The Afterlife of Yiddish in German-Jewish Culture, 1818–1938
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Book Talk
Co-sponsored by the Leo Baeck Institute Admission: Free Registration is required. |
From the late eighteenth century onwards, as growing circles of the German-Jewish population shifted from speaking Yiddish to German, the once-popular early modern corpus of Old Yiddish literature ceased to be published in the German-speaking lands. But this rich literary corpus did not entirely disappear from the cultural landscape of modern German Jews. In A Lingering Legacy: The Afterlife of Yiddish in German-Jewish Culture, 1818-1938, Aya Elyada shows how Old Yiddish texts continued to be retold, translated, adapted, discussed, and explored in the works of nineteenth and early-twentieth-century German Jewish authors.
In doing so, she uncovers a rich afterlife, in which these beloved Yiddish works were not only newly appreciated as historical monuments, but also served as the focus of lively discussions on a range of pertinent topics within modern German-Jewish culture, including tradition and secularization, acculturation and nostalgia, emancipation and antisemitism, gender relations, and religious reform. Illuminating how modern German-Jewish authors engaged with their premodern Yiddish heritage as central to modern Jewish experience and their distinctive cultural identity, this book unfolds a new dimension to German-Jewish history, culture, and literature.
Join YIVO for a discussion with Elyada about this book, led by Samuel Spinner.
About the Speakers
Aya Elyada is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research focuses on Yiddish-German encounters and the social history of language and translation. Before joining the Hebrew University in 2012, she was a visiting PhD student at the University of Munich and a postdoctoral fellow at Duke University. She is the author of A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish: Christians and the Jewish Language in Early Modern Germany.
Samuel Spinner is Associate Professor, Zelda and Myer Tandetnik Chair in Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture at Johns Hopkins University. He specializes in Yiddish and German-Jewish literature and culture from the nineteenth century to the present. He is the author of Jewish Primitivism and is currently working on a book on Holocaust memory. He co-edits the German Jewish Cultures series at Indiana University Press and serves on the editorial board of In geveb.