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The Red Jews: Intertextuality in a Yiddish Myth – Live on Zoom
Rebekka Voß | Delivered in English.
Envisioned as a tribe of ruddy-faced, redheaded, and red-bearded Jewish warriors clad in red attire, the legendary Ten Lost Tribes of Israel are referred to as “Red Jews” (royte yidlekh) in Yiddish. This unique figure is a creation of late medieval vernacular culture in Germany and became a shared motif among both Jews and Christians, circulating in both Yiddish and German. These two linguistic communities interpreted the Red Jews in different ways, each contesting their significance and viewing them through varying shades of red.
This lecture by Rebekka Voß will trace the journey of the Red Jews through both Jewish and Christian imaginations, from their medieval origins to their presence in Old Yiddish and modern Yiddish literature. Focusing on select stories of the Red Jews, the lecture will explore their intertextuality, illustrating how this popular literary motif engaged with canonical texts, including the Bible, works of Hebrew and Yiddish literature (such as Toledot Yeshu, the polemical counter-story of the life of Jesus, and the romance Viduvilt), as well as medieval German literature.
About the Speaker
Rebekka Voß is an associate professor at Goethe University in Frankfurt. Her research focuses on Jewish cultural history in early modern Europe, with special attention to cultural transfer between Jews and Christians.
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Welcome to Otwock: A Virtual Visit to the Warsaw Suburb Before the War – Live on Zoom
Benny Mer (Majersdorf) | Delivered in Yiddish.
“Every Jewish street in Warsaw was a city unto itself,” wrote Isaac Bashevis Singer, and all the more so each suburb of Warsaw. Otwock was quite different from its neighbors. The crown suburb of the “Otwock Line” was, on its western side, a typical Polish-Jewish shtetl, with synagogues, craftsmen, charitable women, and Hasidim – the latter including the Lubavitcher Rebbe and the musical Modzhitser Rebbe whose homes were there. On its eastern side, Otwock was a Warsaw resort town, with refined villas, gardens, forests, and boarding houses. All that attracted distinguished guests, painters, and writers such as Alter Kacyzne, Kadya Molodowsky, Zusman Segalovitsh, Julian Tuwim, Janusz Korczak, and many others. This virtual visit will acquaint the public with the various facets of old Otwock through poems, short stories, and images. This lecture tour by Benny Mer (Majersdorf) is based on the speaker’s newly published Guide to Yiddish Warsaw, 1938.
About the Speaker
Benny Mer (Majersdorf) was born in Tel Aviv in 1971. He is the author of Smocza: A Biography of a Jewish Street in Warsaw (2018), as well as A Guide to Jewish Warsaw, 1938 (2025), and several other works. He has translated into Hebrew from Yiddish the works of Sholem Aleichem, Avrom Sutzkever, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Alexander Spiegelblat, Rivke Basman Ben-Hayim, among others, and has published an anthology of Yiddish poetry in Hebrew translation. Mer served as editor of the literary supplement of Haaretz and of the journal Dafke: Yiddishland and Its Culture. In 2015 he was awarded the Mendele Prize.
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On Early Yiddish Literature in Italy – Live on Zoom
Claudia Rosenzweig | Delivered in Yiddish.
In 1982 the celebrated Yiddish scholar Khone Shmeruk published a descriptive catalogue of Yiddish prints from Italy (from 1545 to 1663), listing thirty-five books (including desiderata). Two decades later, in 2003, Chava Turniansky and Erika Timm published a catalogue of old Yiddish manuscripts and printed books that numbered ninety-nine items. Since then, additional manuscripts and printed books have come to light. Claudia Rosenzweig will present some of these newly discovered items, along with the suggestion that, given evidence from written sources, the history of Yiddish in Italy is far more extensive than previously thought and has yet to be evaluated in terms of its richness and variety, as well as its connections with both Hebrew and non-Jewish prints of the time. Most of the works composed, copied, and printed in Italy during this period had a wide reception throughout “Yiddishland.” This suggests that, although the flourishing of Yiddish literature in 16th century Italy isn’t detachable from its local cultural context, the works that were created there became an intrinsic part of general Yiddish culture tout court.
About the Speaker
Claudia Rosenzweig graduated in Classical Studies from the University of Milan and later specialized in Old Yiddish Literature, with an emphasis on Yiddish Literature in Italy. Her PhD thesis, supervised by Prof. Chava Turniansky (Hebrew University, Jerusalem) and Prof. Erika Timm (University of Trier, Germany), focused on the chivalric poem Bovo d’Antona, a Yiddish rewriting of an Italian work composed in ottava rima. Rosenzweig worked with Prof. Erika Timm and Prof. Chava Turniansky on the volume Yiddish in Italia (Milan 2003), a broadly comprehensive presentation of Yiddish Literature in Italy covering more than one hundred texts. In October-November 2011 and February-March 2012 she took part in the European Seminar on Advanced Jewish Studies titled Old Yiddish: Old Texts, New Contexts at the Oxford Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies.
Rosenzweig is the author of a critical edition of the Yiddish work Bovo d’Antona (Leiden – Boston 2015) and she is preparing a critical edition of the Mayse-bukh (Basel 1602) together with prof. Avidov Lipsker. She has taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Università degli Studi di Milano, the Università degli Studi di Venezia, the Università degli Studi di Verona, the Charles University in Prague and Tel Aviv University. Rosenzweig is Associate Professor in the Department of Literature of the Jewish People at Bar-Ilan University (Ramat-Gan).
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On the Threshold of a New Yiddish Language – Live on Zoom
Daria Vakhrushova | Delivered in Yiddish.
“We may be standing at the threshold of a new Yiddish language – Yiddish-Russian,” proclaimed Ayzik Zaretski in 1930. This claim sparked heated debates among Soviet Yiddish linguists. Indeed, Soviet Yiddish is still best known today for its major influence from Russian, but was Russification the only driving force behind the linguistic developments in the Soviet Union? In that country, Yiddish received state support for the first time in its history and officially became a “national language,” even though the term carried rather different implications than it did at the Czernowitz language conference (1908). How does a former zhargon, as it was widely and derisively referred to, become a national language? How does one develop a kulturshprakh (‘language of culture’, i.e., one with widely recognized standards that is accepted as an adequate medium for all levels of communication – from “high culture” downward)? What is to be retained? What should be changed? What should be borrowed from neighbors? Apart from addressing concepts such as folkshprakh, kulturshprakh, and literarishe shprakh, Daria Vakhrushova will also examine the practical means in the Soviet setting to employ language policy (via language learning, linguistic conferences, research projects); in so doing, several samples of characteristic features of Soviet Yiddish will be presented.
About the Speaker
Daria Vakhrushova is a Yiddish lecturer at Ludwig Maximilian University Munich. She studied Translation and Translation Theory at Nizhny Novgorod State Linguistics University and received her PhD in Yiddish Culture, Language, and Literature in Düsseldorf in 2022. Her research focuses on Soviet Yiddish culture, literature, and translation. One of her particular interests is Yiddish grammar, in both its practical and theoretical dimensions. Her recently published book, Red Jews: Soviet Yiddish Culture, 1917–1934, examines Yiddish literary manifestos, literature, and translation projects in the Soviet Union.
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More than Dates: Yiddish Calendars as Cultural Agents, 1870-1914 – Live on Zoom
Nathan Cohen | Delivered in Yiddish.
Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and until the outbreak of WWI, some Yiddish calendars / almanacs began to change their traditional character and broaden their scope. Political, social, economic, and cultural changes in both non-Jewish and Jewish societies, motivated publishers, editors, and writers to make use of the familiar and accessible format of the calendar in order to disseminate Maskilic and utilitarian ideas, as well as to bring Yiddish readers new literary works, both original and translated (at a higher or more popular level), alongside instructive insights in various fields of knowledge. All of this transformed the almanac into a kind of condensed encyclopedia and presented Yiddish as a “normal” language of culture rather than a "mere jargon.” In this presentation Nathan Cohen will provide an overview of several aspects of this highly interesting phenomenon.
About the Speaker
Nathan Cohen is a full Professor at the Rena Costa Center for Yiddish Studies at the Department of Literature of the Jewish People at Bar-Ilan University. Since 1998, he has been Associate Editor of the bi-annual journal Yad Vashem Studies. His main fields of research and teaching include the cultural history of the Jews of Eastern Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the history of the book and reading in Yiddish, modern Yiddish literature, the Jews of Poland between the two world wars, and Yiddish literature and culture during the Holocaust period. He is the author of Books, Writers and Newspapers: The Jewish Cultural Center in Warsaw, 1918-1942 (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2003, Hebrew; translated into Polish and published by the Jewish Historical Institute in 2021) and Yiddish – The Linguistic Leap from a Common Dialect to a Cultural and Literary Language (Jerusalem: The Zalman Shazar Center, 2020, Hebrew; translated into English under the title Yiddish Transformed: Reading Habits in the Russian Empire, 1860-1914, New York and Oxford: Berhahn, 2023), as well as tens of articles in peer-reviewed periodicals.
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