Miriam Trinh | Delivered in Yiddish. 

The writer Chaim Grade (1910 – 1982) wrote during the course of a half century, beginning “in the Old Country” in Vilna and through his final years “in the New Country” in New York. The trajectory of his life and oeuvre also led him through war-torn Soviet Union and postwar Paris. Based on a selection of texts from different periods written in poetry and in prose, we will see why it is correct to speak of two main periods in Grade’s work. We will attempt to isolate the characteristics of each genre individually and discuss the reasons for the clear dividing line between them. Attention will be paid to understanding Grade’s biography and how it potentially influenced the author’s burning question: What can be expressed in what genre?

About the Speaker
Miriam Trinh was born in Poland, grew up in Germany and immigrated to Israel after finishing high school. She completed her undergraduate studies in Philosophy and Yiddish at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, obtained her Master's degree in Yiddish literature at the Universities of Paris-Sorbonne and Strasbourg (France), her Ph.D. at the Hebrew University and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. She has taught Yiddish language and literature since 1999, in Paris, Oxford, Strassbourg, Vilna, New York, Baltimore, Tel Aviv and is currently teaching Yiddish at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Miriam Trinh has published works in the field of modern Yiddish literature and especially Holocaust literature. She is also engaged in translation from and into Yiddish.

Shachar Pinsker | Delivered in English. 

Focusing on “Yung Yisroel” (Young Israel), the name of a group of Yiddish writers in 1950s–1960s Israel, this talk will examine the history of Yiddish as it played out in cultural production. Shachar Pinsker studies the writers in Israel—some are well-known; others are less-studied—who continued to write and publish in Yiddish, and he explains the influence of Yiddish on Hebrew cultural production from the establishment of the state in 1948 until today. Pinsker will show why the Israeli culture of the past and the present, from literature, journalism, visual art, film, to popular culture, cannot be fully understood without considering the pervasive role of Yiddish. Taking Yiddish in Israel seriously shines new light on Israel and its population, from landscape to language, from collective memory to contemporary identities.

About the Speaker
Shachar Pinsker is Professor of Judaic Studies and Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan and Associate Director of the school's Frankel Center for Judaic Studies. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Jewish Research. His scholarly writings include two award-winning books , Literary Passports: The Making of Modernist Hebrew Fiction in Europe (2011) and A Rich Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture (2018). He is currently writing a book on Yiddish in Israeli literature and co-directing the NEH-supported research project The Feuilleton, the Public Sphere, and Modern Jewish Cultures.

Avi Blitz | Delivered in English. 

Arguably the most popular book in the history of Yiddish literature, the Tsenerene (alternative Romanization: Ze’enah U-Re’enah) has been reprinted, both in Yiddish and in translation, 273 times since its appearance in the early seventeenth century. Arranged according to the weekly Torah portion, the book employs fragments of biblical verses in Hebrew to open sections of Yiddish text that may include direct translations, midrashic stories, commentaries, and – less often – interpretations original to the author, Yankev ben Yitskhok Ashkenazi of Janów.

In this talk about the Tsenerene, Dr. Avi Blitz will show how the work’s anthological style accommodates curious combinations of commentary and folklore and he will discuss what the book teaches us about the folk beliefs of early modern Ashkenazi society. Using different editions of the work, he will talk about textual variances and diverse paratextual elements that hint at the various ways the book was read throughout its 400-year history. Finally, he will discuss the idea of the book as a “women’s Bible.”

About the Speaker
Avi Blitz is a graduate of Oxford University and holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Indiana University. He has taught Hebrew, Yiddish, and Jewish Studies in Europe, Israel, Latin America, and the USA. He teaches Yiddish remotely through the Argentinian branch of YIVO (IWO) in Buenos Aires and works with beginners, intermediate, and advanced students across the Americas.

Chaya Nove | Delivered in Yiddish. 

Over the past three decades, there has been a significant rise in Hasidic popular cultural production. Driven by creative energy and a growing demand for culturally suitable entertainment and aided by new technologies that have made production cheaper and more accessible, Hasidim have produced a robust corpus of cultural artifacts and expressions, including theatrical performances, lyrical music, literature, comedy, advertisements, games, and more, all in Yiddish. Within these genres, the interplay between traditionalism and modernity is evident as mainstream American trends, such as musical styles, literary genres, and cinematographic effects, are refracted and refitted in traditional content, such as biblical verses and moralistic tales, resulting in a distinctive Hasidic style. The question arises as to how developments in expressive culture are reflected in the lives of ordinary Hasidic consumers. Based on the sociolinguistic premise that social developments manifest in the everyday language of a group, it is expected that the spoken language will exhibit both signs of innovation and conservatism. In this talk I will provide an overview of Hasidic popular culture and review several sociolinguistic studies whose results, while apparently contradictory, reflect the ideological and cultural diversification within the community, highlighting the capacity of Hasidim to both preserve their traditional lifestyle and adapt to the modern world.

About the Speaker
Chaya Nove holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the Graduate Center at City University of New York. She studies variation and change in contemporary Hasidic Yiddish, as well as in the prewar Yiddish of the Transcarpathian region. Chaya currently works as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California (Berkeley), where she assists in the development of the “Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe (CSYE)” based on Holocaust testimonies.

Glenn Dynner | Delivered in English. 

Few Jewish spiritual movements have proved as vital and enduring as Hasidism, which originated in the 18th-century Ukraine and spread into Poland and other lands over the next century. However, WWI and postwar pogroms proved devastating and deeply transformative. In Ukrainian territories, Hasidic courts were plundered and destroyed and Hasidic rebbes were exiled, murdered, or driven underground. In the newly established Second Polish Republic, in contrast, Hasidism experienced a revival. Here, the rebbes transformed themselves into educators bent on rescuing the Jewish youth from the effects of physical destruction and emerging secularist temptations. During the ensuing pedagogical revolution, which reconceived education for Hasidic young men and women alike, Hasidic yeshivas and Bais Yaakov schools began to overshadow Hasidic courts, and rebbes became known more for scholarship than miracle-working. On the eve of the Holocaust, Polish Hasidic society was more intellectually purposeful than it had been for many decades. Hasidic scholars were prioritized for rescue, while those left behind formed clandestine yeshiva bunkers in Nazi Ghettos and studied Torah down to the end.

About the Speaker
Glenn Dynner, Ph.D., is the Carl and Dorothy Bennett Professor of Judaic Studies and Director of the Bennett Center at Fairfield University; Editor of the journal Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies; and a recent Guggenheim Fellow. He is author of “Men of Silk”: The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society (Oxford University Press, 2006), and Yankel’s Tavern: Jews, Liquor & Life in the Kingdom of Poland(Oxford University Press, 2014). His new book is entitled The Light of Learning: Hasidism in Poland on the Eve of the Holocaust(forthcoming on Oxford University Press).

Jonathan Boyarin | Delivered in Yiddish. 

The author Yechiel Hofer was born into a wealthy Hasidic family in pre-World War II Warsaw. In a series of volumes, he described his home and religious sphere in those years. Though it is clear that these works constitute a monument to the murdered and their way of life, his depictions are as fresh and lively as today. In this lecture, we will discuss Hofer’s book Reb Zalmen, a captivating portrait of an idiosyncratic person and of the Aleksanderer Hasidim with whom he studied, prayed, and argued.

About the Speaker
Jonathan Boyarin is the Diann G. and Thomas A. Mann Professor of Modern Jewish Studies at Cornell University. His most recent book is Yeshiva Days: Learning on the Lower East Side (Princeton 2020). His translations from the Yiddish include Menashe Unger’s A Fire Burns in Kotsk (Wayne State 2014).