Twenty–First Century Yiddishism – Language, Identity. and the New Jewish Studies

Drawing on sociolinguistics and cultural studies, Twenty-First Century Yiddishism examines the transnational critical debates about teaching Yiddish over the last hundred years. The book looks at the ways a contested pedagogical terrain comes to define a minority language's ongoing resources of cultural and ideological resilience. From the inaugural international academic conference on the language held in 1908 in the Austro-Hungarian empire, to the rise of Yiddish home-schooling, and the surge of interest as a subject of secondary language study in recent years, the status, turf-sharing conflicts, and pedagogical frictions surrounding the shuttling of Yiddish back-and-forth reveal a fraught, yet surprisingly dynamic, situation. Through historical and comparative analysis - including archival work, surveys, interviews, close textual reading, discourse analysis, and ideological critique - the book reports on three critical case studies for the language's futurity: ultra-orthodox Jewry in the UK, "heritage" learners in the US, and "multi-cultural" non-Jewish learners in Germany. It addresses several timely preoccupations in the fields of both Jewish Studies and Linguistics, pulling together multiple strands from the humanities and the social sciences concerning the evolving politics of language, pedagogy, transnationalism and diaspora, the meaning of heritage languages, and religious and ethnic identity in the modern era. Twenty-First Century Yiddishism will be of keen interest to all who study these disciplines academically, as well as other readers in literary studies, cultural studies, anthropology, and history. ***"This is a welcome contribution to the field of Yiddish and socio-linguistics....The divergent yet related areas of Yiddish study addressed here raise many interesting questions. Indeed, each chapter could be expanded into its own book. Recommended for academic libraries, especially collections including Jewish studies and socio-linguistics". AJL Reviews, November/December 2012