21st-Century Yiddishism: The Dialectic of Czernowitz and Yiddish Pedagogical Discourse of the Present

Drawing on sociolinguistics and cultural studies, this dissertation compares the manner that critical debates about teaching Yiddish in the last century both describe and prescribe the language's continuing resources of cultural and ideological resilience. It contextualizes the language's pedagogical and cultural implications in the controversies first articulated in 1908 at the international conference on the language at Czernowitz in the Austro-Hungarian empire and compares these dynamics in three contemporary sociolinguistic settings: the rise of Yiddish homeschooling among London Ultra-orthodox Jews; the status, turf-sharing and pedagogical frictions surrounding the shuttling of Yiddish back-and-forth from popular culture to the contemporary American classroom; and the fraught yet surprisingly dynamic institutional bearings of Yiddish Studies in the contemporary German university. The methodology is both historical and comparative, using of archival work, surveys, interviews, close textual readings, discourse analyses, and ideological critique to achieve a synthesis indispensable for investigating the teaching and learning of present-day Yiddish formations and focusing on ad hoc, in situ pedagogical practices where they necessarily emerge, be they sanctioned or unsanctioned, conscious or unconscious, explicit or tacit. By focusing on nearly a century of teaching Yiddish in a variety of contexts and settings, this dissertation provides both a synchronic and diachronic overview of Yiddish during its most complex and contested period.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Germanic Languages and Literatures

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2015

Author dc:creator

• Soldat-Jaffe, Tatjana

Contributors dc:contributor

• Pandharipande, Rajeshwari

• Literature, Germanic

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier

(MiAaPQ)AAI3223722

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/86340