Dovid Katz

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Dovid Katz
הירשע־דוד כ״ץ
Dovid Katz.jpg
Portrait of Katz, 2010
Born1956 (age 68–69)
Relatives Menke Katz
Academic background
Education Yeshivah of Flatbush
Alma mater University of London
Thesis Explorations of the History of the Semitic Component in Yiddish  (1982)
Website Official website

Dovid Katz (Yiddish: הירשע־דוד כ״ץ‎, also הירשע־דוד קאַץ‎, Hirshe-Dovid Kats, [ˌhirʃɛ-ˈdɔvidˈkɑt͡s] , born 9 May 1956) 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.

Contents

Early life and Yiddish studies

Born in the New York City borough of Brooklyn into the Litvak (Lithuanian-Jewish) family of Yiddish and English poet Menke Katz, [1] Dovid Katz attended the Brooklyn day schools Hebrew Institute of Boro Park and East Midwood Jewish Day School, and then Yeshivah of Flatbush High School, where he led a student protest calling for the inclusion of Yiddish in American Hebrew day school curricula, and founded and edited the Yiddish-English student journal "Aleichem Sholem" (1972–1974). [2] [3] He majored in linguistics at Columbia University, where he graduated in 1978, having studied concurrently at New York's Herzliah Yiddish Teachers' Seminary. He relocated to London in 1978 to work on a doctorate (completed in 1982) on the origins of the Semitic component in the Yiddish language at the University of London.[ citation needed ]

For eighteen years (1978–1996) he taught Yiddish Studies at Oxford, building the Oxford Programme in Yiddish. His contributions include initiating a new four-week summer course [4] at four levels of language instruction (in 1982), the annual Stencl Lecture (from 1983), [5] [6] annual winter symposiums (from 1985); [7] University of Oxford BA, MSt and MPhil options (from 1982), and a doctoral program (from 1984), these being concentrated in the university's Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages. [8] Some of his former doctoral students are today professors of Yiddish, at Indiana University (Bloomington) and Düsseldorf among others. He founded the series Winter Studies in Yiddish in English (vol. 1 appeared in 1987), [9] and Oksforder Yidish (or "Oxford Yiddish"), entirely in Yiddish (vol. 1 appeared in 1990). [10] His posts, at the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies (renamed the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies) were instructor and junior fellow (1978–1982), senior research fellow and director of Yiddish studies (1983–1994). In 1994 he founded the Oxford Institute for Yiddish Studies and served as its research director until 1997. [11] He was Research Fellow at St. Antony's College Oxford from 1986 to 1997, and a member of the Modern Language Faculty's Graduate Studies Committee from 1984 to 1997.

After an initial trip to his ancestral Lithuania and Belarus in 1990 (during which he negotiated an agreement [12] enabling Lithuanian students to enroll in Oxford Jewish studies courses), Katz pioneered the mounting of in-situ post-Holocaust Yiddish dialectological and folkloristic expeditions in Eastern Europe. He focused on the "Lithuanian lands" (Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, etc.) and continues work on his Atlas of Northeastern Yiddish. [13] He has amassed thousands of hours of recorded interviews with "the last of the Yiddish Mohicans" in these regions but as far as is known has thus far failed to find a permanent home for the materials. In early 2013 he began posting clips from his interviews of Boro Park Yiddish speakers gleaned from his return trips to his native Brooklyn. [14]

His publications on Yiddish language include his "Grammar of the Yiddish Language" (London, 1987) and his book in Yiddish, "Tikney takones. Fragn fun yidisher stilistik" (Oxford, 1993), [15] both of which aimed to enhance the teaching of Yiddish as a vibrant language both spoken and for new literary and academic works, even if in (and for) small circles. In both works, he advocated a descriptivist stance, rejecting what he considered to be the excessive purism prevalent in the field, particularly in New York. He also (controversially) championed the traditionalist variant of modern Yiddish orthography, and was the author of the "Code of Yiddish Spelling" (Oxford, 1992). [16] He twice founded and directed (one-time only) Yiddish teacher training programs: at Oxford, a one-year program in 1996, and at Vilnius, an intensive course in spring 2005.

For a nonspecialist English readership he wrote a history of the language and its culture, "Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish" (Basic Books 2004, revised edition with added academic apparatus, 2007), which attracted both acclaim and robust criticism, particularly over his predictions of a vernacular future for Yiddish based in Haredi communities, and his contention that modern Hebrew could not replace the European-nuanced vibrancy of Yiddish. [17] For years he wrote regular columns for the Forverts (1990s), and in more recent years for the Algemeiner Journal, [18] which seemed to have stopped with the departure of Y.Y. Jacobson as editor around 2010. In 2015, his book Yiddish and Power was published in the UK by Palgrave Macmillan. [19]

He is the author of a number of articles on Yiddish in encyclopedias (including The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe) [20] [21] and book introductions, including the Yivo's reprint of Alexander Harkavy's trilingual Yiddish-English-Hebrew dictionary. [22] [23]

After a year as visiting professor at Yale University (1998–1999), Katz relocated to Vilnius in 1999 in order to take up a new chair in Yiddish language, literature and culture at Vilnius University, and to found the university's Center for Stateless Cultures, [24] which he directed for its first two years. He had relocated his old Oxford Yiddish summer program to Vilnius a year earlier (summer 1998). In 2001, he co-founded the Vilnius Yiddish Institute at Vilnius University and remained its research director and primary instructor until 2010. His works on Litvak (Lithuanian Jewish) culture include the folio volume "Lithuanian Jewish Culture" (Baltos lankos, Vilnius 2004, revised edition 2010), "Windows to a Lost Jewish Past: Vilna Book Stamps" (Versus aureus, Vilnius 2008), and "Seven Kingdoms of the Litvaks" (International Cultural Program Center, Vilnius 2009). [25] In 2009 he directed the "Jewish Lithuania" program for Summer Literary Seminars in Vilnius.

He began to write short stories in Yiddish following his father's death in 1991, and published four collections in book form under the nom de plume Heershadovid Menkes (Yiddish: הירשע־דוד מעינקעס—Hirshe-Dovid Meynkes): Eldra Don, 1992; The Flat Peak, 1993; Tales of the Misnagdim from Vilna Province, 1996; Einstein from Svir and Other Yiddish Short Stories, 2020. After experimenting with modern themes in the 1990s, he abandoned them for the vanished life of old Jewish Lithuania, in some cases experimenting with older dialect forms of Lithuanian (Litvak) Yiddish for prose set in pre World War I Eastern Europe.

Awards for his fiction came from within the secular Yiddish environment: the Hirsh Rosenfeld Award (Canadian Jewish Congress, 1994), the Zhitlovsky Prize (Ikuf, 1996), the Itzik Manger Prize (1997) and the Rubinlicht Prize (2020). [26]

In 1994 he founded at Oxford the then sole literary monthly magazine in Yiddish, "Yiddish Pen" [27] and edited its first 27 issues. [28] It did not, however, usher in the literary revival he had hoped for, and his own works of fiction received little recognition outside the narrow world of secular Yiddish culture. In 2001-2002 he was a Guggenheim Fellow in Yiddish literature. A number of translated volumes appeared. In English: City in the Moonlight: Stories of the Old-time Lithuanian Jews (2012); [29] East Broadway to Whitechapel (2025). [30] In German: Ostjüdische Geschichten aus dem alten Litauen. [31] In Italian: Nóah Anshel dell'altro mondo (2002). [32]

Katz, taken aback by the poverty he found among the last aged Yiddish speakers in Eastern Europe (many of them "flight survivors" who survived the war by fleeing to the Soviet Union, hence not eligible for aid under the narrow definition of "Holocaust survivor"), alerted the wider world to the issue in a 1999 op-ed [33] in the Forward, which was cited by Judge Edward R. Korman in the Swiss Banks settlement [34] in the U.S. District Court in 2004. Katz began to work closely with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) on these issues, and he helped the founders of the Survivor Mitzvah Project by a group based in Santa Monica, California.

In 2012, he took part in the Channel 4 reality series "Jewish Mum of the Year" as one of the judging panel alongside Tracy-Ann Oberman and Richard Ferrer. [35] Most of the reviews of his own appearance judged it negatively [36] and he did not think much of the program himself.

In June 2014, two articles in Tablet magazine focused on the recent history and status of Yiddish linguistics, including his own contributions (and controversies). [37]

In 2018, he launched online a draft version of his Yiddish Cultural Dictionary, which is a free online English-Yiddish dictionary that stresses cultural specificities, with all discussions of entries in Yiddish; rooted in his descriptivist perspective in Yiddish stylistics, it contains detailed commentary about usage in Standard Yiddish, and also in both Northeastern (Lithuanian) and Central (Mideastern / Polish) dialects of Yiddish. [38] By early 2025, it had around 40,000 entries and around 800,000 words of text.

In late 2021, he initiated the Lithuanian Yiddish Video Archive (LYVA) by putting on line several hundred (unedited) videos from his thirty years of expeditions to the last native speakers of Northeastern ("Lithuanian") Yiddish in Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, northeastern Poland and eastern Ukraine. [39]

Holocaust history and human rights activism

After observing the Vilnius scene for years, Dovid Katz began in 2008 to publicly challenge the double genocide theory of World War II and the accusations against Holocaust survivors who survived by joining the Jewish partisans. In a Rothschild Foundation London seminar in February that year he proposed the term "Holocaust obfuscation" for an East European trend to downgrade the Holocaust into one of two purportedly equal genocides (without actually denying any deaths); he refined the term in a 2009 paper. [40]

Professor Katz was apparently the first to publicly challenge the 2008 Prague Declaration in two May 2009 op-eds, in The Jewish Chronicle [41] and The Irish Times . [42] He subsequently contributed articles to The Guardian (in 2010), [43] Tablet magazine (2010), [44] The Jerusalem Post (2011), [45] the London Jewish News (2012), [46] The Times of Israel (2012), [47] and other publications. [48]

His professorship at Vilnius University was terminated after eleven years in 2010 after he published several articles critical of Lithuanian prosecutors' campaign against Holocaust survivors who joined the partisans. He began (and continues) to lecture quite widely. In 2016 was appointed professor (on an adjunct basis) at Vilnius Gediminas Technical University (VGTU), in the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies, where he taught courses in Creative Writing and Ethics, until taking leave in 2020.

Katz's work on the Holocaust in Lithuania and related antisemitism issues was among the subjects of a 2010 BBC world service program by Wendy Robbins, [49] and a 2012 Australian documentary film by Marc Radomsky and Danny Ben-Moshe. [50] He has participated in various public debates on these subjects, [51] [52] [53] and has publicly disagreed with Yale Professor Timothy D. Snyder on the related history, in a 2010 Guardian debate preceding publication of Snyder's Bloodlands in a book review in East European Jewish Studies (2011), [54]

In recent years, Katz has registered concern regarding purported policy shifts toward Holocaust Obfuscation and Double Genocide by the United States Department of State, in articles in Tablet (2010), [55] The Guardian (2010) [56] Algemeiner Journal (2011), [57]

In the spring of 2011, Katz was Jan Randa Visiting Scholar at the Australian Center for Jewish Civilization (ACJC) at Monash University in Melbourne where he lectured on both Yiddish Studies and Holocaust issues. He has worked to define the new and "nuanced" elitist East European antisemitism and its success in attracting unsuspecting westerners to help provide political cover. He presented findings at Yale University [58] and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars [59] in 2011, and at a December 13, 2012 ISGAP event at Fordham University [60] in New York City.

References

  1. ↑ Shepard, Richard F. (1991-04-26). "Menke Katz, 85, Poet Appreciated For His Lyrical Style". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2023-06-28.
  2. ↑ "Dovid Katz - periodicals edited". www.dovidkatz.net. Retrieved 2023-06-28.
  3. ↑ See Bernard Bard, "Yiddish Rebels Upset Yeshiva," in the New York Post, August 14, 1972, p. 2.
  4. ↑ "Dovid Katz - Oxford page". dovidkatz.net. Retrieved 2023-06-28.
  5. ↑ "Dovid Katz - periodicals edited". www.dovidkatz.net. Retrieved 2023-06-28.
  6. ↑ Katz edited the first six lectures in pamphlet form between 1984 and 1989; see:https://www.dovidkatz.net/dovid/dovid_periodicals.htm Archived 2017-08-17 at the Wayback Machine ; also Mementos of the early Stencl Lectures Archived 2017-08-16 at the Wayback Machine
  7. ↑ https://dovidkatz.net/dovid/dovid_oxford.htm#5 Archived 2017-08-16 at the Wayback Machine Winter symposiums
  8. ↑ Various illustrative documents from the period are posted at: https://www.dovidkatz.net/dovid/dovid_oxford.htm Archived 2017-08-16 at the Wayback Machine .
  9. ↑ Four volumes appeared of which Katz edited the first two: Katz, Dovid (1987). Origins of the Yiddish Language: Papers from the First Annual Oxford Winter Symposium in Yiddish Language and Literature, 15-17 December 1985. Pergamon Press. ISBN   978-0-08-034156-9. and Katz, Dovid (2014). Dialects of the Yiddish Language: Winter Studies in Yiddish. Elsevier. ISBN   978-1-4832-9950-1.; mementos of the project Archived 2017-08-16 at the Wayback Machine
  10. ↑ Three vols. appeared, edited by Katz: 1 (1990) and 2 (1991) in standard format; vol. 3 (1995) is a large 1000 columned folio. The series was launched at the London Press Centre Archived 2016-03-04 at the Wayback Machine .
  11. ↑ American Jewish Yearbook, 1998, Vol. 98. Ed. David Singer. New York: American Jewish Committee, 1998. ISBN   0-87495-113-5 ISBN   978-0874951134. p. 245.
  12. ↑ Shepard, Richard F. (6 April 1991). "Lithuania and Oxford Are Linked by Yiddish (Published 1991)". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 2023-06-30.
  13. ↑ Around thirty maps have appeared to date on the in-progress web version of the Atlas at: https://www.dovidkatz.net/WebAtlas/AtlasSamples.htm Archived 2017-09-22 at the Wayback Machine .
  14. ↑ His earliest collection constituted a Youtube playlist on his channel.
  15. ↑ https://dovidkatz.net/dovid/PDFStylistics/1993.pdf Archived 2017-12-09 at the Wayback Machine "Tikney takones. Fragn fun yidisher stilistik"
  16. ↑ https://dovidkatz.net/dovid/PDFStylistics/1992.pdf Archived 2017-09-05 at the Wayback Machine "Code of Yiddish Spelling"
  17. ↑ Reviews include Zachary Sholem Berger in the Forward (Oct 29, 2004), Jeremy Dauber in the New York Sun (Nov 3, 2004), Norman Lebrecht in the Evening Standard (March 21, 2005), Susanne Marten-Finnis Archived 2016-03-04 at the Wayback Machine in the Times Higher Education Supplement (Oct 6, 2006), Julia Pascal in the Independent (March 4, 2005), Miriam Shaviv Archived 2016-03-04 at the Wayback Machine in the Jerusalem Post (2004), Gene Shaw Archived 2016-03-04 at the Wayback Machine in Library Journal (Dec. 2004), Joseph Sherman Archived 2016-03-04 at the Wayback Machine in the Times Literary Supplement (May 27, 2005).
  18. ↑ DovidKatz.net has a number of his Algemeiner Zhurnal (Algemeyner zhurnal) posted, on the pages for Yiddish studies Archived 2017-10-16 at the Wayback Machine and for Lithuanian issues Archived 2017-10-17 at the Wayback Machine .
  19. ↑ Katz, Dovid (2015). Yiddish and Power | D. Katz | Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1057/9781137475756. ISBN   978-1-349-35521-1.
  20. ↑ https://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Language/Yiddish Archived 2017-09-14 at the Wayback Machine YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe
  21. ↑ He later posted a slightly Amended version Archived 2016-03-21 at the Wayback Machine on his website.
  22. ↑ Michels, Tony (2005). A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. p. 275, note 62: "... see Dovid Katz, 'Alexander Harkavy and his Trilingual Dictionary,' introduction to the 1988 edition of Harkavy's Yiddish-English-Hebrew Dictionary (YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and Schocken Books, 1988) ..."
  23. ↑ Katz, Dovid, "Alexander Harkavy and his Trilingual Dictionary", in Alexander Harkavy, Yidish-English-Hebreisher verterbukh by Alexander Harkavy, Yidish-English-Hebreisher verterbukh. YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Reprinted by Yale University Press, 2006.
  24. ↑ https://www.baltictimes.com/news/articles/939/ Center for Stateless Cultures
  25. ↑ https://dovidkatz.net/dovid/Lithuania/7_KingdomsLitvaks.pdf Archived 2017-11-15 at the Wayback Machine "Seven Kingdoms of the Litvaks"
  26. ↑ Rubinlicht Prize jury names Dovid Katz a new classic writer of Yiddish literature, The Forward .
  27. ↑ https://www.dovidkatz.net/dovid/dovid_periodicals.htm#YP Archived 2017-08-17 at the Wayback Machine "Yiddish Pen"
  28. ↑ See: https://www.dovidkatz.net/dovid/dovid_periodicals.htm Archived 2017-08-17 at the Wayback Machine
  29. ↑ Selected and translated by Barnett Zumoff. Ktav: New York 2012
  30. ↑ Selected and translated by Barnett Zumoff. Noir Press, Nottingham: 2025
  31. ↑ Selected and translated by Melitta Depner. Salon: München 2012.
  32. ↑ Introduzione e traduzione di Erri De Luca. Libreria Dante & Descartes: Napoli 2002.
  33. ↑ https://dovidkatz.net/dovid/Lithuania/1999-How%20to%20help%20the%20Holocausts%20Last%20Victims.jpg Archived 2016-03-04 at the Wayback Machine 1999 op-ed
  34. ↑ "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2012-01-07. Retrieved 2012-11-20.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link) The Swiss Banks settlement
  35. ↑ See Richard Ferrer in the Independent,16 Oct 2012, online at: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/channel-4s-jewish-mum-of-the-year-was-my-idea-and-im-proud-of-it-8209464.html.
  36. ↑ See the reviews by Tom Sutcliffe in the Independent and John Crace in the Guardian.
  37. ↑ See Cherie Woodworth's "Where did Yiddish come from?" and Batya Ungar-Sargon's "The mystery of the origins of Yiddish will never be solved"
  38. ↑ Burko, Alex (Leyzer) (June 2018)."Review of the Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary". In geveb . Retrieved 2021-01-01.
  39. ↑ Matveyev, Yoel (2 Nov. 2021).". Retrieved 2021-11-13.
  40. ↑ Dovid Katz, "On three definitions: Genocide; Holocaust Denial; Holocaust Obfuscation" in L. Donskis, ed., "A Litmus Test Case of Modernity (etc.), Peter Lang 2009, pp. 259-277. Online at: https://www.defendinghistory.com/2009SeptDovidKatz3Definitions.pdf Archived 2016-03-04 at the Wayback Machine
  41. ↑ Dovid Katz, "Prague's declaration of disgrace" in the Jewish Chronicle, 21 May 2009. Online at: https://www.thejc.com/comment/comment/prague%E2%80%99s-declaration-disgrace
  42. ↑ Dovid Katz, "'Genocide industry' has hidden agenda" in the Irish Times, 30 May 2009. Online at: https://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2009/0530/1224247744866.html?via=mr.
  43. ↑ "Halting Holocaust obfuscation | Dovid Katz". The Guardian . 2010-01-08. Archived from the original on 2023-07-07.
  44. ↑ https://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/32432/the-crime-of-surviving/print/ Tablet
  45. ↑ https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=244192 Jerusalem Post
  46. ↑ https://defendinghistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Dovid-Katz-in-London-Jewish-News-3-August2012.pdf Archived 2016-03-04 at the Wayback Machine The London Jewish News
  47. ↑ https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/efraim-zuroff-historys-lonely-sentinel/ The Times of Israel
  48. ↑ A list of his published articles on these subjects Archived 2017-07-03 at the Wayback Machine is provided in DefendingHistory.com.
  49. ↑ "BBC - World Service Heart and Soul - the Holocaust Deniers, E". Archived from the original on 2017-12-30. Retrieved 2017-09-27.
  50. ↑ Marc Radomsky and Danny Ben-Moshe (producers), "Rewriting History". Website: https://rewriting-history.org Archived 2015-04-30 at the Wayback Machine ; review by Graeme Blundell in the Australian, Sept 14, 2012, at: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/television/lithuanias-lies-and-deception-exposed/story-fncnqfdm-1226473912101.
  51. ↑ "Prosecution and persecution. Lithuania must stop blaming the victims". The Economist . 21 August 2008. Retrieved 3 February 2012.
  52. ↑ Ahren, Raphael (24 February 2009). "When Lithuania was 'Yiddishland'". Haaretz . Retrieved 3 February 2012.
  53. ↑ "Wiesenthal Centre To OSCE Human Rights Conference 'Prague Declaration' is "A Project to Delete the Holocaust from European History". Archived 2017-09-28 at the Wayback Machine 2009 News Releases. Simon Wiesenthal Center. October 5, 2009. Retrieved 2 November 2009.
  54. ↑ Katz, Dovid (30 September 2010). "Why red is not brown in the Baltics | Dovid Katz". The Guardian.
  55. ↑ Katz, Dovid. "Conference Call: The Lithuanian sponsors of a Holocaust education program have a dark history of their own". Tablet. No. December 3, 2010.
  56. ↑ "Why is the US silent on 'double genocide'? | Dovid Katz". The Guardian . 2010-12-21. Archived from the original on 2023-06-30.
  57. ↑ Katz, Dovid (November 25, 2011). "Hannah Rosenthal Does It Again". The Algemeiner.
  58. ↑ https://holocaustinthebaltics.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/YALE14Apr2011.pdf.pdf Yale University
  59. ↑ "Holocaust Revisionism, Ultranationalism, and the Nazi/Soviet "Double Genocide" Debate in Eastern Europe". Wilson Center. 7 July 2011.
  60. ↑ https://vimeo.com/55692172 December 13, 2012 ISGAP event at Fordham University


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