Choosing Yiddish: new frontiers of language and culture

Abstract

Hip Hop, a nineteenth century Slasher, obscure writers, and immigrant Jewish newspapers in Buenos Aires, Paris, and New York are just a few of the topics featured in Choosing Yiddish: New Frontiers of Language and Culture. Editors Lara Rabinovitch, Shiri Goren, and Hannah S. Pressman have gathered a diverse and richly layered collection of essays that demonstrates the currency of scholarship in academia today. Organized into six thematic rubrics, Choosing demonstrates that Yiddish, always a border-crossing language, continues to push boundaries with vigorous disciplinary exchange. Writing on the Edge focuses on the realm of belles lettres; Yiddish and the City spans the urban centers of Paris, Buenos Aires, New York City, and Montreal; Yiddish Goes Pop explores the mediating role of between artistic vision and popular culture; Yiddish Comes to America focuses on the history and growth of in the United States; Yiddish Encounters showcases interactions between and Hebrew in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and Hear and Now explores the aural dimension of in contemporary settings. Along the way, contributors consider famed and lesser-known writers, films, and hip-hop, as well as historical studies on the press, film melodrama, Hasidic folkways, and culture in Israel. Venerable scholars introduce each rubric, creating additional dialogue between newer and more established voices in the field. The international contributors prove that the language-far from dying-is fostering exciting new directions of academic and popular discourse, rooted in the field's historic focus on interdisciplinary research. Students and teachers of studies will enjoy this innovative collection.