Yiddish Culture and Language

[Hirshl] was on one of his circuits of the house when he heard the garden gate swing open. It had been blown by the wind, which was followed by Blume, who had stepped out of the house to close it. "Who's there?" she asked when she saw someone standing in the street. "It's me," Hirshl said. Blume recoiled and retreated into the house. Hirshl felt utterly crushed, utterly mortified. What am I doing, what? he moaned again and again, seizing his head with his hands. Rain began to fall, striking his face; his whole body was drenched with sweat; yet he remained where he was. Not that he expected Blume to come out again to comfort him. Having come this far, however, he refused to abandon his post. . . . Hirshl rested his head on the handles of the lock [ʿal kappot hamanʿul] and began to cry.

I have uploaded one chapter consisting of four pages on the experience and history of Chinese prisoners in a Soviet gulag (political prison camp) sometime in the late 1940s to the 1950s. This short chapter (excerpt) is from Israel Emiot's prison memoir, The Birobidzhan Affair. Emiot was arrested sometime between 1948 and 1950 and then sentenced to camp 051 somewhere in the Russian Far East.  I am invoking the U.S. copyright of "fair use" of up to one chapter of a book which is allowed to be copied and distributed for academic purposes.

Yakir Segev’s Days of Future Past, Boris Schatz’s The Rebuilt Jerusalem Revisited offers a critical reappraisal of Boris Schatz’s utopian novel The Rebuilt Jerusalem (originally printed in Hebrew in 1924), published here in a richly annotated centenary Hebrew edition. Situating Prof. Boris Schatz (1867-1932), 'the Founder of Israeli Art' and the Bezalel School in Jerusalem within early twentieth-century Zionist cultural discourse, Segev examines the ways in which the founder of the Bezalel School envisioned art as an instrument of national revival, spiritual regeneration, and social cohesion. By exploring the novel’s intersections with Jewish modernism, political imagination, and artistic practice, Segev highlights both its historical significance and its contemporary resonance, underscoring the continuing relevance of Schatz’s visionary project for debates on heritage and identity.
The article was published as the introduction to The Rebuilt Jerusalem centenary edition, 1924-2024

Żydowski lekarz Jakub Person, opisując zjawisko epidemii tyfusu w getcie warszawskim, określił je jako "[…] eksperyment na wielotysięcznej ludności getta […]", który musiał doprowadzić do epidemii o ogromnej skali i śmierci tysięcy uwięzionych w getcie ludzi. Tyfus był "dzieckiem" okupanta. Zrodzonym z myślą o eksperymencie na żywej ludzkiej tkance. Jakub Penson-żydowski lekarz, współtwórca nauki o nefrologii-w kilku zdaniach opowiedział "warszawski" rozdział tyfusowej historii. W połowie 1946 r., w Łodzi, stawił się przed Okręgową Komisją Badania Zbrodni Niemieckich w Polsce. Zeznawał "W sprawie Ludwika Fischera i innych":

The story of The Great Dictionary of Yiddish Language has often been unjustly minimized: A group of Yiddish scholars convene to write a dictionary. They fight, and the project collapses before they are able to publish anything beyond four volumes of words beginning with the letter aleph. The history of the project and the ideological tensions it occasioned has only recently

As crenças funerárias egípcias eram plurais, de modo que a noção de Além (ou Duat) diferia tanto em tempo quanto de local em que o discurso funerário fora elaborado. O que propomos nesse texto é demonstrar uma parte do estudo dos estrangeiros na Quinta Hora dos Portões, que comumente são vistos pela Egiptologia de forma positiva, como se Rê os estivesse protegendo no Além. Entretanto, iniciaremos nesse texto uma defesa pela reinterpretação dessa perspectiva, pois a partir da análise dos elementos textuais e das comparações com outros discursos funerários do período, percebemos que eles eram vistos como inimigos do faraó tanto no Egito terreno quanto na Duat. Entenderemos, então, que essa divisão dos Portões demonstra uma forma de controle desses grupos étnicos em relação aos egípcios.

Parlare della Shoah oggi significa soffermarsi a riflettere su una delle più grandi tragedie della storia dell'umanità, una tragedia che in oltre mezzo secolo è stata ampiamente trattata dalla letteratura e dal cinema, in un insieme di opere che conta anche gli imprescindibili scritti dei sopravvissuti e i testi recuperati di chi non è riuscito a resistere ad anni di tormenti e privazioni. Si tratta di un argomento che, per la sua drammaticità e unicità, risulta spesso difficile da analizzare, ancor più quando questa analisi pretende di essere effettuata dal palcoscenico di un teatro. Non sono per la verità molti i drammaturghi che si sono cimentati in questa complessa e delicata impresa, e forse nessuno è riuscito a raggiungere la genialità e l'originalità di Juan Mayorga, uno degli autori più affermati e acclamati dell'effervescente e dinamica scena spagnola contemporanea, di cui lo scrittore madrileno è da tempo l'indiscusso e pluripremiato protagonista. Acclamato fin dagli esordi come una delle stelle nascenti del teatro iberico, Mayorga ha ottenuto la consacrazione internazionale proprio grazie ai due testi capolavoro sulla Shoah qui analizzati, Himmelweg e El cartógrafo, che hanno permesso al suo talento di valicare i confini nazionali per essere riconosciuto e apprezzato anche in molti paesi d'Europa e del mondo. In entrambe le opere, lo scrittore madrileno offre una lettura decisamente originale dell'Olocausto, escludendo dalle storie narrate qualunque accento patetico e banalizzante e allontanandosi dalla troppo semplice e scontata forma del teatro-documento. Ne nascono due drammi di grande valore e complessità, che spingono lo spettatore fin dentro alle storie narrate, come se quello che accade sulla scena fosse tangibile e reale. Mayorga, che fa del pubblico il sovrano assoluto del suo teatro, porta sul palcoscenico il grande fantasma della Shoah, stimolando chi guarda a percorrere un profondo e personale viaggio della memoria. Il mio interesse per la drammaturgia sull'Olocausto dello scrittore madrileno ha una genesi piuttosto semplice: anch'io, come molti prima di me, ho ceduto all'inevitabile e presumo fondata domanda su come si possa rappresentare in teatro l'indicibile orrore della barbarie nazista. Un quesito al quale Mayorga è riuscito a rispondere con delicatezza e intelligenza, senza mai mancare di rispetto alla memoria delle vittime e senza mai cedere a eccessive e spesso inutili scene di violenza. In effetti, benchè il tema affrontato sia quanto mai cupo, in nessuna delle

'Hayout is dedicated to the memory of my grandmother Anita Guillen-Lorente. This essay is not an initiation or instruction in Judaism in the strict sense. The author draws on the Hasidic heritage of Lubavitch and other Jewish worlds to take all interested readers on a journey to the heart of the Kedusha or holiness of Israel, striving to respect the historical
framework while indulging in the pleasure of digression.

This study examines the paradox of language revitalisation through the case of Jewish communities in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. While Jewish linguistic diversity historically flourished in the diaspora, the twentieth century witnessed a dramatic decline in many Jewish languages-most notably Yiddish, Ladino, and various Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Aramaic varieties-amidst the ascendancy of revitalised Modern Hebrew in Israel. The paper analyses how linguistic competition, diglossia, and shifting language ideologies have shaped the status and transmission of these languages. Drawing on sociolinguistic theory, it explores the "revitalisation paradox": the successful revival of one endangered language, such as Hebrew, may come at the expense of others. The persistence of Yiddish among ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) communities is contrasted with its post-vernacular, symbolic status in secular Israeli society. The study concludes that language planning is fundamentally shaped by social attitudes, collective priorities, and the broader ideological environment. Ultimately, the Jewish experience underscores the complex trade-offs involved in linguistic heritage preservation and highlights the need for nuanced, communitydriven approaches to multilingual identity and language policy.

This article presents a previously unknown Yiddish Hasidic tale about the Baal Shem Tov, discovered in a Habad manuscript with the Lubavicher Rebbe's comments. The story, titled "Mayse mi-Besht," features unique elements including 72 rabbis attempting to excommunicate the Baal Shem Tov and a mystical debate about ritual bath intentions (kavvanot ha-mikveh) between the Besht and the Ari (rabbi Isaac Luria).
The authors analyze this tale's literary functions and compare it to parallel versions in Hasidic literature. They argue that Hasidic stories serve not merely as historical documents but as sophisticated theological narratives that shaped how generations understood the Baal Shem Tov's legacy. The 72 rabbis motif, unprecedented in Besht literature, likely draws from biblical traditions of the Sanhedrin or the seventy elders, emphasizing the magnitude of opposition the Besht faced and overcame.
The study demonstrates how Hasidic hagiography transforms historical tensions—whether actual excommunication attempts during the Besht's lifetime or later conflicts between Hasidim and Mitnagdim after 1772—into powerful narratives of spiritual triumph. Through careful textual analysis and comparison with variant traditions, the authors reveal how these stories function as "working narratives" that legitimize the Besht's innovations while establishing his spiritual supremacy over earlier kabbalistic authorities.

“Mit hofenung un glojbn”: Performing “Jewish Hope” in Early Postwar Poland

The article examines the role of “Jewish hope” in rebuilding the sociocultural Jewish milieu in the immediate postwar period (1944–1948). The text interprets hope as a culture-forming and rhetorical tool of survival, continuity, and renewal. This perspective highlights efforts to create a space of homeliness in the unsettled sociopolitical reality while foregrounding the literary discourse that legitimizes these efforts. This approach reorients the dominant research focus on the “aftermath of the Holocaust,” which typically emphasizes the gradual disappearance of Jewish life in postwar Poland, marked by successive waves of emigration.

The book includes papers of the International Yiddish Memorial Conference held in Chernivtsi/Czernowitz (Ukraine) on August 6 - 9,2018.
It is the latest in the series of Yiddish  International  Conferences (1928,1993,1998,2008,2018)  held in this city in memory of the historic 1908 Yiddish Conference.

Contemporary studies on historical migrations gradually demystified the idea that the population in the past was stable and homogenous, and unveiled dynamic and complex connections throughout the whole of Europe. However, even if we are in the era of digitalization and big data, there is no standardized methodology to investigate historical migrations, and there are major challenges in quantifying and providing consistent estimates of migration groups. This research aims to tackle these challenges by proposing a replicable approach, consisting of a multi-step algorithm that uses probabilistic analysis to quantify migration and estimate the most likely migrants’ origin based on surname distributions over the centuries. Particularly, the focus is on the Malopolska case study, on both international and Polish migrations to the region from the 1500s to the Great War. The proposed approach to quantification of historical migrations can be a helpful tool to use in combination with existing methodologies to validate and increase the accuracy of the estimates of other case studies in Europe.

Les études contemporaines sur les migrations historiques ont peu à peu démystifié l’idée selon laquelle la population passée était stable et homogène, et ont mis en lumière des connexions dynamiques et complexes à l’échelle de l’Europe entière. Cependant, même à l’ère de la numérisation et des mégadonnées, il n’existe pas de méthodologie standardisée pour étudier les migrations historiques, et il reste de grandes difficultés à quantifier et fournir des estimations cohérentes des groupes de migrants. Cette recherche vise à relever ces défis en proposant une approche reproductible, fondée sur un algorithme en plusieurs étapes qui utilise une analyse probabiliste pour quantifier la migration et estimer l’origine la plus probable des migrants à partir des distributions de noms de famille au fil des siècles. L’étude se concentre en particulier sur le cas de la Malopolska, en analysant les migrations internationales et polonaises vers cette région, du XVIᵉ siècle jusqu’à la Grande Guerre. L’approche proposée pour la quantification des migrations historiques peut constituer un outil utile, à combiner avec les méthodologies existantes, afin de valider et d’affiner les estimations d’autres études de cas en Europe.

Comparative analysis of Ukrainian, Jewish and Polish subjectivities in the interwar Eastern Galicia in the light of Polish statistics. This essay is also a discourse of interethnic and international relations and the eventful political developments.

parte prima iL CLaSSiCO e L'iNattUaLe 15 Spartito per immagini. Pratiche teatrali e problema della visione nel primo cinema di Max Ophuls di Chiara Tognolotti 28 Europa Fugiens. Sguardo e visione nel cinema di Max Ophuls di Adone Brandalise 38 Continuità e rotture nel melodramma di Max Ophuls. Tre donne, tre film: Sans lendemain (1939), Lettera da una sconosciuta (1948), Lola Montès (1955) di Thea Rimini 51 «Non è solamente una storia d'amore». Werther dal romanzo di Goethe al Roman di Max Ophuls di Simone Costagli parte SeCONda La fUNziONe OphULS 65 La signora di tutti da Gotta a Ophuls di Attilio Motta Il volume è stato pubblicato con il contributo del

Korn devoted her debut poetry collection in Yiddish—"Dorf" (Village), published in 1928—to her home village. It is both a collective portrait of the villagers—characterized through the prism of individual experiences, emotions and desires—and also an evocation of a landscape that, for her, was less a backdrop for human experience than an actor influencing how reality is perceived. Korn describes her rural surroundings with the care and understanding of someone who belongs to this world, but simultaneously with the critical eye of one no longer active in it and who looks at the village from outside, with the distance of both space and memory.

“Internet shminternet: Tracing, Navigating, Retrieving” (5 sessions mii-course, in Yiddish)

In the last 10 years Google has abolished its very useful phrase matched and “direct phrase” search combinations, severely limited more relevant returns of searches on Google-books and reduced the scope and extent of its “returns” on Google search proper (much fewer details and sources). Nevertheless, thanks to several new online resources it is possible to mine many sources and details about Yiddish linguistic, literary, socio-cultural, and research sources. This mini course aims to review the major additional online resources and to share and test some effective search strategies to trace, retrieve and navigate the digitalized and virtual sources, or the information about the real sources that weren’t digitized.

אַ סוד פאַר גאַנץ בראָד: ניט אַלץ געפינט זיך אויף דעם אינטערנעט! און דאָך אַז מע זוכט מיט קאָפּ, געפינט מען. צומאָל מער און צו־מאָל ווייניקער (צי גאָר ווייניק). די לעצטע 10 יאָר האָט דער גוגל און דער אַזוי־גערופענער גוגל-בוקס שטאַרק באַגרענעצט אי דעם אויפן פון אויסזוכן אינפאָרמאַציע אי די אינפאָרמאַציע גופא. אָבער עס האָבן זיך באַוויזן אַ ריי נײַע קוועלן, רעסורסן און אופנים אויפצוזוכן אינפאָרמאַציע (ביכער, ווערק, פּערסאָנאַליאַ, צײַטשריפטן, פאָלקלאָר, פאָרשונגען). אונדז גייט דאָ אָן נאָר אין מקורים צו זוכן, נישטערן און אַנטדעקן די שפראַכלעכע, ליטעראַרישע און וויי־ווײַט מעגלעך אויך קולטור־היסטאָרישע אינפאָרמאַציע און מקורים וואָס זענען צוגענגלעך דיגיטאַליזירטערהייט אויפן אינטערנעט, אָדער די פּרטים וועגן וואו מע קאָן זיי געפינען אין דער רעאַלער וועלט.

Mayer Bretzfeld, who died in 1823 in Schnaittach near Nuremberg, was the last incumbent of the oldest provincial rabbinate in Bavaria. The recent edition of a trove of family letters from his estate, discovered in the local archives, makes it possible to recover the experiences and writing habits of non-elite Jews from a rural environment in which premodern patterns of education, economy, gender relations, and Western Yiddish language had largely remained intact. This article focuses on the registers of emotional selfexpression that men and women mobilized to convince the rabbi of their respect, indignation, love, or distress.

I am grateful to share this work on the 18th of Tammuz 5785, just after the beginning of the Three Weeks — that heavy time leading toward the remembrance of Jerusalem’s destruction. Among many languages I speak, Yiddish remains deeply my mother tongue. I first learned to write it when I was five years old, from a Jewish midwife who had miraculously escaped the Warsaw Ghetto through a tunnel, having lost all her family — as I did mine. She taught me what Yiddish truly is: a language that breathes memory, defiance, and tenderness. A few from my Ukrainian family who survived later supported the return of Jews to the Land of Israel, since the time of the First Zionist Congress in Basel.

For me, Yiddish is a soul-language. As a professor of comparative and psycholinguistics — and also of Talmud — I see in it the fragile seam where language breaks and faith begins to speak. Yiddish, to me, is not a closed inheritance but a living movement. I use it even in the Orthodox Church, where I was officially appointed and recognized to serve in the Jewish languages. Yiddish moves through the streets of Israel, across Slavic and Middle Eastern spaces — and across worlds. It carries a lexicon of survival, a voice beyond voices. It is not a path of endless mourning, but of birth after mourning, of presence, of honoring what remains of God, as Avrom Sutzkever once wrote. These poems, now read in many circles, are born of that breath. May they serve as a midwife-language — a whispered path toward what may yet be born.

Alexander Avraham Winogradsky Frenkel
(Avraham Ben Baruch)

The focus of this symposium is the public presence of the Yiddish language. Our goal is to explore the visibility of Yiddish in public spaces across Eastern and Western Europe and in the territories of Yiddish-speaking diasporas, as well as examine its role in signage, memorials, storefronts, and other contexts as a marker of cultural identity, memory, and community. Through interdisciplinary discussions, we aim to uncover how Yiddish has both shaped and been shaped by the public sphere, connecting past and present narratives around the globe.

The Russian Soviet writer Boris Pilnyak (1894–1938) and the Yiddish playwright Peretz Hirshbein (1879–1948) met in Japan in 1926. According to authoritative opinion, Pilnyak's well-known book, The Roots of the Japanese Sun, is considered “one of the most significant essays ever written by a European about Japan,” and his visit to Japan “one of the most remarkable cultural events in Japan’s 1926 intellectual life.” The striking parallels between Pilnyak’s notes and Hirshbein’s Yiddish essays from the same period suggest the formation of a kind of “literary duet” between these two gifted authors during their time in Japan.

The Jewish Autonomous Region, more known in the world as Birobidzhan, is located north of the narrow strip of land dividing Chinese Manchuria in the west from the Pacific Ocean and the Japanese islands in the east. Jewish settlement of the area was a unique experiment that developed under unusual political, economic, and cultural circumstances. From the project’s beginning in 1928, the region boasted an education network in which Yiddish, the language of the European Ashkenazi Jews, was the language of instruction. Along with nurseries and schools, colleges trained teachers and medics as well as metallurgical, mining, and railway engineers. Dozens of enthusiastic journalists, writers, painters, actors and other artists, mostly very young people, went to Birobidzhan to join the project. The Birobidzhaner Shtern (Birobidzhan Star) newspaper launched in 1930 in Yiddish and is still produced today. A Yiddish theater opened in 1934. An opera house, university, and other Yiddish-oriented institutions were in planning stages too.
As a historian of literature, specifically Yiddish literature, I am particularly interested in how Yiddish writers involved in the project incorporated local Asian cultural materials into their writings and activities. Additionally, I am intrigued by how they attempted to integrate themselves and their audiences into the new geographical and cultural context.

This article discusses a new finding -the first known Yiddish translation of a literary piece by the famous 16th-century Meistersinger Hans Sachs (1494-1576). The translation was copied, shortly after the original piece was printed in German, as part of a manuscript that includes various lists on various topics copied by a traveling Jew named Uri ben Simon. The examination of the translation and its context in Uri ben Simon's codex are used as an example of inter-cultural exchange in the early modern German space.

When the Maskil Ayzik-Meyer Dik (ca. 1807-1893) retooled as a kritiker, a writer of satire, he did so by keeping it local. Most effectively, he exposed the evils and failings of the Jewish body politic by locating his satires in and around the crowded shulhoyf, the Great Synagogue and Courtyard, of his native Vilnius. Endowed with a phenomenal memory and a wicked sense of humour, there was no end to the gallery of schnorrers, shnorrerkes, rogues and misfits whom he could rescue from out of the recent, unenlightened past. But to speak for Jewish Vilna the way that Eugène Sue had spoken for Paris meant learning a new set of skills. To write popular fiction meant to draw upon the dialogical nature of language itself: the way low-lives and charlatans mimicked the speech of the learned class, while uncensored speech betrayed their boorishness, voracious appetites and debauchery; the way the speech of servant girls trafficked in the speech of their mistresses and outperformed them. Who spoke for the shulhoyf was the folksshrayber, the popular writer. Speech was dialogical, because to become a responsible folksshrayber required that one allow others to do the talking. Willy-nilly, and despite his professed ideology, Dik became the first writer to turn Ayalon-Linove-Vilna into the natural habitat of Yiddish.

tested to the limit. As we follow his writings in chronological order, in a time span of escalating violence, we see an ever-growing tension between what is being narrated and the way it is narrated. The greater the pain, the greater the discrepancy. This, strange to say, is the stuff of his humor. By drawing on folk tradition, on concepts of normalcy and on models of communication, Sholem Aleichem perfected an art of the incongruous to take on the vicissitudes of modern times. It was a comic

רבי אלימלך וייסבלום מליז'נסק (צדיק חסידי)
נכתב עבור האנציקלופדיה העברית על ידי צבי לשם

רבי אלימלך (1717-1787), הידוע כ"רבי אלימלך מליז'נסק" וכמחברו של הספר החסידי הקלאסי "נועם אלימלך", היה בין התלמידים הבולטים של המגיד הגדול, רבי דוב בער ממזריץ', ואחר מכן צדיק מרכזי בדור השלישי של החסידות, ובין הראשונים להביא את בשורת החסידות מאוקרינה לפולין/גליציה. הוא התפרסם כבעל מופתים וספרו נחשב בין החסידים לספר "סגולי" עד עצם היום הזה, והוא מהווה אחד מספרי היסוד של הגות החסידית בדורותיו הראשונים. הספר יצא לאור לאחר מותו על ידי בנו, והוא עוסק רבות במרכזיות של "הצדיק" בהווי החסידית. יש שרואים ברבי אלימלך "אביו" של מוסד ה"צדיקות" בחסידות. רוב הצדיקים המפורסמים בפולין בדור הרביעי היו תלמידיו, וגם חלק מצאצאיו הפכו לאדמו"רים ידועים.

This is an eleven-page article by Ben-H.ayyim proving that the book in Hebrew published by Macdonald with the designation Chronicle II is not ancient. This article is misrepresented by Pummer in his book of 2016 "The Samaritans: A Profile". Pummer changes what Ben-H.ayyim wrote and attributes to him the opposite of what he said. He goes out of his way to deceive the reader by quoting what Florentin wrote about what Ben-H.ayyim wrote about SOMETHING ELSE. By working hard to falsify what Ben-H.ayyim wrote, Pummer covered up blunders put in print by other authors and gave the impression that Ben-H.ayyim agreed with them. Pummer did not give an adequate reference to the article, so that readers had no way of checking what he said about it. Pummer understood the article: he had previously represented it in only a couple of words but accurately in a book called "Die Samaritaner", edited by him and Dexinger. Ben-H.ayyim was conveniently dead by 2016. I reproduce Ben-H.ayyim's article as a service to mankind. The reference is Leshonenu, vol. 35, 5731 (1970 - 1971), parts 3 and 4, pp. 292 to 302. See also the article "The Transmission of the Samaritan Joshua-Judges" by Ruairidh MacMhanainn Bóid, which gives more evidence supporting Ben-H.ayyim's argument. Pummer had this article by Bóid in hand and used it at a conference in Leiden, but did not mention it in his book, not even to mention the title. It is not safe to trust any current publications on anything to do with Samaritan historical writing without checking. There is a lot of ignorant invention, and sometimes falsification of data and suppression of data.

A word of caution. Ben-H.ayyim made a serious blunder out of inexcusable ignorance. He said it would still be useful to go through this concoction to see if there were any snippets of old tradition. He said this because he thought one source was the book by Abu 'l-Fateh. used directly, and it can be seen that in a few places this concoction departs in one detail from Abu 'l-Fateh. He did not realise that the compiler had not used the book by Abu 'l-Fateh. directly, but had translated a book in Arabic finished in 1875 called the Comprehensive History At-Târîkh ash-Shâmil by the famous scholar Khad.ir bin Ish.âq or Fînâas ban Yês.âaq. This book is a compilation of all the Samaritan historical writings surviving in the 19th century, with the bulk being the work by Abu 'l-Fateh. Amazingly, Ben-H.ayyim had never heard of this book. There are dozens of mss. of this book. There are more mss. of it than you can shake a stick at. The first mention of it in print was by A. S. Yahuda in 1908, though he did not quote the title. Ben-H.ayyim seems to have joined the long queue of people that have mentioned Yahuda's article without reading it. There is a description by Bóid in the article mentioned above, where the title is given. (He tells me he was highly surprised to find out that no-one else knew about it. He had listed numerous mss. of it in his book "Principles of Samaritan Halachah", published in 1989). Now obviously if there are any details of disagreement with Abu 'l-Fateh., it would be more useful to look at what the original Arabic book by Fînâas says. There is a systematic effort to conceal the existence of this book. The reason for the effort is that when it became impossible to maintain the fiction that this concoction was old, the next story was that it drew on old lost works in Hebrew to some extent. That was done for years on end so that publications by Crown, Stenhouse, and others would not look completely ignorant. As part of this effort, there is no mention of the Comprehensive History by Pummer in the book mentioned above, while he expressly says he has listed every Samaritan historical writing. Pummer knew of the Comprehensive History from Bóid's article and Yahuda's article. Any attempt at making the existence of this book generally known is met with irrational anger. Well, perhaps not irrational, but dishonest. Either way, there is suppression of data and falsification of data.

CALL FOR PAPERS
II Workshop (Online) in the framework of the DFG project, “The Jewish Library in Argentina: Carlos M. Grünberg's Cosmopolitan Poetry and Polyglot Translation”, directed by Dr. Cynthia Gabbay,
      and hosted by Prof. Liliana R. Feierstein’s Chair in Transnational Jewish Studies at the Department of History and Theory of Culture, Humboldt Universität Berlin.
Subject: “Modern and Contemporary Jewish Translation and Multilingualism: Practices, History, and Semiotics / Prácticas, historia y semiótica de la traducción y el multilingüismo judaicos en la época moderna y contemporánea / Pratiques, histoire et sémiotique de la traduction et du multilinguisme juifs à l'époque moderne et contemporaine”.
Date: July 29-30, 2025
Place: Online
Lecturing languages: English, Romance and Jewish Languages
Assistant: Maia Avruj
Please send your proposal (up to 300 words) and a short bio
before June 29, 2025.
to: cynthia.gabbay@hu-berlin.de ; jewishtranslation@gmail.com ; maia.avruj@gmail.com

THE FOREIGN, THE OWN AND THE UNCERTAINTY OF THE TRANSLATOR In the cultural studies-oriented translation theories, the terms “foreignization” and “domestication” are used primarily to describe translation processes. Since Venuti’s resolute plaidoyer against the invisible translator, the power potential released by these strategies has been probed intensively.1 In this paper, I will examine the impact of domesticating/foreignizing strategies on the interpretative processes carried out by readers (for this topic cf. Zhong Yong 2014). To this end, the notion of domestication will be broadened to readers’ interpretation processes, which will be analysed on the basis of the Czech translation of the Yiddish fable Der lokh fun beygl un meshene kneplekh by Eliezer Shteynbarg. I assume that in spite of the indicators of foreignness, the readers will tend to adapt the text to their own cultural background and horizon of experience and, on a second level, domesticate2 the structures and culture...

In most of Y.H. Brenner's fictional works the protagonists wander nervously between geographical planes. In two short stories, 'Paʿamayim' [Twice] and 'Shama' [Over There], both written and published in 1903, the heroes' movements through various landscapes are a projection of a psychological process, one that stems from each hero's desire to shape his inner self and integrate it with his exterior reality. This article offers a psychoanalytic analysis that attempts to describe these geographical and psychological movements and their complex interrelation. The heroes of both stories are children whose primary unconscious wish is for a symbiotic reunion with a parental figure. However, fulfillment of this wish is complicated by the family dynamic and high parental expectations; rather, the heroes find themselves torn between their parents' demands and their own fantasy of a symbiotic connection. Unable to resolve this complicated situation, both heroes act out their longings and frustrations by moving from one geographical site to another. Using some of Donald Winnicott's psychoanalytic concepts, this article focuses on both the thematic and structural dimensions of the relationship between inner and outer journeys. Winnicott's concept of 'potential space' and his analysis of the function of play in children's lives is used in the article as a prism through which to examine the interrelation between reality and the inner world as it is experienced by each protagonist.