From the fall 2009 of IMPACT, American Association of Ben-Gurion University:
"FOR YIDDISH it's the 11th hour," says Prof. Moshe Justman, dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. "People with living memory of it as a spoken language in Eastern Europe are growing older and fewer. Every year we postpone preserving this culture, we lose something. Moreover, the leading scholars in the field are retiring, without leaving a cadre of young scholars ready to take their place. It adds up to "a terrible tragedy," Justman says, "because Yiddish culture is a treasure with intrinsic value, and because it's so important to understanding our culture today." Justman, a professor of economics, has a personal background in Yiddish: his grandfather was a Yiddish journalist and author, and his father had a deep affection for the language. Thus he was fully sympathetic to the idea of creating a major center for Yiddish studies at Ben Gurion University. The idea had resurfaced periodically for years but not come to life, in part because it was difficult to find an eminent leader for such a center. But recently, Justman took up the search again. He called to ask the advice of Prof. David G. Roskies, an internationally known scholar and author of Yiddish studies who teaches at New York's Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS). It was a fortuitous conversation--"a miraculous story," in Prof. Roskies' words. "Moshe told me how 20 years earlier BGU began to work on its economics department, one of the best in the country, by bringing in exactly the right people. And now they would like to do the same with Yiddish. I was blown away, though not completely surprised. I knew the time to build something new for Yiddish in Israel is now, and knew about the exceptional Department of Hebrew Literature at BGU. I could see all the synapses connecting -- right time, the right place." A month later, Roskies visited BGU. When I saw what the place had become I was completely sold." Beginning with the Spring semester this February, Roskies will split his year between the JTS and BGU, running the Center for Yiddish Studies. "It's important to understand that this isn't about people speaking Yiddish," says Justman. "I don't think the university will revive the language all of a sudden. It's about understanding and preserving Yiddish culture, especially high culture in Eastern Europe literature, the theater, the press, poetry primarily between 1860 and 1940. The university is the place to do this." It is fitting for the new Center ma be part of the department of Hebrew Literature, Justman notes, because Yiddish has been a missing piece of its Diaspora and cultural studies, and because many leading Hebrew writers were steeped in Yiddish culture and wrote in that language. "The culture is hardwired by Yiddish but we don't realize that some of the things that we say or do are rooted in it. A lot of this goes on in our collective subconscious and bringing it to the fore helps us understand our own culture better." Because Yiddish culture was a core element of the Ashkenazi Jewish identity, Rookies observes, it makes sense that widespread interest has begun to develop. "When you go looking for who you are and where you come from, you see first that that secrets of the past are encoded in that other language. You heard it from your grandparents but it had always been devalued and you assumed it had nothing to tell us. Now suddenly in the 21st century it holds out a certain promise, to unlock something about who you are." To Roskies, who customarily spends two months per year in Israel, the growing interest signals a doming of age for the country. Yiddish has carried the stigma of the Holocaust and persecution from the 'old country' for decades. It was further discouraged by government campaigns to establish Hebrew as the nation's dominant, unifying language. However, Modern Hebrew has been shaped by Yiddish to a remarkable degree, Roskies says, in its cadence and irony, and how the two Languages play off against each other. Having grown up studying "bookish" Hebrew in a Yiddish day school, he noticed on his first visit to Israel how many colloquial expressions come from Yiddish. "But 99, 9 percent of Israelis had no idea of that." F How Hebrew and Yiddish interact is at the heart of the Jewish sensibility, Roskies explains. Jews had two languages: Yiddish, the spoken vernacular, and the high status religious scriptural tradition of Hebrew. "At times the discrepancies between what God promised and what you see in everyday life are pretty great." This idea is embodied by Sholom Aleichem's character Tevye, Roskies points out. "In this great literary invention, a simple salt-of the-earth milkman tempers his speech with Snippets from the liturgy, playing with misquotes, parodying them. Sholem Aleichem based it on what he heard. The play between biblical promise and everyday reality is built into Yiddish folk speech." One of Roskies' longstanding dreams is to team-teach a course on Yiddish-Hebrew parody with BGU's professor and author Haim Beer, which he hopes to be able to do in two years. More immediately he plans to organize a day of study devoted to the place of Yiddish at BGU, inviting colleagues from every department to converse on what Yiddish could mean to their fields and how it can interface with them. "I know how to reach out and build constituencies," he says, "If I can interest and intrigue people in different areas, then we can figure out ways to work together". The overarching goal is to turn BGU into the center of Yiddish studies in Israel by creating an academic fellowship of Yiddish scholars already working in the field. "We're stronger than people realize, but there's no umbrella organization," Roskies says. "We'll bring everyone together to brainstorm: What can be done that no one can do individually; what can we accomplish by pooling resources? He hopes, too, to train his successor so someone is in place for the long term, along with a cadre of graduate students. Prof. Justman hopes that the Center will fulfill its role, preserving the heritage of Yiddish literature and culture, by reaching out to larger audiences. The big picture includes publishing scholarly works and classics, organizing conferences, cataloging and analyzing the tremendous output of the Yiddish press in East Europe, and perhaps even reviving the Yiddish theater tradition and publishing popular plays and songs. With Roskies as a bridge, BGU and the JTS have begun meeting to explore potential collaborations. "We see this as a first step in a partnership", says Justman, "initially through Jewish literature, with a faculty and student exchange Program and perhaps in other graduate study fields later." All of it together is a dream come true," Roskies -- says "the interest in Yiddish, the Center, the institutions coming together -- and that it's happening in the worst economic a climate in living memory is even more miraculous! It's a very Jewish scenario". --- Messages and opinions expressed on Hasafran are those of the individual author and are not necessarily endorsed by the Association of Jewish Libraries (AJL) =========================================================== Submissions for Ha-Safran, send to: hasaf...@osu.edu SUBscribing, SIGNOFF commands send to: Listproc @ lists.acs.ohio-state.edu Questions, problems, complaints, compliments;-) send to: galron.1 @ osu.edu Ha-Safran Archives: Current: http://www.mail-archive.com/hasafran%40lists.acs.ohio-state.edu/maillist.html History: http://www.mail-archive.com/hasafran%40lists.acs.ohio-state.edu/history.html AJL HomePage http://www.JewishLibraries.org
