Nov 21, 2024
INTRODUCTION
There’s a lot to discuss in Jewish Studies, from new trends to old texts, from the international to the personal, from innovations in classroom instruction to program development. Yiddish has a large presence at the Association for Jewish Studies Conference and we’re looking forward to learning about the latest developments in the field - and (re)connecting with the friends and colleagues who make our field(s) of study so vibrant. This year, the conference will take place online from December 15 to 19.
We are pleased to once again offer this guide to Yiddish at AJS, aimed at helping you navigate the conference with Yiddish in mind. If you are at the conference, we hope this guide helps you find relevant conversations and if you can’t make it, our hope is that this guide will make it easier for you to know what others are working on and to forge connections with scholars whose work contributes to Yiddish studies, even when those connections happen outside the conference itself.
This guide contains papers on topics related to Yiddish Studies, organized around session day/time. If you notice something we’re missing, please email us! If you are one of the presenters included here, we hope you will consider submitting your work to In geveb for publication!
We also want to highlight the events In geveb has organized and is participating in, and to encourage you to use them as an opportunity to meet us. In geveb aims to be a resource for Yiddish Studies in the broadest sense, which means that if you work with Yiddish and we don’t know you yet, we want to. We look forward to seeing you at the conference! Whether or not you will be at the AJS, if you would like to connect with our editors, please write to [email protected] to schedule virtual office hours with us.
WHERE TO FIND IN GEVEB AT AJS
Join the Yiddishist Group Chat!
In place of our usual kave-sho this year, we invite you to gather with us on WhatsApp throughout the conference. We have created a WhatsApp group to encourage informal conversation and community building among Yiddish Studies folks throughout the conference. We look forward to reading your hellos and well wishes, your praises for the work you’ve encountered, your questions for one another, and your snarky jokes. All friends of In geveb are welcome!
This year, In geveb is sponsoring three round table discussions:
What is a Yiddish Studies Program of Study?
Tue, December 17, 8.30 - 10.00 AM EST, Virtual Zoom Room 17
With the expansion of Yiddish Studies, scholars now face the challenge of defining and framing the field for future generations. This work is increasingly done through formal Yiddish Studies Programs, offered at the graduate or undergraduate levels, yet there is no consensus as to what a degree in “Yiddish Studies” should look like, from a BA program with a year or two of language study and a few courses on Yiddish literature in translation to a dedicated Master’s program with a full curriculum for advanced students. While the study of Yiddish may be largely determined by external forces (availability of teaching personnel, finances, the structure of programs at a given college or university), this roundtable aims to take a proactive, content-oriented approach, with current heads of Yiddish Programs articulating their visions for what such programs could and should look like in a digitized, post-pandemic era. Participants will discuss intellectual aims and priorities: depth of study versus accessibility, connecting teaching to research versus following student interests, the importance of building global student cohorts versus the pull of local scholarly communities and collaboration with other language-literature programs. Together they will propose possible futures for Yiddish studies programs.
Hannah Pollin-Galay directs the Goldrich Institute for Yiddish and will discuss her efforts to make the Yiddish Studies Program a space of challenging, international exchange, while also speaking to local, Israeli realities. Saul Zaritt leads a program in Yiddish studies that doesn’t exist in any official capacity at Harvard University but instead traverses multiple departments and university institutions. Marion Aptroot at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf leads a program created within the European Union’s and her university’s regulations, constraints, and possibilities. Karolina Szymaniak directs BA and MAs in Yiddish at the University of Wrocław and is also the director of pedagogy at the Warsaw International Summer Program; she will discuss constructing programs for Slavic-speaking and international students alongside the challenges of national, European, and international cooperation. Anna Shternshis of the University of Toronto will discuss the advantages of directing students toward an “area studies” model rather than thinking of Yiddish Studies as an independent discipline.
Beyond Yiddish 101: Current Approaches to Undergraduate Yiddish Studies Syllabi
Tue, December 17, 3:30 to 5:00pm EST, Virtual Zoom Room 10
Wherever we are in the cycle of Yiddish's presence in the popular imagination (renaissance or revenant?), undergraduate courses in Yiddish Studies are a testing ground for the continued vitality and relevance of Yiddish culture for today’s university student. The participants in this roundtable will each share a syllabus for a recent undergraduate course on a range of topics in Yiddish studies and related fields. The discussants come from a variety of college and university settings including small liberal arts schools and major research universities in the US and Europe. Discussion questions will range from specifics of syllabus construction (course goals, assignments, approaches to teaching literature in translation, incorporating newly available materials) to big picture questions about what is drawing undergraduates to the study of Yiddish today.
Justin Cammy will share a syllabus for his seminar on “Yiddishland,” which includes travel to Warsaw and Vilnius during spring break. A central question for this seminar is how to create travel experiences for students that incorporate the Khurbn, but are not overwhelmed by it.
Madeleine Cohen will discuss her class “Yiddish Nation: Language as Homeland” and the experience of teaching about Jewish national identity during the fall of 2023 in light of October 7 and the ensuing war.
Matt Johnson is developing two courses that respectively address beginning and advanced undergraduates: "Introduction to Yiddish Studies: Migration, Gender, and (Post-)Vernacularity" and a new version of the "BA Kandidatkurs" (similar to a senior seminar in the US), which focuses on developing research and analytic writing skills in Yiddish Studies.
Jessica Kirzane will discuss a course on practical and theoretical considerations in literary translation developed for advanced Yiddish students.
Samuel Spinner will discuss his syllabus for “Yiddish Literature and Holocaust Literature,” which presents the challenge of teaching about Yiddish literature and culture while reading texts focused on its decimation.
The roundtable will be moderated by Ayelet Brinn, who incorporates topics related to Yiddish studies into her courses on medieval and modern Jewish history, modern Jewish literature, American Jewish history, and banned books.
Mentorship in Yiddish Studies
Mentor relationships are crucial to the retention, success, and wellbeing of scholars throughout their academic careers. Mentoring provides professional support, offers guidance about norms and behaviors that can help newer scholars navigate within the field, and fosters a community across rank that celebrates and encourages emerging scholars and their accomplishments. Mentorship is a crucial component of academic work, requiring time and emotional labor as well as expertise both about the content of the field of academic study and about the community of practice.
This round table considers the work of mentorship in the context of Yiddish Studies. In Yiddish Studies, the transfer of knowledge across the generations bears the weight of the differing relationships scholars may have to the language and to the field, as heritage speakers or speakers of an acquired language, as Jews and non-Jews, Hasidim, ex-Hasidim, and non-Hasidim, and from a variety of gender, socio-economic, and political positionalities. For many Yiddish scholars, the language is a source of identity and community as well as a subject of study. How do, or can, established Yiddish Studies scholars work to help emerging scholars navigate both the field of study and its community? What can they do to connect meaningfully with emerging scholars in service of their goals and aspirations? This conversation will include both a discussion of existing best practices and envisioning future mentorship practices that could benefit the scholarly community as a whole.
Rebecca (Rivke) Margolis, a professor in Monash University’s Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation, will speak to mentorship in the context of international immersive Yiddish summer program as well as strategies to support students in the transition from language learners to graduate students in the field of Yiddish Studies.
Lily Kahn, Professor of Hebrew and Jewish Languages in the University College London, Dept of Hebrew & Jewish Studies, will speak to mentorship in the context of her work in linguistics and endangered language revitilization.
Miriam Udel, associate professor of German Studies and Judith London Evans Director of the Tam Institute of Jewish Studies at Emory University, will speak about mentorship with her undergraduate students and her broader learning community as both a scholar and a Darshanit. She will also discuss the generosity of mentors she has learned from.
Dovid Braun, who has taught all levels of Yiddish language at YIVO's intensive summer program since 1990 at Columbia University and New York University, and has taught Yiddish language, Yiddish linguistics, and/or general linguistics as a faculty member of Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, will talk about his mentorship among Yiddish language students and instructors.
Agnieszka Legutko is the Senior Lecturer in Yiddish and Director of the Yiddish Language Program at Columbia University. She will discuss her interests in content-based foreign language teaching as it relates to her mentorship of students, including graduate students teaching Yiddish language in her program, as well as mentorship in other areas of her scholarship.
Tahneer Oksman (moderator), Associate Professor in the Departments of Writing, Literature, and Language, as well as Communication and Media Arts, at Marymount Manhattan College will lead a discussion grounded in the conversations that have emerged out of the volume she co-edited: Feminists Reclaim Mentorship (2023).
WHERE TO FIND YIDDISH AT AJS
All of the following panels, roundtables, seminars, and lightning sessions promise to have at least one speaker whose presentation engages with Yiddish in a substantive way. We include the name of these presenters and their papers, and in the case of sessions fully devoted to Yiddish topics we include the chairs and respondents. In the case of roundtables and seminars, we have included the names of all participants. Follow the links to the conference schedule for more detail. If you notice something missing or incorrect, please email us!
December 16
10.30 AM - 12.00 PM EST
Linguistic Analysis in Eastern Europe
Sophia Korn, “The Convergence of Northern Ukrainian Reflexes of E in Newly Closed Syllables and the ĭ from E in the Yiddish Dialects of the Area”
Ronald Shabtavev, “The Interplay of Ethnic Identity and Language Attitudes among Mountain Jews: Implications for Heritage Language Preservation”
Ani Kvirikashvili, Tamari Lomtadze, “Code-Switching Practices in Judeo-Georgian Discourse”
Here there are only words: Memorial Literature of the Holocaust
Daniel Stein, “Poetry in the Yizker-Bikher of Galicia”
1.30 - 3.00 PM EST
Yiddish and Hebrew in the American Midwest
Jessica Kirzane, Moderator
Noam Sienna, Discussant
Shachar Pinsker, Discussant
Anna Torres, Discussant
Zachary Baker, Discussant
Mark Louden, Discussant
3.30 - 5.00 PM EST
Expressions of Collective Identity in Commonwealth Yiddish Literature
Shirli Gilbert, Moderator
Daniel Baker, Discussant
Amanda Gordon, Discussant
Rebecca Margolis, Discussant
Roni Masel, Discussant
Rochelle Sibley, Discussant
Navigating Transnational Modes of Jewishness in 20th Century America
Vardit Lightstone, “Narrative maps and Jewish geography: A discussion of place in North American Yiddish migrant personal narratives”
December 17
8.30 - 10.00 AM EST
Historical Interactions and Mutual Understandings: Jews and China
Anruo Bao, “Meaningful Misunderstanding and Mistranslations: On Mao Dun's "A Survey of New Jewish Literature”
Jewish Italian Literary Continuities and Contiguities
Saskia Ziolkowski, “Yiddish in Contemporary Italian Literature”
Rethinking Childhood
Miriam Borden, “TSIGELES and Ukrainians: Dyads of the Nation and the Self in Ruth Rubin’s Yiddish Lullabies and Children’s Songs”
What is a Yiddish Studies Program of Study?
Saul Noam Zaritt, Moderator
Hannah Pollin-Galay, Discussant
Marion Aptroot, Discussant
Karolina Szymaniak, Discussant
Anna Shternshis, Discussant
10.30 AM - 12.00 PM EST
Remaking it New: Yiddish Socio-Political Thought
Gil Ribak, “The Lips that Have Often Smiled So Foolishly”: Ambivalent Jewish-Polish Relations in Itshe Meyer Vaysenberg’s Shtetl Stories
Mark Smith, “The Yiddish Encyclopedia as a Prescription for the Future”
Sophie Cardin, “Kalman Zingman’s EDENIA: A Utopian Window into the History of Yiddish Political Thought”
Jason Rosenblum, “DER SOYNE: Shmuel Charney and the Development of a Religious Secular Yiddishkayt in the Yiddish Press”
1.30 - 3.00 PM EST
Space and Place in Yiddish Culture
Jacob Hermant, “Gender, Land, and Folk in Shloyme Ettinger's SERKELE”
Simo Muir, “‘Where Things Were Different’: The Expedition of Michal Borwicz and Joseph Wulf to the Nordic Countries in 1947”
Käthe Erichsen, “The Feeling Body: Exiled Heritage in selected poems of Binem Heller and Hadasa Rubin”
Digital Zamlers: The Oral Torah & Realizing An-sky's Dream of Engaged Jewish Culture-Making
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Chair
Yonatan Malin, “The ‘Musical Tapestry’ of Klezmer: A Computational Approach to Beregovski’s JEWISH INSTRUMENTAL FOLK MUSIC”
Christina Crowder, Clara Byom, “The Crowdsourced Digital Archive: Advancing Scholarship in Community with the Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project”
Max Rothman, “Documenting Cultural Heritage with Cutting-Edge Technology: Investigations of the Klezmer Archive Project”
Children’s Culture and Ideological Formation
Miriam Udel, “A World Safe to Wander: The Adventures of the Yiddish “New Girl””
Embodied Jewish gender histories: Feminist, reflexive, creative encounters in the archives and in the field
Nikki Halpern, “The Butzy Project: Jewish Women in the Healing Arts and the Imaginary”
3.30 - 5.00 PM EST
"Negotiating Identity: Yiddish Theatre in Interwar Europe."
Nick Underwood, Chair
Michèle Fornhoff-Levitt, "Yiddish Theatre in Interwar Paris: The Staging of Jewishness"
Ruthie Abeliovich, "Kafka at the Theatre: On Joseph Lateiner’s ‘Der Meshumad’."
Corina Petrescu, "Yankev Shternberg in Bucharest: Envisioning a Permanent Space for Yiddish Theatre in Interwar Romania."
Beyond Yiddish 101: Current Approaches to Undergraduate Yiddish Studies Syllabi
Ayelet Brinn, Moderator
Justin Cammy, Discussant
Madeleine Cohen, Discussant
Matthew Johnson, Discussant
Jessica Kirzane, Discussant
Samuel Spinner, Discussant
December 18
8.30 - 10.00 AM EST
New Directions in Ethnography and Sociology
Isabel Frey, “Tracing the Yiddish Folksinger: Ethnographic-Biographical Insights from the YIVO Yiddish Folksong Project”
Yiddish Women’s Writing
Julie Sharff, Chair
Rochelle Sibley, “Yiddish Women Writing on the Periphery: The visibility of female labour in the short fiction of Esther Kreitman”
Dalia Wolfson, “The Sentimental SHRAYBERIN: Yiddish Popular Fiction, the Jewish New Woman Writer and The Aesthetics of Feeling”
Hinde Ena Burstin, ““IKH BIN GEVORN SHTUM”: coercion, control and gender-based violence in two Yiddish poems by Avigayl”
Beyond Jewish Theology. Jewish Studies in Heidelberg
Roland Gruschka, “Yiddish Studies and Jewish Literatures at Heidelberg”
Eastern European Jewish Politics and Spaces Between the World Wars
Olga Petrova, ““Convinced that in the free Ukraine… rights are respected”: Ministry for Jewish Affairs and Constructing Homeland, 1917-1920”
Wojciech Tworek, “The myth of apolitical Hasidism: Chabad-Lubavitch in interwar Poland”
10.30 AM - 12.00 PM EST
Religious language ideologies and multilingual textual practices
Katalin Rac, Chair
Dina Sender, “Is Haredi Hebrew LOSHN KOYDESH? Language Ideologies and Practices among Hebrew-Speaking Haredim (Ultra-Orthodox)”
Bogi Perelmutter, “Jewish Multiglossia and Script-Switching in Early-20th-Century Hungarian: The Case of Magyar Zsinagóga”
Mentorship in Yiddish Studies
Tahneer Oksman, Moderator
Rebecca (Rivke) Margolis, Discussant
Lily Kahn, Discussant
Miriam Udel, Discussant
Dovid Braun, Discussant
Agnieszka Legutko, Discussant
1.30 - 3.00 PM EST
Yiddish Discourses of Body, Gender, and Sexuality (1880–1939)
Zuzanna Kołodziejska-Smagała, “Discourses of the Body in Advertisements Printed in the Jewish Press in the Polish Lands between 1880 and 1918”
Samuel Glauber, “Representations of Women and Womanhood in Yiddish Illustrated Magazines”
Zohar Weiman-Kelman, “Yiddish ONANIZM: How Jews Took Sexuality into Their own Hands”
Naomi Seidman, Respondent
Sexual Violence in the Holocaust: Language, Body and Power
Dorota Glowacka, Chair
Hannah Pollin-Galay, “How Yiddish Dealt with Sexual Violence in the Holocaust: From Pipels to Kuzinkes”
Katarzyna Person, “The Language of Women’s Experience in Small Ghettos in Occupied Poland”
Jewishness in the American Imagination
Lila Fabro, “Away from Nostalgia: Yiddish and Intimacy in Contemporary Argentine Literature”
German-Jewish Women in Journalism and the Visual Arts, 1918–1938
Aya Elyada, ““Actually, It Is Not A Book I Wish to Tell You About”: The Journalist Bertha Badt-Strauß and the Yiddish ‘Frauenliteratur’”
Mapping Jewish Experiences
Laura Eckstein, Chair
Sarah Bunin-Benor, Jacob Kohn, “Putting Jewish Languages on the Map”
Christa Whitney, “Wrangling Metadata in the Multilingual Landscape of Jewish Central and Eastern Europe”
The Study of Early-Modern Jewish Musics: Mapping the Field (I)
Diana Matut, “Mapping Early Modern Jewish Music Studies: Yiddish Song Culture”
3.30 - 5.00 PM EST
Mysticism as Resistance
Iris Malkah Morrell, ““A New Tabernacle in the Middle of the Market”: Irreverent Theology in Atheist Yiddish Poetry of Atrocity”
December 19
10.30 - 12.00 PM EST
Jewish Difference Across Borders
Roni Henig, “Yiddish and Other Linguistic Creatures: On Kafka’s Monster Jargon”
Madeline Cohen, ““I am the city”: Embodied do’ikayt (Hereness) in Kulbak’s “Vilne””
Memoir, Biography, and Biographical Interpretations
Jules Riegel, “The Yiddish Beethoven: Jewish Identity, European Music, and Belonging”
1.30 - 3.00 PM EST
The Friends of Yiddish Publishing
Jacqueline Krass, Moderator
Sunny Yudkoff, Discussant
Eric L. Goldstein, Discussant
Cecile Kuznitz, Discussant
Corbin Allardice, Discussant
Modernism and the Migration of Jewishness to the Americas
Alona Bach, “People Without Power: Interwar Accounts of Electrical Outages in the Yiddish Daily DER MORGEN ZSHURNAL”
Elazar Elhanan, ““My Resting Place”- Morris Rosenfeld and The Compass of Mourning.”
Julia Sharff, “Yiddish Literature Goes South: Immigration and Race in I.J. Schwartz’s “Kentucky””
Works-in-Progress Group in Jewish Studies
Roni Masel, “Yiddishland Unbound: Interwar Yiddish Culture in South Africa and the Colonial Condition”
The Study of Early-Modern Jewish Musics: Mapping the Field (II)
Avery Gosfield, “Between Nostalgia and Novelty – Yiddish Song in the Italian Renaissance”
3.30 - 5.00 PM EST
Censorship & Self- Censorship in Modern Jewish Cultures
Shachar Pinsker, Chair
Jonathan Branfman, Discussant
Naomi Brenner, Discussant
Ayelet Brinn, Discussant
Josh Lambert, Discussant
Kate Rosenblatt, Discussant
