The California Institute for Yiddish Culture and Language (CYCL) started in 1999 and serves as a multi-generational center for the teaching, promotion, celebration and learning of Yiddish in all of its embodiments, with an emphasis on the arts and other areas that influence the cultural formations that inform its existence. The institute owes its establishment to Miriam Koral, who is the Founding Director, and who, as a Yiddish instructor at UCLA and native Yiddish speaker, created the center and community that brings world-renowned Yiddish authors, playwrights, musicians, poets, artists and others to the Los Angeles area. [1]
Yiddish is a West Germanic language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. It originates from 9th century Central Europe, providing the nascent Ashkenazi community with a vernacular based on High German fused with many elements taken from Hebrew and to some extent Aramaic. Most varieties of Yiddish include elements of Slavic languages and the vocabulary contains traces of Romance languages. Yiddish has traditionally been written using the Hebrew alphabet; however, there are variations, including the standardized YIVO orthography that employs the Latin alphabet.
Birobidzhan is a town and the administrative center of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, Russia, located on the Trans-Siberian Railway, near the China–Russia border.
The Forward, formerly known as The Jewish Daily Forward, is an American news media organization for a Jewish American audience. Founded in 1897 as a Yiddish-language daily socialist newspaper, The New York Times reported that Seth Lipsky "started an English-language offshoot of the Yiddish-language newspaper" as a weekly newspaper in 1990.
Shtetl or shtetel is a Yiddish term for the small towns with predominantly Ashkenazi Jewish populations which existed in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. The term is used in the contexts of peculiarities of former East European Jewish societies as islands within the surrounding non-Jewish populace, and bears certain socio-economic and cultural connotations. Shtetls were mainly found in the areas that constituted the 19th-century Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire, as well as in Congress Poland, Austrian Galicia, the Kingdom of Romania and the Kingdom of Hungary.
The Yiddish Book Center Yiddish: ייִדישער ביכער־צענטער, romanized: Yidisher Bikher-Tsenter, located on the campus of Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, United States, is a cultural institution dedicated to the preservation of books in the Yiddish language, as well as the culture and history those books represent. It is one of ten western Massachusetts museums constituting the Museums10 consortium.
Israeli literature is literature written in the State of Israel by Israelis. Most works classed as Israeli literature are written in the Hebrew language, although some Israeli authors write in Yiddish, English, Arabic and Russian.
Yiddishism is a cultural and linguistic movement which began among Jews in Eastern Europe during the latter part of the 19th century. Some of the leading founders of this movement were Mendele Moykher-Sforim (1836–1917), I. L. Peretz (1852–1915), and Sholem Aleichem (1859–1916).
Yiddish theatre consists of plays written and performed primarily by Jews in Yiddish, the language of the Central European Ashkenazi Jewish community. The range of Yiddish theatre is broad: operetta, musical comedy, and satiric or nostalgic revues; melodrama; naturalist drama; expressionist and modernist plays. At its height, its geographical scope was comparably broad: from the late 19th century until just before World War II, professional Yiddish theatre could be found throughout the heavily Jewish areas of Eastern and East Central Europe, but also in Berlin, London, Paris, Buenos Aires and New York City.
Jewish studies is an academic discipline centered on the study of Jews and Judaism. Jewish studies is interdisciplinary and combines aspects of history, Middle Eastern studies, Asian studies, Oriental studies, religious studies, archeology, sociology, languages, political science, area studies, women's studies, and ethnic studies. Jewish studies as a distinct field is mainly present at colleges and universities in North America.
YIVO is an organization that preserves, studies, and teaches the cultural history of Jewish life throughout Eastern Europe, Germany, and Russia as well as orthography, lexicography, and other studies related to Yiddish. Established in 1925 in Wilno in the Second Polish Republic as the Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut (ייִדישער װיסנשאַפֿטלעכער אינסטיטוט, pronounced[ˈjidiʃɛrˈvisn.ʃaftlɛχɛrinstiˈtut], Yiddish Scientific Institute.
Zarphatic, or Judeo-French, is an extinct Jewish language that was spoken by the French Jews of northern France and in parts of west-central Germany, such as Mainz, Frankfurt am Main and Aix-la-Chapelle. It was also spoken by French Jews who moved to Norman England. Some have conjectured that the language influenced the development of Yiddish.
Yiddish literature encompasses all those belles-lettres written in Yiddish, the language of Ashkenazic Jewry which is related to Middle High German. The history of Yiddish, with its roots in central Europe and locus for centuries in Eastern Europe, is evident in its literature.
Yiddish dialects are varieties of the Yiddish language and are divided according to the region in Europe where each developed its distinctiveness. Linguistically, Yiddish is divided in distinct Eastern and Western dialects. While the Western dialects mostly died out in the 19th-century due to Jewish language assimilation into mainstream culture, the Eastern dialects were very vital until most of Eastern European Jewry was wiped out by the Shoah.
Joshua Fishman was an American linguist who specialized in the sociology of language, language planning, bilingual education, and language and ethnicity.
Yiddishkeit literally means "Jewishness". It can refer broadly to Judaism or specifically to forms of Orthodox Judaism when used particularly by religious and Orthodox Jews. In a more general sense, it has come to mean the "Jewishness" or "Jewish essence" of Ashkenazi Jews in general and the traditional Yiddish-speaking Jews of Eastern and Central Europe in particular.
Jeremy A. Dauber is the Atran Professor of Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture in the Department of Germanic Languages at Columbia University, specializing in Yiddish and Jewish literature, American Jewish culture, and American studies.
Michael Alpert is a klezmer musician and Yiddish singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, scholar and educator who has been called a key figure in the klezmer revitalization, beginning in the 1970s. He has performed solo and in a number of ensembles since that time, including Brave Old World, Kapelye, Khevrisa, The Brothers Nazaroff, Voices of Ashkenaz and The An-Sky Ensemble, and has collaborated with clarinetist David Krakauer, hip-hop artist Socalled, singer/songwriter/actor Daniel Kahn, bandurist Julian Kytasty, violinist Itzhak Perlman, ethnomusicologist and musician Walter Zev Feldman, trumpeter/composerFrank London and numerous others.
Dovid Katz is an American-born Vilnius-based scholar, author, and educator specializing in Yiddish language and literature, Lithuanian-Jewish culture, and the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. In recent years, he has been known for combating the so-called "Double Genocide" revision of Holocaust history which asserts a moral equivalence between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. He is editor of the web journal Defending History which he founded in 2009. He is known to spend part of each year at his home in North Wales. His website includes a list of his books, of some articles by topic, a record of recent work, and a more comprehensive bibliography.
Yiddishkayt is a Yiddish cultural and educational organization, based in Los Angeles, California. Its offices are located in the Pellissier Building above the Wiltern Theater in the Koreatown District of Los Angeles. Its name refers to the cultural concept of yiddishkayt,, which the American Jewish critic Irving Howe described not in religious terms, but rather as a humanism based in a "readiness to live...beyond the clamor of self." According to the Yiddishkayt website, the organization seeks to "inspire current and future generations with the artists, writers, musicians, performers, filmmakers, philosophers, and social justice activists whose yiddishkayt — their particular form of critical and compassionate engagement with humanity — emerged from the Jewish communities of Europe as they developed in constant contact with their non-Jewish neighbors."
Yizkor books are memorial books commemorating a Jewish community destroyed during the Holocaust. The books are published by former residents or landsmanshaft societies as remembrances of homes, people and ways of life lost during World War II. Yizkor books usually focus on a town but may include sections on neighboring smaller communities.