The Politics of Yiddish’s Origins, with Kalman Weiser

Click here to register for this free online program, co-presented by KlezCalifornia.

When, where, why, and how did Yiddish come into being? Since at least the 19th century, linguists and historians have debated where Yiddish comes from and what that tells us about the origins and migrations of Ashkenazic Jews. Their answers often reveal as much about their politics as about Yiddish. In recent years, genetics has entered the fray, yielding sometimes surprising new arguments as well as reviving old ones. In this talk, we’ll explore the history of the Yiddish language and how theories about its development have been used to often contradictory ends.

Kalman Weiser is the Silber Family Professor of Modern Jewish Studies and the Director of the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York University in Toronto. His book Jewish People, Yiddish Nation: Noah Prylucki and the Folkists in Poland received the Canadian Jewish Book Award for scholarship. Weiser is also co-editor of the books Czernowitz at 100: the First Yiddish Language Conference in Historical Perspective and Key Concepts in the Study of Antisemitism, and the editor of a revised and expanded edition of Solomon Birnbaum’s Yiddish: A Survey and a Grammar. He has recently completed the manuscript for a book about Nazi scholars of Yiddish and their relationships with Jewish colleagues before, during, and after World War II. He is presently conducting work on the history of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in post-war America.

This event is in conjunction with the Library’s Jewish Languages: A Cultural Dialogue exhibit.