Jeffrey Shandler on his book Yiddish: Biography of a Language 7-17-22
Channel: Jewish Language Project
Date: 2022-07-17

The most widely spoken Jewish language on the eve of the Holocaust, Yiddish continues to play a significant role in Jewish life today, from Hasidim for whom it is a language of daily life to avant-garde performers, political activists, and LGBTQ writers turning to Yiddish for inspiration. Yiddish: Biography of a Language (Oxford Universitiy Press) presents the story of this centuries-old language, the defining vernacular of Ashkenazi Jews, from its origins to the present. In this event, Jeffrey Shandler presents about his book in conversation with Sarah Bunin Benor.

Dr. Shandler is Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University and the author and co-editor of several books about Eastern European Jewish culture, including: Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust (2002); Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (2005); Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory (co-edited with Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 2012); and Shtetl: A Vernacular Intellectual History (2014).

Event Co-sponsors: HUC-JIR Jewish Language Project; California Institute for Yiddish Culture and Language (CIYCL); Congress for Jewish Culture; In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies; Yiddishkayt; The Yiddish Voice / דאָס ייִדישע קול .

To learn more about Yiddish, see https://www.jewishlanguages.org/yiddish.