Yiddish Civilisation

Author: Paul Kriwaczek
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307430332
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Book Description
Paul Kriwaczek begins this illuminating and immensely pleasurable chronicle of Yiddish civilization during the Roman empire, when Jewish culture first spread to Europe. We see the burgeoning exile population disperse, as its notable diplomats, artists and thinkers make their mark in far-flung cities and found a self-governing Yiddish world. By its late-medieval heyday, this economically successful, intellectually adventurous, and self-aware society stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Kriwaczek traces, too, the slow decline of Yiddish culture in Europe and Russia, and highlights fresh offshoots in the New World.Combining family anecdote, travelogue, original research, and a keen understanding of Yiddish art and literature, Kriwaczek gives us an exceptional portrait of a culture which, though nearly extinguished, has an influential radiance still.

Jews in Eastern Europe

Author: Katarzyna Kornacka-Sareło
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443887781
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Book Description
The problem of being a stranger is present in every culture. In this context, “the Jewish question” is often discussed, since the Jews have been present in other nations for centuries, constituting the social and cultural minority and being almost always perceived as strangers. This volume presents a detailed analysis of Jewish self-perceptions and attitudes, often very complex, towards other societies and communities living in the same lands. The contributors to this book explore the lengthy discussions between both the supporters and adversaries of assimilation within the Jewish environment and also between the assimilated Jews and non-Jews, which often further complicate this issue. As the authors show here, the “methods of assimilation” of eastern European Jews were not straightforward, but were rather often rather complicated and rough. Many Jewish people were trying to find the best solution to their own, “Jewish question”, and adapt themselves reasonably to the gentile environment and to the changing realities of the world in which they had to exist, regardless of their will, or in which they freely chose to live having made autonomic and personal decisions. As such, this volume explores Jewish assimilation issues from a wide and multifaceted perspective.

Jewish Roots, Canadian Soil

Author: Rebecca Margolis
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773538127
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 317

Book Description
"How Montreal's Yiddish community ensured its lasting cultural importance and influence."--WorldCat.

The Story of Yiddish

Author: Neal Karlen
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061860115
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 444

Book Description
Yiddish—an oft-considered "gutter" language—is an unlikely survivor of the ages, much like the Jews themselves. Its survival has been an incredible journey, especially considering how often Jews have tried to kill it themselves. Underlying Neal Karlen's unique, brashly entertaining, yet thoroughly researched telling of the language's story is the notion that Yiddish is a mirror of Jewish history, thought, and practice—for better and worse. Karlen charts the beginning of Yiddish as a minor dialect in medieval Europe that helped peasant Jews live safely apart from the marauders of the First Crusades. Incorporating a large measure of antique German dialects, Yiddish also included little scraps of French, Italian, ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, the Slavic and Romance languages, and a dozen other tongues native to the places where Jews were briefly given shelter. One may speak a dozen languages, all of them Yiddish. By 1939, Yiddish flourished as the lingua franca of 13 million Jews. After the Holocaust, whatever remained of Yiddish, its worldview and vibrant culture, was almost stamped out—by Jews themselves. Yiddish was an old-world embarrassment for Americans anxious to assimilate. In Israel, young, proud Zionists suppressed Yiddish as the symbol of the weak and frightened ghetto-bound Jew—and invented modern Hebrew. Today, a new generation has zealously sought to explore the language and to embrace its soul. This renaissance has spread to millions of non-Jews who now know the subtle difference between a shlemiel and a shlimazel; hundreds of Yiddish words dot the most recent editions of the Oxford English Dictionary. The Story of Yiddish is a delightful tale of a people, their place in the world, and the fascinating language that held them together.

Multicultural America

Author: Carlos E. Cortés
Publisher: SAGE Publications
ISBN: 1452276269
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 2475

Book Description
This comprehensive title is among the first to extensively use newly released 2010 U.S. Census data to examine multiculturalism today and tomorrow in America. This distinction is important considering the following NPR report by Eyder Peralta: “Based on the first national numbers released by the Census Bureau, the AP reports that minorities account for 90 percent of the total U.S. growth since 2000, due to immigration and higher birth rates for Latinos.” According to John Logan, a Brown University sociologist who has analyzed most of the census figures, “The futures of most metropolitan areas in the country are contingent on how attractive they are to Hispanic and Asian populations.” Both non-Hispanic whites and blacks are getting older as a group. “These groups are tending to fade out,” he added. Another demographer, William H. Frey with the Brookings Institution, told The Washington Post that this has been a pivotal decade. “We’re pivoting from a white-black-dominated American population to one that is multiracial and multicultural.” Multicultural America: A Multimedia Encyclopedia explores this pivotal moment and its ramifications with more than 900 signed entries not just providing a compilation of specific ethnic groups and their histories but also covering the full spectrum of issues flowing from the increasingly multicultural canvas that is America today. Pedagogical elements include an introduction, a thematic reader’s guide, a chronology of multicultural milestones, a glossary, a resource guide to key books, journals, and Internet sites, and an appendix of 2010 U.S. Census Data. Finally, the electronic version will be the only reference work on this topic to augment written entries with multimedia for today’s students, with 100 videos (with transcripts) from Getty Images and Video Vault, the Agence France Press, and Sky News, as reviewed by the media librarian of the Rutgers University Libraries, working in concert with the title’s editors.

World of Our Fathers

Author: Irving Howe
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780883658826
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 714

Book Description
A new 30th Anniversary paperback edition of an award-winning classic. Winner of the National Book Award, 1976 World of Our Fathers traces the story of Eastern Europe's Jews to America over four decades. Beginning in the 1880s, it offers a rich portrayal of the East European Jewish experience in New York, and shows how the immigrant generation tried to maintain their Yiddish culture while becoming American. It is essential reading for those interested in understanding why these forebears to many of today's American Jews made the decision to leave their homelands, the challenges these new Jewish Americans faced, and how they experienced every aspect of immigrant life in the early part of the twentieth century. This invaluable contribution to Jewish literature and culture is now back in print in a new paperback edition, which includes a new foreword by noted author and literary critic Morris Dickstein.

Women Writers of Yiddish Literature

Author: Rosemary Horowitz
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476619905
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
Taking stock of Yiddish literature in 1939, critic Shmuel Niger highlighted the increasing number and importance of women writers. However, awareness of women Yiddish writers diminished over the years. Today, a modest body of novels, short stories, poems and essays by Yiddish women may be found in English translation online and in print, and little in the way of literary history and criticism is available. This collection of critical essays is the first dedicated to the works of Yiddish women writers, introducing them to a new audience of English-speaking scholars and readers.

Jews and Words

Author: Amos Oz
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300156774
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Book Description
DIV Why are words so important to so many Jews? Novelist Amos Oz and historian Fania Oz-Salzberger roam the gamut of Jewish history to explain the integral relationship of Jews and words. Through a blend of storytelling and scholarship, conversation and argument, father and daughter tell the tales behind Judaism’s most enduring names, adages, disputes, texts, and quips. These words, they argue, compose the chain connecting Abraham with the Jews of every subsequent generation. Framing the discussion within such topics as continuity, women, timelessness, and individualism, Oz and Oz-Salzberger deftly engage Jewish personalities across the ages, from the unnamed, possibly female author of the Song of Songs through obscure Talmudists to contemporary writers. They suggest that Jewish continuity, even Jewish uniqueness, depends not on central places, monuments, heroic personalities, or rituals but rather on written words and an ongoing debate between the generations. Full of learning, lyricism, and humor, Jews and Words offers an extraordinary tour of the words at the heart of Jewish culture and extends a hand to the reader, any reader, to join the conversation. /div

How the Irish Saved Civilization

Author: Thomas Cahill
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307755134
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A book in the best tradition of popular history—the untold story of Ireland's role in maintaining Western culture while the Dark Ages settled on Europe. • The perfect St. Patrick's Day gift! Every year millions of Americans celebrate St. Patrick's Day, but they may not be aware of how great an influence St. Patrick was on the subsequent history of civilization. Not only did he bring Christianity to Ireland, he instilled a sense of literacy and learning that would create the conditions that allowed Ireland to become "the isle of saints and scholars"—and thus preserve Western culture while Europe was being overrun by barbarians. In this entertaining and compelling narrative, Thomas Cahill tells the story of how Europe evolved from the classical age of Rome to the medieval era. Without Ireland, the transition could not have taken place. Not only did Irish monks and scribes maintain the very record of Western civilization -- copying manuscripts of Greek and Latin writers, both pagan and Christian, while libraries and learning on the continent were forever lost—they brought their uniquely Irish world-view to the task. As Cahill delightfully illustrates, so much of the liveliness we associate with medieval culture has its roots in Ireland. When the seeds of culture were replanted on the European continent, it was from Ireland that they were germinated. In the tradition of Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror, How The Irish Saved Civilization reconstructs an era that few know about but which is central to understanding our past and our cultural heritage. But it conveys its knowledge with a winking wit that aptly captures the sensibility of the unsung Irish who relaunched civilization.

China and the Jewish People

Author: Salomon Wald
Publisher: Gefen Publishing House Ltd
ISBN: 9789652293473
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 124

Book Description
The Jewish people and world Jewish leadership are facing critical dilemmas, opportunities and challenges. These create a need for systematic thinking to examine the range of decisions that may affect the standing of world Jewry in the decades to come. The Jewish People Policy Planning Institute (JPPPI) was established as an independent think tank whose mission is to contribute to the continuity of the Jewish people and Judaism, and their thriving future. China and the Jewish People' is the first document in a series of strategy papers dedicated to improving the standing of the Jewish people in emerging superpowers without biblical tradition.China and Jewish People: Old Civilizations in a New Era by Dr. Shalom Salomon Wald, is a crucial book that addresses the Jewish people and their issues with China.