History of the Yiddish Language (Evening)
Tuition: $325 | YIVO members: $250**
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This is a live, online course held on Zoom. Enrollment will be capped at about 25 students. All course details (Zoom link, syllabus, handouts, recordings of class sessions, etc.) will be posted to Canvas. Students will be granted access to the class on Canvas after registering for the class here on the YIVO website. This class will be conducted in English, and any readings will be in English.
Instructor: Dovid Katz
Starting with the rise of Ashkenazic civilization, this course will begin by focusing in on early Yiddish in a society with three Jewish languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, Yiddish) and will pivot to the origin and development of Yiddish per se, alongside west-to-east migration precipitated by the Crusades and other episodes of violent intolerance.
The cultural dialectology of Yiddish and (mostly) Eastern Ashkenazic history will be discussed, with a long period of East European tolerance punctuated by massacres and false messiahs. These were followed by Hasidism, demographic explosion, and the rise of modern literary genres, followed by later 19th century political polarization linked to contemporary revolutionary movements ranging from Socialism and revolution at the left, to Zionism at the nationalist end of the spectrum. The twentieth century creation and achievements of modern Yiddish institutions, Yiddish-Hebrew battles, and the internal conflicts centered on religion, politics, culture, or aspects of dialects, standard language, vocabulary, pronunciation and spelling. Discussion of the sociology of Yiddish with reference to the recurring phenomena of love and hate for the language. Attempts to come to grips with the varying conceptualizations of Yiddishism. Summary of twenty-first century Yiddish debates will include the advent of the new Hasidic period. The final session will include a survey of current Hasidic magazines alongside analysis of the contemporary secular scene (popular as well as academic), with discussion of the decades ahead.
Course Materials:
This course will use the second revised edition of the instructor's Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish (Basic Books, NY 2007) (Available here). The instructor will provide all other course materials digitally throughout the class on Canvas.
Dovid Katz is a Brooklyn-born, Vilnius-based Yiddish scholar, author, and educator, and a researcher and advocate in the field of the Holocaust in the Baltic lands. He founded and led Yiddish Studies at Oxford (1978-1997), and after a stint at Yale as visiting professor (1998-1999) relocated to Vilnius where he founded Yiddish studies at Vilnius University, where he was professor from 1999 to 2011. From 2016 to 2020 he taught philosophy and creative writing at Vilnius Gediminas Technical University. His Yiddish books include a work on Yiddish stylistics (1993) and four volumes of Yiddish fiction (1992, 1993, 1996, 2020). In English, his books include Grammar of the Yiddish Language (1987), Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish (2nd revised edition 2007), Windows to a Lost Jewish Past (2008), Seven Kingdoms of the Litvaks (2009), Lithuanian Jewish Culture (2nd revised edition 2010), and Yiddish and Power (2015). He is currently at work on A Yiddish Cultural Dictionary, a free online English-Yiddish dictionary comprising to date a million Yiddish words of text and around 25,000 entries, and an in-progress translation of the Bible into Lithuanian Yiddish. His recent online teaching has included pioneering courses on current Hasidic Yiddish publications, Ashkenazic Hebrew, and study of 1920s editions of New York’s leftist daily Frayhayt. He is putting online his evolving Lithuanian Yiddish Video Archive (LYVA), comprising to date around 675 videos from his three decades of expeditions to the Lithuanian (Litvak) Yiddish lands (Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, northeastern Poland and eastern Ukraine), to seek out the last in-situ survivors and preserve for posterity their language and culture. In autumn 2022, he began to put online a multimedia Yizkor Book project for his ancestral village in the Vilna area. His website is www.dovidkatz.net.
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