Insight into Yiddish language and culture

books:


	• The Meaning of Yiddish (Contraversions: Jews and Other Differenc) Benjamin Harshav Stanford University Press, 1999 - 236 pages average customer review:based on 1 review view larger image
	for more information click here

Insight into Yiddish language and culture

In The Meaning Of Yiddish, Benjamin Harshav (Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at Yale University) has written an impressive work of scholar erudition and insight into the major aspects of the Yiddish language and culture. Professor Harshav reveals where Yiddsh came from and what it has to offer contemporary Jewish culture, even as it is starting to die out with the passing of the generations of ghettoized Eastern Europe Jewry. The Meaning Of Yiddish is an outstanding recommendation for any personal, Temple, or academic Yiddish studies collection.

for more information click here

With a rare combination of erudition and insight, the author investigates the major aspects of Yiddish language and culture, showing where Yiddish came from and what it has to offer, even as it ceases to be a ?living? language.

Reviews

?Harshav?s book is a first-class study of Yiddish as both language and culture, rich with linguistic detail and historical insight, expert in its literary analysis and judgments. I recommend it enthusiastically.?

?Irving Howe,

Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York

?The Meaning of Yiddish is the most important contribution to the study of Yiddish language and literature in recent times.?

?Chana Kronfeld,

University of California, Berkeley

?The Meaning of Yiddish is explicitly intended for ?readers who bring to it no previous knowledge, only curiosity.? . . . ?My central question,? Harshav writes in the preface, ?is: Yiddish: what was it? What kind of world was it? How can we read the intersections of meaning its texts seem to provide? How did it lead in and out of Jewish history, moving between the internal Jewish world and the cultures of Christian Europe and America?? I know of no other single book in any language which could respond to these questions by conveying to the uninitiated . . . such a richly textured profile of the nature and dynamics of both the Yiddish language and its literature. It is a remarkable feat of high popularization, written with great flair and without a hint of pedantry, its examples always to the point and often memorable in themselves. . . . The book should be read by all who are interested in language, in literature, and in the modern Jewish experience.?

?Times Literary Supplement

for more information click here