Twenty-first century Yiddishism

摘要

This book, a by-product of the author's doctoral thesis, will raise or has already raised the brows of many people. Jeffrey Shandler will no doubt be surprised to learn that 'Yiddishland' is his 'label', since the term was already current in the early 1930s and became a catchword during the 1937 International Yiddish Culture Congress in Paris. Similarly, Dov-Ber Kerler will be stunned to find out that he fathered the term 'modern literary Yiddish'. A number of other scholars, including Joshua and David Fishman, will be bemused to see the result of rather cursory reading of their important works. To be honest and, perhaps, not very modest, I am surprised that none of my publications dealing with Yiddishism, its history and contemporary state have been mentioned in Soldat-Jaffe's work here (Yiddish in the Contemporary World, for example, which I edited with my colleague Mikhail Krutikov in 1999).