Yiddish and the Left Papers of the Third Mendel Friedman International Conference on Yiddish

For over a century, Yiddish served as a major vehicle for expressing leftwing ideas and sensitivities. A language without country, an 'ugly jargon' despised by the assimilationist Jewish bourgeoisie and nationalist Zionists alike, it was embraced as a genuine folk idiom by Jewish adherents of socialism and communism worldwide. Following the Holocaust, Yiddish was the primary language of education, culture and propaganda for millions of people on five continents. The present volume examines the rich diversity of relationships between Yiddish and the Left, from the attitude of Yiddish writers to apartheid in South Africa to the vicissitudes of the Yiddish communist press in the Soviet Union and the USA.

PART I: Politics 1 The Question of Human Rights in American Yiddish Journalism: The Example of Ditsukunft 2 Socialism with a Jewish Face: The Origins of the Yiddish-Speaking Communist Movement in the United States, 1907-1923, 3 Abraham Cahan’s Travels in Jewish Homelands: Palestine in 1925 and the Soviet Union in 1927 4 Diaspora, Ethnicity and Dreams of Nationhood: American Jewish Communists and the Birobidzhan Project 5 The Left Poalei Zion in Inter-War Poland 6 The History of ‘The Truth’: Soviet Jewish Activists and the Moscow Yiddish Daily Newspaper 7 Metamorphoses of Morgn-frayhayt 8 Yiddish in Poland after 1945 PART II: Culture 9 The Cult of Self-Sacrifice in Yiddish Anarchism and Saul Yanovsky The First Years of Jewish Libertarian Socialism 10 Abraham Golombs ‘Integrated Jewishness’ 11 Inscribing the Yiddish Past: Inter-War Explorations of Old Yiddish Texts 12 Soviet Literary Theory in the Search for a Yiddish Canon: The Case of Moshe Litvakov 13 From Exile to Exile: Bergelson’s Berlin Years 14 Chaim Sloves and the Soviet Union: An Essay on the Jewish People in one of its Peregrinations 15 The Status of Yiddish in Jewish Educational Systems in Argentina and Mexico 16 The Image of Apartheid in South African Yiddish Prose Writing

Gennady Estraikh is Lecturer in Yiddish Linguistics at the Oxford Institute for Yiddish Studies and SOAS, London.