Schocken, 1973), 18.
23.Miron, Traveler Disguised, 12.
24.See Menachem Perry, “Thematic and Structural Shifts in Autotranslations by Bilingual Hebrew-Yiddish Writers: The Case of Mendele Mokher Sforim,” Poetics Today 2, no. 4 (1981): 181–192.
25.See Gabriella Safran and Steven J. Zipperstein, eds., The Worlds of S. An-sky: A Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006), 361–435.
26.Jeffrey Shandler, “Heschel and Yiddish: A Struggle with Signification,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 2 (1993): 245–299.
27.Naomi Seidman, The Marriage Plot: Or, How Jews Fell in Love with Love, and with Literature (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2016).
28.Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Making Jews Modern: The Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 25.
29.Tony Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 113.
30.The most famous example of this practice is the “Bintl briv” (Packet of letters), a column that appeared during the first seven decades of the twentieth century in the Jewish Daily Forward, offering editorial advice in response to readers’ letters regarding personal problems. Selected letters are translated in Isaac Metzger, ed., A Bintel Brief: Sixty Years of Letters from the Lower East Side to the Jewish Daily Forward (New York: Schocken, 1990).
31.Morris Bassin, Antologye: Finf hundert yohr yidishe poezye [Anthlogy: Five Hundred Years of Yiddish Poetry] ([Brooklyn, N.Y.]: Farlag “Dos yidishe bukh,” 1917).
32.See, e.g., Ellen Kellman, “Entertaining New Americans: Serialized Fiction in the ‘Forverts’ (1910–1930),” in Jews and American Popular Culture, ed. Paul Buhle, vol. 2 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2007), 199–211.
33.Sholem Aleichem, “The Judgment of Shomer, or The Jury Trial of All of Shomer’s Novels,” trans. Justin Cammy, in Cammy et al., Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon, 129–185.
34.See Nina Warnke, “Immigrant Popular Culture as Contested Sphere: Yiddish Music Halls, the Yiddish Press, and the Processes of Americanization, 1900–1910,” Theatre Journal 48, no. 3 (1996): 321–335; Nathan Cohen, “‘Shund’ and the Tabloids: Jewish Popular Reading in Inter-War Poland,” Polin 16 (2003): 189–211.
35.See Jeffrey Veidlinger, Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 105–109.
36.See Veidlinger, Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire, ch. 2.
37.See, e.g., Zalman Shneour, “Newspapers,” in Restless Spirit: Selected Writings of Zalman Shneour, trans. Moshe Spiegel (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1963), 41–52. On cafes, see Shachar M. Pinsker, A Rich Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2018).
38.On avant-garde Yiddish poetry, see, e.g., Benjamin Harshav, The Meaning of Yiddish (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), chs. 7, 8.
39.Farlag un bukhhandlung B. A. Kletskin, Ilustrirter katalog [Illustrated catalog], Warsaw, March 1925.
40.Beatrice Lang Caplan, “Shmuel Nadler’s Besht-Simfonye: At the Limits of Orthodox Literature,” in Cammy et al., Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon, 599.
41.See Ellen Kellman, “Dos yidishe bukh alarmirt! Towards the History of Yiddish Reading in Inter-War Poland,” Polin 16 (2003): 213–241; Nathan Cohen, “The Yiddish Press as Distributor of Literature,” in The Multiple Voices of Modern Yiddish Literature, ed. Shlomo Berger, Amsterdam Yiddish Symposium 2 (Amsterdam: Menasseh ben Israel Institute, 2007), 7–29.
42.On Soviet Yiddish book design, see Margit Rowell and Deborah Wye, The Russian Avant-Garde Book, 1910–1934 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002).
43.See Gennady Estraikh, Soviet Yiddish: Language Planning and Linguistic Development (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), 62–67.
44.See David Goldberg, “Fantasy, Realism, and National Identity in Soviet Yiddish Juvenile Literature: Itsik Kipnis’s Books for Children,” in Field of Yiddish: Studies in Language, Folklore, and Literature, Fifth Collection, ed. David Goldberg (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 153–201; David Shneer, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture, 1918–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), ch. 6.
45.See Joshua Rubinstein and Vladimir P. Naumov, eds., Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001).
46.Harald Haarmann, Language in Ethnicity: A View of Basic Ecological Relations (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1986), 71.
47.See Estraikh, Soviet Yiddish, 108–114.
48.Anita Norich, Discovering Exile: Yiddish and Jewish American Culture during the Holocaust (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007), 21, 23.
49.Naomi Prawer Kadar, Raising Secular Jews: Yiddish Schools and Their Periodicals for American Children, 1917–1950 (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2017), 156.
50.See Lucy S. Dawidowicz, From That Place and Time: A Memoir, 1938–1947 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), ch. 14; David Fishman, The Rise of Modern Jewish Culture (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), ch. 10.
51.Barry Trachtenberg, The Revolutionary Roots of Modern Yiddish, 1903–1917 (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2008), 285, 297.
52.Jan Schwarz, Survivors and Exiles: Yiddish Culture after the Holocaust (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2015), 7.
53.See Jack Kugelmass and Jonathan Boyarin, eds., From a Ruined Garden: The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry (New York: Schocken, 1983).
54.See Schwarz, Survivors and Exiles, ch. 4.
55.Malena Chinski and Lucas Fiszman, “‘A biblyotek vos felt’: Planning and Creating the Book Collection Musterverk fun der yidisher literatur (Buenos Aires, 1957–1984),” Journal of Jewish Identities 10, no. 2 (July 2017): 138.
56.See Shmuel Rozhanski, ed., Yidish in lid [Yiddish in verse] (Buenos Aires: Literatur-gezelshaft baym YIVO in Argentine, 1967).
57.Mozny Kohen, “A Letter to the Readers” [Yiddish], in F. Royz, Der shpion vos iz antlofn [The spy who escaped] (Monroe, N.Y.: Mozny Kohen, 2000), [4].
58.See Jeffrey Shandler, “Anthologizing the Vernacular: Collections of Yiddish Literature in English Translation,” in The Anthology in Jewish Literature, ed. David Stern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 304–323.
59.See Anita Norich, Writing in Tongues: Translating Yiddish in the Twentieth Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013), ch. 3; Naomi Seidman, Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), ch. 6.
60.Kalevala: Folks epos fun di finen [Kalevala: The Finnish national epic], trans. Hersh Rosenfeld (New York: Martin Press, 1954), 13. My translation.
61.Barbara Finkelstein, “Why Etgar Keret Wanted His Prizewinning Book Translated into Yiddish,” Forward, February 4, 2020, https://forward.com/yiddish/439388/why-etgar-keret-wanted-his-prizewinning-book-translated-into-yiddish/?utm_source=PostUp&utm_medium=email&utm_campai. The Yiddish translation appeared in 2019.
62.Jeffrey Shandler, “Enacting Ethnicity: Yiddishkeit Masked and Unmasked on the Contemporary American Stage,” Jewish Social Studies, n.s., 23, no. 2 (Winter 2018): 12.
63.Dr. Seuss, Di kats der payats: The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss in Yiddish, trans. Sholem Berger (New York: Twenty-Fourth Street Books, 2003); Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Der kleyner prints: Yidish [The little prince: Yiddish], trans. Shloyme Lerman (Nidderau, Germany: Verlag Michaeli Naumann, 2000); Wilhelm Busch, Max und Moritz auf jiddisch: Eine Bubengeshchichte in sieben Streichen / Shmul un Shmerke: A mayse mit vayse-khevrenikes in zibn shpitselekh [Max and Moritz / Shmul and Shmerke: A tale of pranksters in seven scenes], trans. Charles Nydorf and Elinor Robinson (Nidderau, Germany: Verlag Michaeli Naumann, 2000).
64.Heinrich Hoffman, Pinye shtroykop: Der Struwwelpeter auf jiddisch [Pinye Strawhead: Shaggy Peter in Yiddish], trans. Charles Nydorf and Elinor Robinson (Nidderau, Germany: Verlag Michaeli Naumann, 1999); A. A. Milne, Vini-der-Pu [Winnie the Pooh], trans. Leonard Wolf (New York: Dutton, 2000), 23.
65.See Jeffrey Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 116–122.
66.See, e.g., Adrienne Cooper and Zalmen Mlotek, Ghetto Tango: Wartime Yiddish Theater, Traditional Crossroads CD 4297, 2000, compact disc; Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird, The Butcher’s Share, Oriente Musik RIENCD91, 2017, compact disc.
67.Ross Perlin, “Blitspostn, Vebzaytlekh, Veblogs: The Rise of Yiddish Online,” Slate, February 27, 2014, https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/02/yiddish-language-the-mame-loshen-has-network-of-adherents-on-the-internet-from-bloggers-to-translators-to-cultural-preservationists.html.
68.Jonathan Boyarin, “Yiddish Science and the Postmodern,” trans. Naomi Seidman, in Jonathan Boyarin, Thinking in Jewish (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 198.
1.Jerold C. Frakes, ed., Early Yiddish Texts, 1100–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 52–61, 71–72, 460–462.
2.Nicolas Hatot and Judith Olszowy-Schlanger, eds., Savants et Croyants: Les Juifs d’Europe du Nord au Moyen Âge [Scholars and believers: Jews in northern Europe during the Middle Ages] (Ghent: Snoeck, 2018), 163.
3.See Aya Elyada, A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish: Christians and the Jewish Language in Early Modern Germany (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2012), 83–98.
4.On eastern European Jewish surnames, see Alexander Beider, A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire (Teaneck, N.J.: Avotaynu 1993); Alexander Beider, A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Kingdom of Poland (Teaneck, N.J.: Avotaynu, 1996).
5.Sholem-Aleykhem, “Stempenyu,” in Yidishe romanen [Jewish novels] Ale verk fun Sholem-Aleykhem [Complete works of Sholem Aleichem] 2 (New York: Forverts oysgabe, 1944), 136. My translation.
6.See Itzik Nakhmen Gottesman, Defining the Yiddish Nation: The Jewish Folklorists of Poland (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003), 129–135.
7.YIVO Institute, Filologishe shriftn [Philological studies], vol. 3 (Vilna: B. Kletskin, 1929), xiii.
8.Khayim Khayes and Naftuli Vaynig, Vos iz azoyns yidishe ethnografye? Hantbikhl farn zamler [Just what is Jewish ethnography? Handbook for fieldworkers] (Vilna: YIVO, 1929). My translation.
9.H[illel] Aleksandrov, Forsht ayer shtetl! [Research your town!] (Minsk: Institut far vaysrusisher kultur, 1926), 8. My translation.
10.See, e.g., Ignatz Bernstein, Yidishe shprikhverter [Yiddish proverbs] (Warsaw, 1912).
11.See, e.g., Y. L. Cahan, Yidishe folkslider nit melodyes [Yiddish folksongs with melodies], ed. Max Weinreich (New York: YIVO, 1957); Abigail Wood, And We’re All Brothers: Singing in Yiddish in Contemporary North America (London: Routledge, 2016).
12.On Yiddish in social science scholarship, see, e.g., Gennady Estraikh, “Jacob Lestschinsky: A Yiddishist Dreamer and Social Scientist,” Science in Context 20, no. 2 (2007): 21–237; Gottesman, Defining the Yiddish Nation; Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Coming of Age in the Thirties: Max Weinreich, Edward Sapir, and Jewish Social Science,” YIVO Annual 23 (1996): 1–103; Deborah Yalen, “Documenting the New Red Kasrilevke: Shtetl Ethnography as Revolutionary Narrative,” East European Jewish Affairs 37, no. 3 (December 2007): 353–375.
13.See Gabriel Davidson, Our Jewish Farmers: The Story of the Jewish Agricultural Society (New York: L. B. Fischer, 1943).
14.On vocational education in the late Russian Empire and interwar Poland, see Hirsz Abramowicz, Profiles of a Lost World: Memoirs of East European Jewish Life before World War II, trans. Eva Zeitlin Dobkin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999), 221–248.
15.“Be a Good Shock Worker!” [Yiddish], in P. Burganski, Zay greyt! [Be prepared!], part 1 (Kharkov: Melukhe-farlag far di natsyonale minderheytn in USRR, 1932), 44; L. Frumin, Vos darf men visn vegn akhtung gebn af a vagranke [What you need to know to maintain a blast furnace], trans. N. Sakharni (Kharkov: Melukhe-farlag far di natsyonale minderheytn in USRR, 1932); Kolvirttsenter fun FSSR, Vi azoy organizirn di arbet fun mashin- unferd-stansyes in di kolvirtn [How to organize work in equipment and horse stations on collective farms] (Moscow: Tsentrfarlag, 1930).
16.Z[almen] Reyzen, Yidishe gramatik [Yiddish grammar] (Warsaw: Farlag “progress,” 1908).
17.Cited in Barry Trachtenberg, The Revolutionary Roots of Modern Yiddish, 1903–1917 (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2008), 118.
18.On Lifshits, see essays by Zalman Rejzen, N. Shtif, Mordkhe Schaechter, and David E. Fishman in Yidishe shprakh [Yiddish language] 38, nos. 1–3 (1984–1986): 1–58.
19.See Jean Baumgarten, Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature, ed. and trans. Jerold C. Frakes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 22–23.
20.See Dovid Katz, “Alexander Harkavy and His Trilingual Dictionary,” in Alexander Harkavy, Yiddish-English-Hebrew Dictionary (1928; repr. New York: Schocken, 1988), xii–xiii.
21.Sieben-Sprachen-Wörterbuch: Deutsch, Polnisch, Russisch, Weissruthenisch, Litauisch, Lettisch, Jiddisch [Dictionary of seven languages: German, Polish, Russian, Belorussian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Yiddish] (Leipzig: A. Spamer, [1918]).
22.Arabish verterbikhel: Mit geshprekhen; mit dem originelen arabishen alefbeys [Arabic dictionary: With idioms; With the original Arabic alphabet] (Warsaw: Ferlag Altnayland, 1920); David ben Shalom Shakhna Hurvits ha-Levi, Sefer ha-milim zhargoni-ivri / yudisher loshn-koydesher verter-bukh [Yiddish-Hebrew dictionary] (Warsaw: Bi-defus ha-ahim Shuldberg, [1893]); Yidish-portugezisher verter-bukh: Far emigrantn keyn Brazilyen [Yiddish-Portuguese dictionary: For immigrants to Brazil] (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Polskiego Komitetu Towarzystwa JCA Jewish Colonization Association, [192-?]); I. Winocur, Idish-shpanisher verter-bukh [Yiddish-Spanish dictionary] (Buenos Aires: G. Kaplanski, 1931).
23.Hanoch Rusak, Entsiklopedisher verterbukh esperanto-yidish [Encyclopedic dictionary of Esperanto-Yiddish] (Jerusalem: Bet Zamenhof, 1969–1973); Yitskhok Niborski and Bernard Vaisbrot, Yidish-frantseyzish verterbukh [Yiddish-French dictionary] (Paris: Medem-Bibliotek, 2002); Henrik Blau, Idish-ungarish verter-bukh [Yiddish-Hungarian dictionary] (Budapest: Chábád Lubavics Zsidó Nevelési és Oktatási Egyesület, 1995); Davide Astori, Parlo Yiddish: Manuele di Conversazione [I speak Yiddish: Conversation guide] (Milan: Antonio Vallardi, 2000); K. Ueda, Idisshugo jō yō: 6000-go [Six thousand commonly used Yiddish words] (Tokyo: Daigaku kan rin, 1993); Lennart Kerbel, Jiddisch-svensk-jiddisch ordbok [Yiddish-Swedish-Yiddish dictionary] (Stockholm: Megilla-förlaget, 2005); I. Torchynsʹky, Kurtser yidish-ukrainisher verterbukh [Short Yiddish-Ukrainian dictionary] (Kiev: Holovna spetsializovana redaktsiia literatury movamy natsionalʹnykh menshin Ukraïny, 1996).
24.Katz, “Alexander Harkavy and His Trilingual Dictionary,” vii.
25.Uriel Weinreich, Modern English-Yiddish / Yiddish-English Dictionary (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), xi. On Weinreich’s career, see Journal of Jewish Languages 5, no. 2 (2017), a special issue devoted to his work.
26.Gitl Schaechter-Viswanath and Paul Glasser, eds., Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary: Based on the Lexical Research of Mordkhe Schaechter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016).
27.Katz, “Alexander Harkavy and His Trilingual Dictionary,” xviii; Judah A. Joffe and Yudel Mark, eds., Groyser verterbukh fun der yidisher shprakh [Great dictionary of the Yiddish language], vol. 1 (New York: Yiddish Dictionary Committee, 1961), 509.
28.Joffe and Mark, Groyser verterbukh fun der yidisher shprakh, 1:510.
29.Additional volumes of the Groyser verterbukh fun der yidisher shprakh appeared in 1966 (vol. 2), 1971 (vol. 3), and 1980 (vol. 4).
30.Joffe and Mark, Groyser verterbukh fun der yidisher shprakh, 1:509–510.
31.See Max Weinreich, “YIVO during a Year of Mass Murder” [Yiddish], YIVO-bleter [YIVO pages] 21 (1943): 88.
32.See Avraham Novershtern, “Between Town and Gown: The Institutionalization of Yiddish at Israeli Universities,” in Yiddish in the Contemporary World, ed. Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov (Oxford: Legenda, 1999), 1–19.
33.David E. Fishman, “The Rebirth of Jewish Scholarship in Russia,” American Jewish Year Book 97 (1997): 391–400.
1.See, e.g., Der bezim [The broom], a supplement to Dos lebn [Life] (Odessa), April 10, 1906.
2.Tony Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 79.
3.On Peretz, see Ken Frieden, Classic Yiddish Fiction: Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and Peretz (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 245–249. On “sweatshop poets,” see Ori Kritz, The Poetics of Anarchy: David Edelshtat’s Revolutionary Poetry (New York: Peter Lang, 1997); Marc Miller, Representing the Immigrant Experience: Morris Rosenfeld and the Emergence of Yiddish Literature in America (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2007).
4.See David E. Fishman, The Rise of Modern Jewish Culture (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), 53.
5.Fishman, Rise of Modern Jewish Culture, 32.
6.See Lewis Glinert, “The First Conference for Hebrew, or When Is a Congress Not a Congress?,” in The Earliest Stage of Language Planning: The “First Congress” Phenomenon, ed. Joshua A. Fishman, Contributions to the Sociology of Language 65 (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1993), 85–115; Esther Schor, Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language (New York: Metropolitan, 2016), 85; Holger Nath, “The First International Conference of the Catalan Language in Barcelona (1906): A Spiritual Precursor to Czernowitz (1908)?,” in The Politics of Yiddish: Studies in Language, Literature, and Society, ed. Dov-Ber Kerler (Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira, 1998), 51–62.
7.Barry Trachtenberg, The Revolutionary Roots of Modern Yiddish, 1903–1917 (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2008), 121–122.
8.Trachtenberg, Revolutionary Roots of Modern Yiddish, 114.
9.Emanuel S. Goldsmith, Architects of Yiddishism at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century: A Study in Jewish Cultural History (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1976), 168.
10.Goldsmith, Architects of Yiddishism, 64.
11.See Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983).
12.See Gennady Estraikh, Soviet Yiddish: Language Planning and Linguistic Development (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), ch. 3; David Shneer, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture, 1918–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), ch. 2.
13.On the murder of Soviet Yiddish culture leaders, see Joshua Rubinstein and Vladimir P. Naumov, eds., Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001).
14.See Tony Michels, “Exporting Yiddish Socialism: New York’s Role in the Russian Workers’ Movement,” Jewish Social Studies 16, no. 1 (2009): 1–26.
15.The Yiddish Forward continued as a weekly and is currently an online publication.
16.See Edna Nahshon, Yiddish Proletarian Theatre: The Art and Politics of ARTEF, 1925–1940 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1998); Edward Portnoy, “Modicut Puppet Theatre: Modernism, Satire, and Yiddish Culture,” TDR 43, no. 3 (1999): 115–134.
17.Raymond Pearson, National Minorities in Eastern Europe, 1848–1945 (London: Macmillan, 1983), 25.
18.Israel Bartal, “From Traditional Bilingualism to National Monolingualism,” in Hebrew in Ashkenaz: A Language in Exile, ed. Lewis Glinert (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 141–150.
19.See Larry Wolff, The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010), ch. 1; Pearson, National Minorities in Eastern Europe, ch. 3.
20.See Miklós Konrád, “Hungarian Expectations and Jewish Self-Definitions, 1840–1914,” in Modern Jewish Scholarship in Hungary: The “Science of Judaism” between East and West, ed. Tamás Turán and Carsten Wilke (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2016), 329–348; Szonja Ráhel Komoróczy, “Yiddish in the Hungarian Setting,” in Jewish Languages in Historical Perspective, ed. Lily Kahn (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 92–107.
21.Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 89.
22.Ahad Ha-‘Am, Selected Essays by Ahad Ha-‘Am, trans. Leon Simon (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1912), 281, 280, 283.
23.Avraham Novershtern, “Language Wars,” in Critical Terms in Jewish Language Studies, ed. Anita Norich and Joshua L. Miller (Ann Arbor: Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Michigan, 2011), 22–23.
24.Liora R. Halpern, Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920–1948 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2015), 58.
25.Shneer, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture, 49, 51.
26.Yehoshua A. Gilboa, “Hebrew Literature in the USSR,” in The Jews in Soviet Russia since 1917, ed. Lionel Kochan, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 228.
27.Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History?: Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).
28.See, e.g., Gila Flam, Singing for Survival: Songs of the Lodz Ghetto, 1940–45 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991).
29.United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “The Yiddish words, ‘Jews Revenge!’ scrawled in blood on the apartment floor of a Jew murdered in the Slobodka pogrom,” Photograph Number: 04640, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa29012, accessed August 25, 2018.
30.Szmerke Kaczerginski, Dos gezang fun vilner geto [The song of the Vilna Ghetto] (Paris: Farband fun di vilner in Frankraykh, 1947); Szmerke Kaczerginski, Lider fun di getos un lagern: Tekstn un melodyes [Songs of the ghettos and camps: Texts and melodies] (New York: TSIKO, 1948); Yisroel Kaplan, Dos folks-moyl in natsi-klem: reydenishn in geto un katset [The voice of the people under Nazi Oppression: Speech in ghettos and concentration camps] (Munich: Tsentraler historisher komisye fun di bafrayte yidn in der amerikaner zone in Daytshland, 1949), translated by Jenny Bell and Dianne Levitin as The Jewish Voice in the Ghettos and Concentration Camps: Verbal Expression under Nazi Oppression (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2018).
31.David Slucki, The International Jewish Labor Bund after 1945: Toward a Global History (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2012).
32.Diego Rotman, “The ‘Tsadik from Plonsk’ and ‘Goldenyu’: Political Satire in Dzigan and Shumacher’s Israeli Comic Repertoire,” in A Club of Their Own: Jewish Humorists and the Contemporary World, ed. Eli Lederhendler, Studies in Contemporary Jewry 29 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 167.
33.See Jerome R. Mintz, Hasidic People: A Place in the New World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1994), ch. 26.
34.See Jeffrey Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 201–202.
35.Ruth Ellen Gruber, Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 194.
1.Benjamin Harshav, The Meaning of Yiddish (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 91.
2.Endel Markowitz, The Encyclopedia Yiddishanica: A Compendium of Jewish Memorabilia (Fredericksburg, Va.: Haymark, 1980), xvii.
3.Leo Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), xviii.
4.Maurice Samuel, In Praise of Yiddish (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1971), xii, 6, xii.
5.See Jeffrey Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 22.
6.Samuel, In Praise of Yiddish, 97, 99, 103–104.
7.See Nokhem Stutshkov, Oytser fun der yidisher shprakh [Thesaurus of the Yiddish Language] (New York: YIVO, 1950), sections 246, 247, 249, 250; Mordkhe Schaechter, Plant Names in Yiddish: A Handbook of Botanical Terminology (New York: League for Yiddish, 2005).
8.For example, “Monish” is the opening work in The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse, ed. Irving Howe, Ruth Wisse, and Chone Shmeruk (New York: Viking, 1987), 52–81.
9.Y. L. Perets, “Monish,” in Di verk fun Yitskhok Leybush Perets [I. L. Peretz’s Works], vol. 1: Lider [Poems] (New York: Farlag yidish, 1920), 169. My translation. In later versions of the poem, Peretz omitted this section.
10.Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog, Life Is with People: The Jewish Little-Town of Eastern Europe (New York: International Universities Press, 1952), 72–73.
11.See, e.g., Fred Kogos, A Dictionary of Yiddish Slang and Idioms (New York: Citadel, 1970); Yosef Guri, Lomir hern gute bsures: yidishe brokhes un klolim / Let’s Hear Only Good News: Yiddish Blessings and Curses (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2004); Yiddish Wisdom: Humor and Heart from the Old Country (San Francisco: Chronicle, 2013).
12.James A. Matisoff, Blessings, Curses, Hopes, and Fears: Psycho-Ostensive Expressions in Yiddish (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1979), 6, 4.
13.Matisoff, Blessings, Curses, Hopes, and Fears, 4, 7, 7.
14.See., e.g., John Murray Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1974), part 1; Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 250–269.
15.Christopher Hutton, “Freud and the Family Drama of Yiddish,” Studies in Yiddish Linguistics, ed. Paul Wexler (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1990), 16, 21.
16.Hutton, “Freud and the Family Drama of Yiddish,” 16.
17.Franz Kafka, “An Introductory Talk on the Yiddish Language,” in Reading Kafka, ed. Mark Anderson (New York: Schocken, 1990), 263–266.
18.Evelyn Torton Beck, Kafka and the Yiddish Theater: Its Impact on His Work (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971), 28–29.
19.Martin Buber, introduction to Eisik Schaftel: Ein jüdisches Arbeiterdrama in Drei Akten von David Pinski [Isaac Schaftel: A Jewish labor drama in three acts by David Pinski] (Berlin: Der jüdische Verlag, 1903), 4f, as cited in Paul Mendes-Flohr, “The Politics of Covenantal Responsibility: Martin Buber and Hebrew Humanism,” ORIM: A Jewish Journal at Yale 3, no. 2 (Spring 1988): 7.
20.Mendes-Flohr, “Politics of Covenantal Responsibility,” 7.
21.Richard Fein, Dancing with Leah: Discovering Yiddish in America (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1986), 9, 16, 22, 29, 28.
22.Lita Epstein, If You Can’t Say Anything Nice, Say It in Yiddish: The Book of Yiddish Insults and Curses (New York: Kensington, 2006).
23.Yetta Emmes, Drek!: The Real Yiddish Your Bubbe Never Taught You (New York: Plume, 1998); Adrienne Gusoff, Dirty Yiddish: Everyday Slang from “What’s Up?” to “F*%# Off!” (Berkeley, Calif.: Ulysses, 2012).
24.Martin Marcus, Yiddish for Yankees: or, Funny, You Don’t Look Gentile (Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott, 1968); Arthur Naiman, Every Goy’s Guide to Common Jewish Expressions (New York: Ballantine, 1981).
25.Per a Google search of “Yiddish T-shirts,” May 16, 2018. Romanizations per sources.
26.On these resorts, see Stefan Kanfer, A Summer World: The Attempt to Build a Jewish Eden in the Catskills from the Days of the Ghetto to the Rise and Decline of the Borscht Belt (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989).
27.Uriel Weinreich, Languages in Contact: Findings and Problems (1953; repr. The Hague: Mouton, 1966), 95.
1.David Crystal, Language Death (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1.
2.Andrew Dalby, Language in Danger: The Loss of Linguistic Diversity and the Threat to Our Future (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 275.
3.UNESCO lists Yiddish in Europe and in Israel as “definitely endangered.” UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, http://www.unesco.org/languages-atlas/index.php, accessed May 31, 2018.
4.Netta Avineri, “Yiddish Endangerment as Phenomenological Reality and Discursive Strategy: Crossing into the Past and Crossing Out the Present,” Language and Communication 38 (2014): 18–32.
5.Sarah Bunin Benor, “Hebrew Infusion in American Jewish Life: Tensions and the Role of Israeli Hebrew,” in What We Talk about When We Talk about Hebrew (and What It Means to Americans), ed. Naomi B. Sokoloff and Nancy E. Berg (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018), 124–138.
6.Anita Norich, Discovering Exile: Yiddish and Jewish American Culture during the Holocaust (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007), 5.
7.Jeffrey Shandler, Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age: Survivors’ Stories and New Media Practices (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2017), 94, 122.
8.Cynthia Ozick, “Envy; or, Yiddish in America,” in Jewish Literature in America: A Norton Anthology, ed. Jules Chametzky, John Felstiner, Hilene Flanzbaum, and Kathryn Hellerstein (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 859.
9.Celia Stopnicka Heller, On the Edge of Destruction: Jews of Poland between the Two World Wars (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 66. See also John Myhill, Language in Jewish Society: Towards a New Understanding (Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2004), 136–140.
10.Samuel Kassow, “Polish Jewish, Yiddish Jewish: Language Angst in Interwar Jewish Poland,” seminar presentation, American Academy for Jewish Research Fellows Retreat, University of California Berkeley, May 22, 2012. On Yiddish in postwar Poland, see Joanna Nalewajko-Kulikov, “Yiddish Form, Socialist Content: Yiddish in Postwar Poland, 1945–1968,” in Yiddish after 1945, ed. Marion Aptroot, Amsterdam Yiddish Symposium 11 (Amsterdam: Menasseh Ben Israel Institute, 2018), 29–44.
11.Joshua A. Fishman, ed., Never Say Die!: A Thousand Years of Yiddish in Jewish Life and Letters (The Hague: Mouton, 1981).
12.Joshua A. Fishman, “The Lively Life of a ‘Dead’ Language or ‘Everyone Knows That Yiddish Died Long Ago,’” Judaica Book News 13, no. 1 (Fall/Winter 1982–1983): 10.
13.Avrom Sutskever, “Yidish” [Yiddish], in Yidish in lid [Poems on Yiddish], ed. Shmuel Rozhanski (Buenos Aires: YIVO, 1967), 186–187. My translation.
14.Yankev Glatshteyn, “A Lively Decline: A Language for Eternity, Not for the Meantime” [Yiddish], in Fishman, Never Say Die!, 610. Reprinted from Yankev Glatshteyn, In der velt mit yidish: Eseyen [In the world with Yiddish: Essays] (New York: Congress for Jewish Culture, 1972). My translation; in the original, the words good time are in English, rendered in the alef-beys.
15.Ahad Ha-‘Am, “The Spiritual Revival,” in Selected Essays by Ahad Ha-‘Am, trans. Leon Simon (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1912), 282. The essay was “originally an address delivered before the general meeting of Russian Zionists at Minsk, in the summer of in 1902” (253).
16.Leo Wiener, The History of Yiddish Literature in the Nineteenth Century, 2nd ed. (New York: Herman, 1972), 24, 10–11.
17.Cited in Ezekiel Lifschutz, “Morris Rosenfeld’s Attempts to Become an English Poet,” America Jewish Archives (1970): 124. Rosenfeld was writing to Leo Wiener, who arranged for the English-language publication of Rosenfeld’s poetry.
18.Norich, Discovering Exile, 5.
19.Janet Hadda, “Yiddish in Today’s America,” Jewish Quarterly 170 (Summer 1998): 34–35.
20.E.g., Aaron Lansky, Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin, 2004).
21.Adrienne Cooper and Joyce Rosenzweig, Dreaming in Yiddish, Adrienne Cooper AC 8432, 1997, compact disc liner notes.
22.Interview with Alicia Svigals, New York, November 14, 2000, cited in Jeffrey Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 144.
23.As cited in Paul Kresh, Isaac Bashevis Singer: The Magician of West 86th Street (New York: Dial, 1979), 418.
24.Isaac Bashevis Singer, Nobel Lecture (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1978), 9.
25.Amram Nowak, dir., Isaac in America: A Journey with Isaac Bashevis Singer (documentary film), 1986. My transcription.
26.Simon Rawidowicz, Israel, the Ever-Dying People, and Other Essays, ed. Benjamin C. I. Ravid (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1986), 61, 63.
27.Irving Saposnik, “A Canticle for Isaac: A Kaddish for Bashevis,” in The Hidden Isaac Bashevis Singer, ed. Seth L. Wolitz (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 3.
28.See, e.g., “Daniel Kahn and The Painted Bird,” https://www.paintedbird.de/index.php?option=com_content&view=featured&Itemid=101&lang=en, accessed August 16, 2018.
29.“Sala-Manca Group,” http://www.sala-manca.net/salamancagroup.htm. See Jeffrey Shandler, “Sala-Manca: Mediating the Poetics of Translation,” AJS Perspectives, Spring 2006, 38–39.
30.“Yevgeniy Fiks: Books,” https://yevgeniyfiks.com/artwork/4191033-Soviet-Moscow-s-Yiddish-Gay-Dictionary.html, accessed January 1, 2019.
31.Michael Cooper, “A Yiddish-Cuban Opera to Have Its Premiere in Havana in March,” New York Times, February 19, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/19/arts/music/a-yiddish-cuban-opera-to-have-its-premiere-in-havana-in-march.html.
32.“The Company,” New Yiddish Rep, http://www.newyiddishrep.org/The%20Company.html, accessed Aug. 28, 2016.
33.Corey Kilgannon, “A Gentile Who Lives for Yiddish,” New York Times, January 29, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/nyregion/shane-baker-raised-episcopalian-lives-for-yiddish-theater.html.
34.Yermiyahu Ahron Taub, “Why I Write in Yiddish,” Jewish Book Council blog, March 12, 2018, https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/_blog/The_ProsenPeople/post/why-i-write-in-yiddish/.
35.The online periodical In geveb (In the network) publishes annual bibliographies of Yiddish studies scholarship in English, https://ingeveb.org).
36.“Voices of the Holocaust,” http://voices.iit.edu, accessed June 3, 2018.
37.“The Ruth Rubin Legacy Archive of Yiddish Folksongs,” https://exhibitions.yivo.org/exhibits/show/ruth-rubin-sound-archive/home, accessed December 24, 2018; “The Stonehill Jewish Song Collection,” http://www.ctmd.org/stonehill.htm, accessed June 3, 2018.
38.“EYDES: Evidence of Yiddish Documented in European Studies,” http://www.eydes.de/, accessed June 3, 2018; “Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry,” http://library.columbia.edu/locations/global/jewishstudies/lcaaj.html, accessed June 3, 2018.
39.Avraham Novershtern, “Between Town and Gown: The Institutionalization of Yiddish at Israeli Universities,” in Yiddish in the Contemporary World: Papers of the First Mendel Friedman International Conference on Yiddish, ed. Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov (Oxford: Legenda, 1999), 16.
40.“AHEYM: The Archives of Historical and Ethnographic Yiddish Memories,” http://www.iub.edu/~aheym/, accessed June 3, 2018.
41.See Shandler, Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age, ch. 3.
42.Jeffrey Shandler, “Queer Yiddishkeit: Practice and Theory,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 25, no. 1 (Fall 2006): 112, 122, 113.
43.Jerold C. Frakes, “Yiddish in Italia: Yiddish Manuscripts and Printed Books from the 15th to the 17th Century” (review), Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 24, no. 3 (2006): 154–156.
44.Ricardo Otheguy, Ofelia García, and Wallis Reid, “Clarifying Translanguaging and Deconstructing Named Languages: A Perspective from Linguistics,” Applied Linguistics Review 6, no. 3 (2015): 281. See also Ofelia García and Li Wei, Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
45.Sarah Bunin Benor, “Towards a New Understanding of Jewish Language in the Twenty-First Century,” Religion Compass 2, no. 6 (2008): 1068.
46.Sarah Bunin Benor, “Echoes of Yiddish in the Speech of Twenty-First-Century American Jews,” in Choosing Yiddish: Studies in Language, Culture, and History, ed. Lara Rabinovitch, Shiri Goren, and Hannah Pressman (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012), 319–323.
47.See, e.g., Marc van Oostendorp, “How Yiddish Dissolved into the Dutch Dialects,” in Dutch in Yiddish, Yiddish in Dutch, ed. Marion Aptroot (Amsterdam: Menasseh Ben Israel Institute, 2016), 39–56; Lutz Edzard, “Hebrew and Hebrew-Yiddish Terms and Expressions in Contemporary German: Some (Socio-)Linguistic Observations,” in Proceedings of the Oslo-Austin Workshop in Semitic Linguistics: Oslo, May 23 and 24, 2013, ed. Lutz Edzard and John Huehnergard, Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 88 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2014): 127–143.
48.Ghil’ad Zuckermann, “Hybridity versus Revivability: Multiple Causation, Forms and Patterns,” Journal of Language Contact 2 (2009): 45.