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.

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.

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

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

A delightfully unconventional tale of a people, their place in the world, and the fascinating language that held them together. Yiddish is an unlikely survivor of the ages, much like the Jews themselves. Incorporating antique German dialects and elements from more than a dozen other tongues, the Yiddish language bears the imprint of the many places where European Jews were briefly given shelter. Neal Karlen's unique, brashly entertaining, yet thoroughly researched telling of the language's story reveals that Yiddish is a mirror of Jewish history, thought, and practice—for better and for worse.

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.

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.

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.

"The Yiddish speakers from Eastern Europe brought few material possessions but clung to a language and a culture that defined who they were, a way of life that had endured pogroms, persecution and a genocide that pushed them to the brink of extinction. Melbourne gave them a second chance at life, an opportunity to rebuild a secular Yiddish world that sat at the core of their existence. A community centre quickly became the beating heart of Yiddish Melbourne. The arts flourished, newspapers were launched and schools were established. But these immigrants also brought their competing political ideals, hotly contested notions of what it meant to be a Jew and how to live life in this furthest corner of the world. But the Australian authorities only grudgingly accepted them as immigrants, in restricted numbers and under the sponsorship of Jews already living here. Yiddish speakers, with their boisterous demeanour and high visibility challenged the authority of the established Jewish community. Using the voices of the immigrants themselves and archival sources, the authors give a compelling account of how these Yiddish speakers came to shape, change and define an entire community"--Back cover.

From the acclaimed author of The Man Without a Face, the previously untold story of the Jews in twentieth-century Russia that reveals the complex, strange, and heart-wrenching truth behind the familiar narrative that begins with pogroms and ends with emigration. In 1929, the Soviet government set aside a sparsely populated area in the Soviet Far East for settlement by Jews. The place was called Birobidzhan.The idea of an autonomous Jewish region was championed by Jewish Communists, Yiddishists, and intellectuals, who envisioned a haven of post-oppression Jewish culture. By the mid-1930s tens of thousands of Soviet Jews, as well as about a thousand Jews from abroad, had moved there. The state-building ended quickly, in the late 1930s, with arrests and purges instigated by Stalin. But after the Second World War, Birobidzhan received another influx of Jews—those who had been dispossessed by the war. In the late 1940s a second wave of arrests and imprisonments swept through the area, traumatizing Birobidzhan’s Jews into silence and effectively shutting down most of the Jewish cultural enterprises that had been created. Where the Jews Aren’t is a haunting account of the dream of Birobidzhan—and how it became the cracked and crooked mirror in which we can see the true story of the Jews in twentieth-century Russia. (Part of the Jewish Encounters series)