Politics of Yiddish

Politics of Yiddish means different things to different people. For some it refers to the various social and political forces that shaped the status and the functional diversification of the language. For others it may be analyzed within the context of personal or even collective love and hate of one’s mother-tongue vis-à-vis the politically “mightier” and “culturally more prestigious” languages. After the Second World War, the post-Holocaust realities forced a complete reconceptualization of Yiddishism as both an ideology and a state of mind. Yet, despite or perhaps because of numerous heated debates for and against Yiddish, and the unabating personal wars within the “Yiddishist” camp itself, the subject of Politics of Yiddish is bound to fascinate many modern historians, sociolinguists, and literary scholars. In the present volume it serves as a general theme for studies devoted to internal and external politics of Yiddish language, literature, ethnography, and scholarship.