New Approaches to Modern Yiddish Culture

Abstract

One of the more complicated questions that has accompanied the renais sance of the study of Yiddish culture is the definition of the term itself, particularly given the complex and ardent ideological battles around the Yiddish language that inflected much of the scholarship on Yiddish, in Yiddish, and for Yiddish, to quote the title of Dovid Katz's well-known article on that field's history.1 The two recently published books by David Fishman and Jeffrey Shandler on the subject of Yiddish culture soberly eschew any of the tendentiousness that mar some earlier scholarly or popular treatments of the subjects of Yiddish language and of the culture that flourished in that language. Nonetheless, in their maximalizing defi nitions of the fields they survey, both authors do their level best to make those earlier writers proud: by the time one finishes reading the volumes, convincing evidence has been marshaled to expand the province of Yid dish culture ?and therefore of future Yiddish studies ? significantly be yond its current borders. Certainly every field has its desiderata, and Yiddish studies, a young field in the modern university, has more than most; and so Fishman s manifesto-like statement on the first page of his preface ?that this book's