 Both this past summer's writing grant award and we're making up for last year's cancellations when we had to cancel due to pandemic quarantine. In any case, Nick Walters will present the results of his grant on March 29 and you can find out more about this event and all of our programming on our website and in our newsletter. We'll post the call for proposals for this year's summer writing grant awards later this week so keep an eye out for that faculty. The summer writing grant along with all of our programming is made possible by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. And I must add that all of our programming is unthinkable without the support of associate director Amy Mepham and administrative assistant Kimberly Schultz. So thanks to both of them. So I'm going to turn it on over to Barry who's going to share his screen and we'll talk for about 40 minutes very take it away. Thanks so much team. So first of all, thank you Dean and Amy and Kimberly for all of your support and help to me over not just this project but going back for so long now. I've been at Wake Forest since 2016 and have really benefited from the generosity of the Humanities Institute from intellectual stimulation I received there. I've participated in a faculty seminar on the under comments that was really transformative for me and so much of my thinking this summer writing grant or recent book development grant I've appreciated the the partnership with Jewish studies that we formed. So I'm really grateful you've even helped fund my students go to Central Europe on a study abroad trip that I led a couple of years ago so it's really felt like a home for me at Wake Forest and I'm grateful for that. I also remember scheduling this talk with Amy back in September and thinking oh maybe this will be in person because like maybe it'll all be over by then and it seemed like possible back in September to imagine that. And I'm sorry that's not the case I'm sorry I don't get to thank you in person for for all of your support. I also want to note that I realized that women's history month starts today and the book project that I'm going to talk about has a near complete absence of women who are participants in it. And I'm happy to talk about that and I don't contend with that question directly in the work, but I'm also happy to talk about my strategies for sort of dealing with that. During the Q&A if that's of interest to folks. So I'll share my screen here. Please let me know if I've done this correctly. And then it always messes up my screen when I do that so forgive me for a second for shifting things around a little bit. So are you able to see my my PowerPoint. Dean great thank you. So this work is my third book that I'm pretty close to finishing, but it's one that I started some 15 years ago while I was finishing my first book project and that book was on the origins of modern Yiddish intellectual culture and really the, how did the field of revolution to being and I located it as one of the consequences of the failed 1905 revolution in Russia. And this book that I'm going to be talking about today is really about the end of that project. So it's actually the same many the same figures appear in both works. So the their first attempts to bring about a modern Yiddish culture and their attempts to sort of give it what was called a different context or a decent burial. So my project for this was it really was to have been kind of a one off essay in a journal that was dedicated to Jewish encyclopedias that have been invited to contribute to. Since I began sort of reaching into this history I found the story so compelling that I just knew that it needed to be told. And I came to understand over the course of writing this project that this Yiddish language encyclopedia is a way for us to chart the displacement of Yiddish hence that the title of my project, and the many attached political and cultural ideologies that are associated with it. And it's the language is displacement, not only from Eastern Europe in the Holocaust, but also the fact of its displacement from Jewish Jewish intellectual life you know we don't think in Yiddish. We don't write in Yiddish very few people speak in the Yiddish language. And what that means is that masses and masses of books many of them are on my shelf I'm not sure which way they show my camera like, you know, just can't be accessed by by so many people because the language just is not considered to be really be at the center of Jewish life any longer. And there's enormous challenges in doing this kind of work that I didn't expect that the outset not only are the volumes themselves very hard to get, especially the first editions. But as I came to discover the archives and periodicals associated with are scattered all over the world and they're in New York and in Boston and Montreal, Paris, Amsterdam, Jerusalem Cape Town. The materials also appear in some half a dozen languages and I had to figure out how to work with the Yiddish and Hebrew and German Russian French, as well as some English which were less hard to deal with happily. And then also this project and took me to Weimar Germany it took me to interwar France and then to the immediate post war period in the United States and got me and really forced me to kind of immerse myself in those historical periods and it reminded me of something that happened in my job interview here at Wake. When I was asked what sort of historian I was you know was I an Americanist or was I a Germanist or Russianist. And I actually hadn't been asked that question before and I thought you know, well we go where the Jews go like you know we just have to follow the people that we study and they don't, they don't stay in one one place. In terms of this material you know when we when we think about encyclopedias right we. What we what is commonplace I think about our understanding of them is there's a presumption of reliability of consistency of the works. There's something that is reassuring I think to many of us about the uniformity of the volumes. You can imagine that there may be sort of a central plan there's a guiding vision and very often is in the case of this encyclopedia. This is a Jewish encyclopedia from the early 20th century. That there's often a single editor who shepherds the project from beginning to completion encyclopedias cover an established and defined body of knowledge and they have usually a clear beginning and a clear end. To be frank, some of the very first modern encyclopedias were these massively unwieldy projects such as Diderot encyclopedia in French which in its second sort of second edition went to 166 volumes. These are the works of Ershen Gruber's all-domain encyclopedia, which went to 167 volumes these are works that sought to contain all the knowledge of the world between their pages they presumed sort of all the knowledge that was fit to contain. What happens though is that by the early 20th century the the form of encyclopedias begins to shift and a shift sort of in two ways that are probably worth mentioning here. One is that it becomes explicitly tied to national programs. So each nation must have an encyclopedia of their own in their own language in order to sort of announce themselves to the world. And at the same time because of innovations technological innovations printing innovations, the form becomes much more standardized, and they become produced for mass reading audiences so it's no longer an esoteric subject that just very few people could afford something that certainly every sort of good bourgeois or middle-class home should have on their shelves. And so if this is how we think about encyclopedias the project that I'm talking about sort of by contrast is an encyclopedia that is defined if by anything by its complete incoherence. It's defined by instability, and it's ever changing mission, which occurred on account of the rise of Nazism to power, the continual displacement of Yiddish speaking intellectuals artists and activists and speakers as a whole from their historic centers in Eastern Europe, as well as by the changes in both the functional and symbolic role of the Yiddish language. So you can see this picture of the encyclopedia that I have here this is what a complete set looks like of the encyclopedia. This is one that I've, this is a picture that I took on my bookshelf a couple days ago, right, sort of line them all up, sort of as neatly as I could with these and I'll just kind of walk you through what these encyclopedias are so Yiddish we read from right to left, it's written in the Hebrew alphabet. These first volumes here the the first four of them were published in Paris, starting in 1934. This last one here was published in 1937 so every fuse, and then it actually skips and then these skips one volume and then these next two volumes were also published in Paris the one in the middle was published in New York during World War two. The one that's in a box here is one of very few volumes or volumes of this that exist in the world, the vast majority of them were lost at sea. It was published weeks before the Nazis invaded Paris. The bulk of the shipment was was sent to the United States where presumably that ship was sunk by you boat, but a few volumes made their way through the regular mail and survive and I was able to find one for $5. It was very exciting for me. Then the subsequent volumes are all published in the United States after the war, including these ones here which were published in the middle of the 1960s, which as you can tell by sort of how neat and tidy they are were largely read and there's no audience for them. At the same time in the post war period you have a four volume English set that was published of the encyclopedia, which was an attempt to take the sort of the best articles of the Yiddish and translate them for a Hebrew reading audience. So I'm going to talk a little bit just about this history with you kind of give you a sense of it as a way to start I'd like to sort of just talk about the state of Yiddish in the 1920s 1930s when this project began. So, already by the 1920s and early 30s when people are beginning to advocate on behalf of the Yiddish encyclopedia saying, you know, Yiddish speaking Jews need encyclopedia of their own. Yiddish is already what we might think of as a transnational language. You know there's a historic center of the Yiddish language probably now and what are at this point and what we think of as the lands of Poland or parts of the Soviet Union. So these territories of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, parts of Poland, you know that are tied to the Ukraine as well. These are the historic homes of Yiddish but by this time period, there's been such displacement and migration of Yiddish speaking Jews that there are many large or smaller important centers and these include Berlin Germany, they include New York City, Paris, others in Melbourne and in Cape Town and Buenos Aires. And so you have these peripheral sites, which become absolutely vital to sustain the language after World War two. So any sort of home for Yiddish intellectual culture in this time period. It's with an organization known as YIVO the Yiddish Scientific Institute, which was formed and was actually founded in Berlin but the building gets established in Vilna, Poland, which was then part of Poland today it's the capital of Lithuania Vilnius, and it's established in 1925. So it really becomes the close thing we have is to sort of a center for Yiddish culture. Now, what makes this project that I'm sort of looking at sort of stand out from nearly every other intellectual venture that happened in the Yiddish culture, is that it's the only one that's able to continue through World War two, and the Nazi Yiddish and then may be maintained in in the post war period, you know for several decades really the only other project is that of YIVO itself. You know, every other project comes to an end with the beginning of World War two and so we often think of these this period not surprisingly in terms of Jewish history, as one that's simply defined by rupture. You know, classes in Jewish studies often end in 1939 and then there's classes on the Holocaust and they pick up after after the war. And so one of the things I find so compelling about this project is that it represents one of those few chains of continuity that link the pre modern European world to the post modern American world. Early in the 20th century was a time when there was a whole number of Jewish encyclopedias that were published. So this is hardly the first one. Interestingly, and for reasons I could go on certain nauseam about. They all appear in non Jewish languages. So the first of them is the Jewish encyclopedia which I showed you is one of my first slides which appeared in New York in 1901. Then there's a Russian variant of it and that happens almost immediately after it's published out of St. Petersburg. And then in the 1920s, there's actually two but there's this is the more famous of the ones that are published in Berlin Germany. Now what makes these encyclopedias are interesting in a way is that they're all Jewish encyclopedias so that what by what I mean by that is that they are focused on entries dedicated to Jewish content. So important Jewish historical figures Jewish religious concepts important moments in Jewish history important cities Jewish political movements cultural movements labor movements. So they're very much about conveying the the total of Jewish civilization as its founders sort of understood it. So the fact that they appear in non Jewish languages it assumes an audience of both Jewish and non Jewish readers. Right. And so with each of these three projects. There's the there's sort of this dual mission in a way. They're able to present Jewish people as compatible with the societies in which they're located so locating, you know, Jews in America as part of being Americans Jews and Russia as Russians Jews and Germans as Germans. But at the same time, they're working in the opposite direction, and that they're trying to bring Jewish knowledge to Jewish audiences who no longer have the capacity to read Jewish languages. They're working in these two directions which is really quite fascinating. Now for my project. What they're trying to do is they're trying to create an encyclopedia in the Yiddish language. So this is going to be encyclopedia that is going to be restricted almost entirely to Jewish readers only and to a subset of those Jewish readers once you can work in the Yiddish language, but this constitutes about half of the the Jewish world at the time some nine to 10 readers of Yiddish are estimated by the founders. And this was, you know, the project that I'm working on was not the first attempt to make encyclopedia in the Yiddish language there are many that had been tried in the early decades of the 20th century. All of them fell flat for a bunch of reasons but one of them was there is just a sense that the Yiddish language itself wasn't capable yet of conveying the knowledge of the world in the Yiddish language that that that language itself hadn't developed so that by the time my encyclopedias get together to to talk about this encyclopedia, you know, they they were and sort of announcing to themselves and to the world that Yiddish had finally arrived at as a language that it was finally ready to join the languages of the world and that Yiddish speaking Jews were ready to join the nations of the world. Hi Yiddish my my figures came together to in honor of their sort of teacher and mentor Simon Dubnov who's the sort of the great historian of Eastern European Jewry. He was near using his as it turns out in the last decade of his life. He had spent his entire whole career as a historian, really trying to convey the history and diversity and development of Eastern European Jews really to try to show that they really rested at the center of European life. These other figures who came together really to honor him include the leader of the Mensheviks who are in exile Raphael Abramovich, the historian Elias Chericover, and the statistician and demographer Yoko Blaschinski. Now it's interesting is all these figures happen to be living in Berlin, Germany. They themselves had either fled the Soviet Union, such as Abramovich, who really fled for his life, and others had just decided to leave Poland and or take refuge in Berlin in order to sort of get away from kind of the, the hustling bustle of Poland, which was a very, very vibrant scene for Yiddish letters but also hotly contested in terms of political divisions. So what this group decides to do is they come together and what they want to publish is encyclopedia in the Yiddish language but unlike any other of these Jewish encyclopedias they say, we're going to put together an all gamena encyclopedia a general encyclopedia that we don't need to give Jewish knowledge to these Jews because they're already Jewish they know if they know the Yiddish language there's an assumption that they're already familiar with most Jewish subjects. But what they need what we need is knowledge of the larger world. So we are not going to model our encyclopedia on these other works, we're going to model our encyclopedia on Diderot encyclopedia we're going to model it on the encyclopedia Britannica we're going to bring the knowledge of the world to Jews, and or to modernize them modernize us as a people, and to really provide this guide so that Jews can make their way through the world. Now this in itself is this very controversial decision. There are many people say no Jews are already modernizing what they need is Jewish knowledge, and they these groups go back and forth over this issue. The group YIVO which I mentioned earlier which had sort of prompted this discussion pulls away from the project and doesn't want to have a formal tie to it. But they insist on kind of going together and what they ultimately decide on is a split sort of 70% in general knowledge about 30% Jewish knowledge. And most of that Jewish knowledge was going to be in a supplement volume sort of as a bonus that would be made available to subscribers. They thought it would be about that thought to be a 10 volume project with this 11th volume given at the end, and that it would take about five years to put together. That's obviously not what happened and this is why it becomes kind of an interesting story. So, in 1932, they decide to release a probaheft and again, this is, you know, in Yiddish so you can see that the version on the left in the middle is probaheft. But you can see the violence is 1932 it says comes out of something called the Dubnov fund in Berlin. And this probaheft, when it's released is done, it's really just a marketing tool it's to show the potential subscribers that they should get this issue, they should get this encyclopedia set. But it is generate so much excitement in the world of Yiddish letters that it generates its own reviews. So there are reviews published in the Yiddish press over this sample volume and all sorts of people weigh in. It's absolutely fascinating, but it actually compels them to put out a second version so you can see this next one is published in 1933. This is one of the Eve actually of the Nazis coming to power really within days, and I'll just show you a couple pictures from the inside. So you can see that it looks like kind of a basic encyclopedia anyway right so there's an enter here and obelisk. Another one on dinosaurs. That's there. Probably not showing the exact proportional size of dinosaurs to locomotives. This is my favorite image this one here. So this is an image of Easter Island of course. You can see Hebrew readers out there you can see it actually says Pesach Inzel so Passover Island, which I just think it's funny. And so you get the sense like this is what was it in the in the encyclopedia, and it was a very kind of broad sweeping proba half this the sample volume that they put forward. But of course as soon as that second version of the sample volume is released Hitler comes to power. They are foreigners, and they are leftist so they are triply at risk of being arrested, and some of them actually were and they were able to escape. And so within a period of a few weeks or some in a few months for other, they all flee, they all flee Berlin, and some of them go to Eastern Europe, some of them go to America to resettle. And then some of them end up in Paris which becomes the home for most German Jews who fled Germany on with the onset of Nazism. And so they're in Paris in 1933 and they have to reconstitute the project. They're now twice as far from Warsaw in Vilna than they were before and so they're they're they're bonds to the societies are ever more frayed. They're not very well aware of this rising sort of fascism from Europe but they could recommit to this project. They set up new offices and instead of having some materials be bilingual of the German it's now you just French and a lot of the language of the the document shifts to French, at this point, and they begin to, you know reestablish this project and it takes a long time. So the first volume, finally that's published doesn't come out until very very late, like. December 31, 1934, just sort of just under the wire, but they put out this volume and it goes from the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet olive to Atlantic City, and that's what it covers. And this generates such excitement in the Yiddish world. And this it contains these these full colored maps, which you know to many people had had never been seen before, and in this sort of volume here's one obviously of North America. It begins with this reproduction of a very famous painting by the German Jewish artist, Lesser Uri. This is Jeremiah, which which is kind of an interesting work on its own. And it gets so much attention in the Yiddish world that for one publication one famous journal sort of the New Yorker of its time dedicates the entire issue over to celebrating this work. It's not particularly critical, but it's a fascinating just, you know, sort of media push for this work. And for many people it's really a sign that Yiddish as a language has come into its own at this moment. But there are funding difficulties it's really hard for them to get subscribers it's really hard for them to keep the ties with their different contributors. You know they're suffering from this is the middle of the depression. People don't have the $5 that it costs for individual volumes and enormous son for sort of working class Polish Jews. So it takes them a long time so the next volume doesn't come out until, I'm sorry, I was not silent shape doesn't come out until 1935. So we have volume comes out in 1934 in 1935. An interesting thing happens in 1936, they put out the third volume, and they're still in the first letter of the alphabet, but very curiously at the end of what looks like a regular encyclopedia. And without any discussion appears this long essay multi author essay on the topic of anti Semitism. It's in the right place, alphabetically, but otherwise it's completely out of sync with the rest of the encyclopedia. They don't have multi authored essays in this work. And so, that was the first signal that like some things up that there's some sort of transition happening. The same thing happens in 1937 with the fourth volume. There's a long essay on a rich Israel, so the land of Israel, so Israel Palestine. So it includes again a full color math. And again, it's in the right place alphabetically, but it's out of sync with the rest of the volumes which are on things like, you know, submarines and x rays and you know automobiles, just this very long essay on the land of Israel. These are Jews who are not Zionists, by and large they're what we call diaspora nationalists they believe that Jews have a right to live as full citizens in the societies in which they reside but to live as Jews in their own language they have the right to their own. These Jewish language schools, even their own Yiddish governing institutions, but located within the states in which they're already living so in whether it's in Berlin or Paris or or New York, Poland. You know they're fighting for what they called here in this like their ability to be here as opposed to the Zionist vision which is to be right there in the land of Israel. This is actually a quite sympathetic reading of the Zionist movement, which again is kind of another signal because of course by 1937, the situation for Jews in Europe is declining tremendously. And then to the point where in 1938, I'm sorry it skipped again 1938 things would become catastrophic. Right, so the war doesn't start until 1939 but the year before that there's the Anschluss where Germany seizes Austria. So here is the taking of the Sudetenland these checked territories. And then of course it ends with Kristallnacht and each of these instances in 1938. The situation for the Jewish community goes from being difficult and full, you know, full of discrimination and oppression to being really an existential crisis and it prompts this massive refugee crisis. In response to this, these crises of 1938. The editors decide they're going to publish the supplement early that they're going to publish that last volume on Jews, sort of in the middle of the project and so in 1939. So they put out a volume that they called you didn't meaning just choose. And this is a project that is about sort of the history of the Jews of Europe it gives them their long history has articles on Hebrew and Jewish literature on different aspects of Jewish culture. But what they say is that because of the worsening conditions we're not going to do just one of these volumes we're going to do to. We're going to make this a double volume, and that the next one will come out shortly, and it does come out and this is you didn't pay so the second of these. And this is the volume that is shipped just on the eve of the Nazi invasion of Western Europe and this is the one that only a few volumes survive a bit. So, when Germany does invade France my figures have to flee again they've already fled from the Soviet Union that fled from from Germany. Now they have to flee from France. They make their way to Lisbon, ultimately, and are among these refugees who are able to get into the United States in this period when the war is on, but the United States has not yet joined it there's hundreds of ships that actually land in the United States, bringing several thousands of people and they are lucky enough to be on these ships. Now this was the point at which I had tried written all this history up, and I'd sent this final this so it's in three chapters this this book I'd sent the, the second chapter off to my editor, and then coven struck, right. Within days at the lockdown happened, and my life got completely overturned and my project got stalled. I've written about that elsewhere I'm happy to kind of share that with you. But this is what my life looked like for the next several months where my, my wife Jennifer and I Jennifer's English apartment here. We built ourselves into kindergarten teachers and to teach our daughter Spanish, and we did all these things we found tadpoles that we raise into toads together. We built a coronavirus pinata we baked so much banana bread we made a garden, and my daughter spent an entire evening trying to figure out how to spell the f word. And we did not share it to her she heard another kid say it. She wanted to know how to spell it and so this is her evidence of but it seemed like a good sign of what the virus was. This is where the humanities institute grant came in such handy for me right so what that grant did Dean Kimberly and Amy is that it helped buy me some time bought me some technology bought me the ability to get archives from collections that are very far away to get them to send and I'm so grateful and stuff was at this point that I turned to the humanities institute for the support, and it allowed me to write the last third of this project, which was on the New York years. So my figures come to the United States. You know, before the before the Holocaust begins right the Holocaust really begins with a German invasion of the Soviet Union which happens the following summer. In America and they're trying to now to figure out what to do with their project, not all of them make it make it summer unable to get out all of them, all those figures perish in the Holocaust. But they were what's interesting is that they remain committed to the encyclopedic form. But what becomes very clear to them is that the need for a general encyclopedia in the language is rapidly disappearing. And so what they decide initially to do is they're going to put out a third volume in the series on Jews and try to recommit to the general volume. Now what happens over the next 25 years of this project that doesn't end until 1966 is they ultimately just publish one more volume of general knowledge, the fifth. But then they publish seven total volumes in the supplement series the unit work, and then a four volume English language work. So the whole project goes through this profound transformation because what they realize in this moment is that, you know, then the needs of you to speakers have just dramatically changed, and they've gone through this downshift. And what Jews need is a guide to their own culture. They need an archive to this community that has been destroyed. They need memorial books. They need a guide to what life in the Americas will be like. And ultimately, what they decide they need is a study of the Holocaust itself. And this then becomes their work for the next several years. So in coming to America, you know, they put out a series of new volumes, and they take a tremendous amount of time. They put out the third of the year in series in 1942. They put out a book, you know, it's the fourth in the series in 1950 where they start providing sort of a statistical handbook of the situation of Jews on the eve of the Holocaust. They also decide as part of the, the large celebrations that that took place in the mid 1950s to celebrate 300 years of Jewish life in North America, they begin to produce this new series called the Jewish people past and present. And like the main project, this too is faced by interrupts with interruptions and changes in its content and its mission. They think it's going to be a one off. It becomes four volumes altogether. And it contains both some of the best writings from the Yiddish, the Yiddish series that get translated into English, and then later, some new contributions that are written in English, get put into later Yiddish version so there's kind of this, this multi direction to the work. The main works. There's a volume on Jewish life in the Americas that really seeks to give the history of the Jewish communities as far north as Canada as far south as Chile and the communities in between. It contains some of the first comprehensive histories of the Nazi Holocaust. Well, and so I'll sort of end on this point, maybe it's a little early but these these last two volumes from 1964 1966 were really the first comprehensive studies of the Holocaust to appear that were these multi author kind of survey works. In fact, there was a few studies of the Holocaust that had emerged most importantly raw Hillberg's destruction of European Jews. But those works that appeared in English, and some in French and German, we're almost entirely told from the point of view of the perpetrators the goal of historians like Hillberg and others was to figure out how and why the Nazis committed the genocide that they did. They largely were dismissive of Jewish sources so they weren't paying attention to Jewish eyewitness testimonies of memoirs of diary writing you know this whole sort of what we think was ego documents. But these Yiddishists they saw that the for them the real history of the Holocaust was the history that was told from the point of view of the victims and the survivors. Those who suffered the indignities of Nazism who resisted it, who endured it and who perished in it. And all two volumes come out in 1964 and then 1966. And interesting thing when I was first researching this encyclopedia in the year 2008. I called up the offices of a group called the seco the central Yiddish cultural organization which then had its offices in New York just above Union Square. And I called them to ask if they had any files on the encyclopedia since they were the last sort of official publisher of the work. And I was doing research at the Evo which was just a few blocks away from there. And so I called I get a hold of the executive director who's at this actor named hi Cohen, the high wolf sorry. And he calls me says, you're calling about the Yiddish encyclopedia and all my years working here known as ever called the encyclopedia. Come on over my basement is full of them. So I went over to the offices, and we he took me down into the basement and their floor to ceiling, where these pristine beautiful volumes of the last two sense encyclopedia on the Holocaust these are works that there was just no audience any longer for it and if you look at the I just referred to these last volume there's a note from the sort of the last managing editor of the project who says, we hope that with these volumes we bring to the thousands of Yiddish readers history of the Holocaust. Now for me this is just of course profoundly sad because at the opening address of Simon Dubnov in 1931 when they gathered together to decide this. He talked about this as a project for the nine to 10 million Yiddish speakers in the world. So, I'll just sort of end with with this point and this this this last slide here that. So I'm just going to read to you this is from from my work says notwithstanding the hundreds of Jewish scholars and cultural activists who ultimately collaborated in the making of the alchemy encyclopedia. And the often dramatic and compelling history of its production it's been almost entirely overlooked by scholars since its final volume was published in 1966. It's not hard to understand why this lost treasure of Jewish civilization is written primarily a language that few readers today can understand it's archival materials are scattered and more than two dozen collections located on many continents. Complete sets are nearly impossible to obtain. Despite of the chaos that marks the encyclopedia, there's much to be learned about the fate of Yiddish culture from examining its history. Among the goals of my book is to introduce this encyclopedia to contemporary readers make the case not only that the volumes can serve as a valuable source of information from which to draw. To illustrate how the fate of modern Yiddish culture and its speakers were deeply intertwined with much larger historical forces of geopolitical alignment, the rise of communism fascism world war displacement genocide. The Dideros encyclopedia and symbolizes the enlightenment's triumph of reason over superstition and order over chaos. The alchemy encyclopedia by contrast embodies the disorder and irrationality of the enlightenment's demise in the Holocaust and more over, I could symbolize the tenacity of the victims of that disorder and the resolve to continue advocating on behalf of their language culture. So I'll leave it with that thank you. Thank you very much for having me. Thank you very much for having me. I just wanted to stop sharing my screen here. Very that was just really extraordinary. I've heard the pieces of this material over the last two or three years and I've always been thrilled by the excitement with excitement by your particular findings but this was the first time I got such a sense of the overall project, including both the tragedy you were supposed to be as well as the all eclipsing tragedy of what it turned out to be so I just really thank you for giving us this, this big story. And I'm so pleased that you're completing this project this is really thrilling. I just want to also say, if I can real quick. One of the things that's helping me to finish this project is not only the grant from the summer but the book development grant that you also offered a which I'm just going to make a pitch for it. It's not a humanities institute. If you don't know I know some of you do, but they offer grants. So when you have a completed manuscript, they will pay to have it sent out to readers. It's extraordinarily hard to get your books read by colleagues who are experts in the field because who has the time to read an entire book manuscript but with the incentive of the humanities and see we get to pay these folks. And worked out so well in my instance that I already had a contract for this book I got a contract over the summer. It was a great day is in the middle of August I'm around I signed the contract for this book. And I sent the reader reports to my press. And when they saw who the names were they said we will accept these as reader reports. And so what that meant was that the press itself is not going to then go out and have to get new reports they're still going to read the manuscript and make sure I've done everything it's posting. It's sped up my process and probably saved me several months, which in publishing terms means an entire publishing season so unless something goes wrong and noting the history of this book, it certainly will. You know, hopefully within about a year from now the book will be out, which, again, is because of this work that you will that you do so thank you for that. Well, I was going to say just now that q amp a on zoom is always an awkward affair no doubt about it, but here's how we'll proceed. If you would like to ask a question, or make a comment. You, there's two options one is just turn the camera on and kind of wave your hand and I'll try to call on you like we would do if we were all together. However, if you're not comfortable turning on your camera you can put a question in the chat box, and I'll identify it that way as and you know bear with me I'll try to try to catch people as I see them. Most people don't have their cameras on and that's perfectly fine but if you want to raise a question. Turn on your camera and we'll and we'll go. So, with that in mind we have about 15 or so minutes for a q amp a discussion. Anybody have a question for Barry. Aha. Okay, it looks like Fred's got a question. I have no expertise in this area at all. And I was just wondering what the size of the audience will be for a book, such a book. You know, that is a question that happily, there's, you know, from publishing point of view, there is this crossover interest right so I mean there's a broad body of people who are interested in works on and about the English language right so it has as I said you know, doesn't have the same functional value used to have but it has this symbolic value for for many people and and also there's great interested in the Holocaust and happily. The only work sort of in this genre that I've been able to draw from this really broad body of literature that examines. Not necessarily that just the intersection of Yiddish culture and the Holocaust but part of this new work, new sort of line of historical inquiry on Jewish knowledge production. I'm hoping they'll be quite a bit of interest you know I think the, the story that compels me that I find so compelling about this work hopefully I've written it well enough that'll compel others to so. That's fascinating, really fascinating. I see a question from Herb Spindel and then Gail Siegel is after her. So you have to turn on your microphone. You mentioned the Yiddish book store and Amherst mass and their collection of Yiddish. No, I did not because I was founded in the 1990s, you know, sort of long after my project but I'm actually really grateful to the book center, because they have digitized. You know, tens of thousands of Yiddish books, including the sample volume of my encyclopedia which is where I, because that is almost impossible to find a library so I was able to get it from them. Fascinating. And Gail you had a question. Yes, I really loved your presentation I thought it was fascinating all the archival work. This is really important. This is kind of a rescue mission in a way. I was wondering, you know, I grew up in New York, my grandparents spoke Yiddish, and they read the forwards. And I don't know how many people actually what kind of readership the forwards had, but it went on for a long time. Could you say something about, about that the Yiddish readership in New York. Sure. And I'll tell you there's a new book about the four words that just came out in the fall. There's $120 so I would loan you my copy rather than. By one of my teachers, Gennady Estre, who's at NYU. Yeah, so the Yiddish forwards at its height had a readership of well over a quarter million daily readers. And that would have been in the 1920s, you know, it declined precipitously and the, the joke by the time I was a student was that it was no longer Yiddish it was no longer daily and there's no longer forward, because it had become a weekly. They, it was more well known in its English version and its politics that shifted sort of radically away from its social democratic roots. Certainly in coming to America, you know, Yiddish was, it was the language of the Jews there. And, but it was typically only the language of the first generation in terms of the spoken language, because the United States was simply more welcoming. There weren't the same racial barriers or religious barriers that sort of kept you speaking Yiddish as they had in Europe. And there are options and opportunities in America for so many Jews that usually within a generation. Yiddish was not really continued as a language of day to day communication with the exception being ultra orthodox Jews among whom the language even to this day is absolutely sort of thriving and there remains hundreds of thousands of Yiddish speakers in the world who have it as their, their native language. But the sort of the intellectual and political and cultural questions they have are completely disassociated from this. You know, after the World War two, you know, America becomes the home to the greatest number of Yiddish speakers. And there's this intensive wave of efforts to continue the language and to try to convince another generation of speakers to take it up and to make it their own. There's this burst of publishing activity of cultural activity, creative work, some of the good some of the terrible sort of the whole range. The later volumes of my project of my encyclopedia in some ways are part of that larger project, but really by the mid 1960s, it's kind of lost a lot of steam. And Yiddish as a new, another generation scholars who's just kind of up and coming is starting to sort of understand is that Yiddish takes on more the symbolic value right we can think of Leo Rostin's joys of Yiddish we can think of the movies of Woody Allen right which begin to appear in the 1960s. You know, there's all sort of these cultural associations right there's fiddler on the roof from Broadway and so on. And so, people feels if they have an attachment to Yiddish, but it's rooted sort of in nostalgia and sort of this, this saying Yiddish this like Hamish Yiddish right this hominess of the language. But what it's missing is is sort of the full kind of range of possibilities that existed in Yiddish prior to that time period. People talk about calling it goes into its post post vernacular period. Can you talk a bit more about just that point and how the encyclopedia project, how it's, it's editors. Imagine their audience so if on the one hand, post war Yiddish is a, not exactly a project but it's involved in kind of constructing a Jewish past that that regularizes Jewish culture in the US. And that contrast is the project of four on behalf of Jews for the editors how are they imagining their Jewish audience what are they trying to make them into into sure they're trying to do two things simultaneously. On the one hand, they're trying to keep the, the bonds of the transnational Yiddish community alive. What happens is because of the war in the Holocaust, Jews are scattered even further right already before the war. There were these other centers for Yiddish after the war. There's even more right you've got Jewish communities in Melbourne you've got Jewish communities in Winnipeg you know you've got Jewish communities all over. And I think to this encyclopedia is a way to keep them all together. And so they have emissaries that go they go to Cuba, they, you know they go to Buenos Aires, trying to fundraise and try to bring these communities into conversation with one another. Recognizing at some level that they're maybe among the last of their, their kind. And they're also embarking on this project of translation and this is where these Yiddish language volumes come out of is that they believe that, you know, there is this inherent ball of value to Yiddish culture, and the, the, the works that it the ideologies of sort of diasporism in some ways that it sustained and they're also infused with this very important sort of working class ethos to them you know they're socialists they're Mensheviks. What they want to do with these Yiddish language projects is to try to make that history and culture sort of available to American Jews like they keep talking about the new community in America like it's 300 years old by this time period right, but they're talking about the old world is gone the new world like American Jews have to carry the mantle right of Judaism forward of course Israel is not a state until 48 it's tiny, you know, for a very long time period it's Hebrew speaking you know it's sort of it's it's the relationship to Yiddish is really fraught. And so they see what they have to do is they have to figure out a way to translate the, like the most important bits of Eastern European Jewish life and civilization for an American audience to make it possible. It is not received well. What's interesting like Milton Himmelfarp right one of the great sort of later neocons of our time. He writes a review of Jewish people past and present race has like nice try, but we have different needs, you know, interestingly he becomes a literary editor as a subsequent volume, which is quite fascinating. He's not giving up on it entirely, but it doesn't really translate over in the same way. And it's only kind of much later after Yiddish goes through this sort of nostalgic period that people begin I think examining these works and trying to figure out kind of what is to be learned from them. But there's just a period where American Jewry I think has sort of planted its own stake and doesn't want to have to feel bound by sort of the weightiness and kind of the oppression of sort of the this European Jewish inheritance. Thank you for that. So are there other questions or observations or comments for our guest. We gave an encyclopedic talk very and I think you heard all the bases. I think it's a class and five minutes. We very much appreciate your talk. We appreciate your salute to the Humanities Institute back at you loved it. And I think everybody for attending will have another one of these humanities summer writing grant presentations on March 29 and you'll see information about at the upcoming newsletter. Until then, I wish everybody a great afternoon. Thank you all for being here. Goodbye. Thank you. Bye bye. So, Amy, I'm just seeing your note now. Yeah, sorry, it was fine. Yeah, it we could see everything it was fine. Yeah. What, what, what shouldn't you have seen though or what, what could I have done differently just put it in presenter view or something. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, if you go to slide show and just do that. I'm sorry. I didn't notice it until yeah I was like the third slide and so yeah. When I've done that I've lost my ability to see all of you. And I wonder if that was it. Yeah, I wondered if that was part of it too that you wanted to keep an eye on it because it was. But don't no worries. It was, it was great. So yeah, yeah. No, I worry about my classes, because when I put it in presenter view I lose, because then it shows this like this preview view on my little monitor. Yes, yeah. Which is what I'm looking into and I'm also using an iPad to actually yeah for my notes. So yeah, so I'll, yeah, sorry about that. No worries at all. Like I said, I thought that was probably the case that it was like a, you know, screen, like, you know, but it was, we could see everything fine it was just yeah. I wanted to know just wanted to bring it but it was I wasn't going to push it if it wasn't I didn't want to. I appreciate it. So yeah, I have a rule that I can't read the chat while I'm talking because it's so distracted. So I've tried to do it mess. Yeah. I want to ask you about Shanghai Jewish refugees Museum. I just I went to Shanghai a couple years ago and I wondered if yeah it's a really interesting place and I didn't know if there was any, you know, I didn't know how language is affected and sort of the, you know, the Jewish it's mostly German Jews go there to take refuge there. So it doesn't factor in with with my folks very much. But now they're super interesting studies about it and it's this point of like utter fascination for people and an old friend of mine who I'm not in touch with anymore her father was one of those folks. Yeah, she tells super fascinating stories about it. It's really interesting. Yeah, just, you know, the, it was a highlight of going. It was a really. Yeah, there's all these sites, you know, that emerge for periods of time, you know, there's Havana, there's Lisbon, there's Shanghai, where Jews go to wait and to wait mostly to come into America right because there's this crazy visa system where you can only come in when your visa comes up. But you have these centers and there's some people I think I think Marion Kaplan, NYU is writing a book trying to look at these places in relationship to one another. I've heard her speak on pieces of it but it'll be amazing when it all gets sort of put together, you know, fantastic. Yeah, no thank you. I really grateful for this. And try to get a walk in this week. I would love it. All right. Bye bye.