Yiddish, Scholarship, and Neoconservatism

Abstract

After World War II, interest in Yiddish literature, and in Yiddish culture more broadly, began to develop beyond immigrant and Yiddishist spheres in America. Encompassing both popular and academic works, and some in between, this interest was driven by various impulses, some political, from the Left, including from communists, fellow travelers, the labor Left, and others, and some only indirectly political. And there emerged, unexpectedly, a conservative strain of interest. This article will examine the conservative approach to Yiddish studies and some of the ways it manifested itself in scholarship and culture. I ask how this shift in interest in Yiddish is related to the decline of the Jewish Left and to the rise of Zionist thought among the major Jewish Diaspora communities. As a case study, I will explore how these trends in Yiddish scholarship were expressed in the writings of Isaac Bashevis Singer, particularly in his novel Shadows on the Hudson (1957–58).