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A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Welcome to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. My name is Alex Weiser. I'm the Director of Public Programs of yivo. And we're so thrilled to have you all here today for this event. New Trends in YIVO Scholarship. This event is part of YIVO's centennial celebration. We've had a variety of events about YIVO's history, about important scholarship and collecting initiatives and projects that have happened at yivo, and this event is a part of that initiative. Coming up, we have a big exhibition featuring three sections, one with treasures from the collections, one that tells the story of the Paper Brigade, and one that tells the story of the Shashun Library. And those are gonna be opening on June 22, which coincides with our YIVO in America conference, which is going to be a day and change of discussion of yivo's work here in New York or where it's been headquartered since 1940. But going back to today, a big important part of the story of YIVO is not just all the different continuing work that it does, but the way that it's old work is used by scholars in different ways. So we're really thrilled to have a wonderful group of scholars with us to talk to us about their new work, which touches on some of yivo's old work. So it's a very interesting event for us. And just to dive in, I want to introduce the moderator, the chair of today's event, Jessica Curzain. Jessica Kurzain is the Associate Instructional professor of Yiddish at the University of Chicago. She's the editor in Chief for ingiveb, a journal of Yiddish Studies. Curzain has published widely, including literary translations of three works of Miriam Karpalova. Karzain has been a translation fellow and a Pedagogy Fellow at the Yiddish Book center and serves on the Academic Advisory Board of the Jewish Women's Archive. She earned her PhD in Yiddish studies from Columbia University in 2017. Jessica, thank you so much for doing this.
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Thank you so much for having me. It's really a delight to have the opportunity to learn about all the wonderful work that these scholars are doing. So just a little bit of housekeeping before we get started. If you have a question at any point in the presentations, feel free to put your question in the Q and A. The way we'll do this, each person will will give their talk, and at the end of all three talks, then it'll be time for Q and A and I'll ask some questions, and I'll also read the questions from the audience. So. But you don't have to wait until all of the papers are over to post your questions. We'll just hold on to them until the end. So feel free to ask them at any time. I'm going to answer. Introduce Kendall Kanl Kiak is an Assistant professor at the Jewish Studies Department of the University of Rockla, Poland, and has been a Prinz Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the at the center for Jewish History and Soslin Family Fellow at the Jack Joseph and Morton Mandel center for the Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. I won't read the names of the publications because I can't read Polish, but he has been published quite widely and I'm very excited to hear him speak about his work today. So I will turn it over to you, Camille.
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Yes, thank you. So thank you for having me here. It's really an honor. After spending two separate months in YIVO working on Evo materials as a PhD student, then after being in York as a postdoc as a Prince Foundation Fellow, also spending one year in yivo, I have the honor now to speak about my work that was possible thanks to the YIVO resources, the amazing YIVO materials and in my short presentation I want to speak about two things. First of all I want to say how the one particular group of YIVO materials that is the EVO autobiographies of Jewish youth informed and enabled me to write my dissertation and subsequent book. And secondly, I want to speak speak about the potential of EVA autobiographies for the future cutting edge research. So as I mentioned, I wrote a doctoral dissertation that was devoted to the socialization culture and political culture of Jewish Viewfinder Poland. And on the basis of this I published Polish language book that now in February 2026 will be published in English as Modern Radical Politics, Culture and Socialization of the Jewish Youth in Interwar Poland. And my main problem, the main thing that interested me was to study the very specific one and only actually the unique generation of Polish Jews, the only one that from the one side grew up and was living in Poland when Poland before the Holocaust was still one of the centers of the world Jewish civilization and at the same time the only civilization that confronted modern nationalist or national oriented Polish state because the generations before grew up in the multinational Habsburg or Russian empires. Now it was the only generation that confronted the Polish state, the modern Polish state. But at the same time Poland was still one of the centers of the Jewish civilization. And in my dissertation I dealt with problems such as conditions of growing up in statues and large Polish cities in Jewish families, education daily cultures including various language cultures of Polish Jews, relations with the state and Christian non Jewish citizens, internal class and stratification divisions inside Jewish society, state and popular antisemitism. Finally, Jewish political awareness, political engagement and political culture. And what I want to underline that besides me, there were many scholars who dealt with these topics used in Kiba autobiographies and other evil resources, including such seminal scholars like Ezra Mendelssohn at Vas Elser, ido, Basok, Ronayon and many others. But none of us actually had explored any of these problems to the final extent. Meaning that there is still a lot to be researched and said about all these spheres of Jewish life. Working on the EVO autobiographies and why these are such amazing sources. They were collected in free autobiographical contests organized in 1932, 34 and 39. And at the time that I was in YIVO, altogether more than 600 autobiographies were collected in the contest. At the time that I was in YIVO, 384 were accessible. But now I think even more and more. Around 70% of them were written in Yiddish, 20% in Polish and around 5% in Hebrew. And I used 100 of these in my own doctoral work. And it is important to say that almost all the Jewish miliez and stratas are represented of interweb Poland are represented in these autobiography selections. Jewish society from central Poland, from so called eastern borderlands, both from Litvak and Hasidic area and from Galicia, rich and poor, Polish speaking, Yiddish speaking Zionists and Zionists, et cetera, et cetera. And maybe the two groups that are not so much not represented in this context. One, are these Jews who felt already as Poles of Jewish origin or Poles of Mosaic faith, that is did not have the Jewish national or ethno religious identification. And secondly, the group that I would call faithful ultra Orthodox, including part of the Hasidim. But again, many of the young people who were still in a part of Orthodox society, but they had some problems with their Orthodoxy or they were struggling with their Orthodoxy, send their autobiographies for the EVO contest. So we have amazing also glimpse into the Orthodox life via or through these autobiographies. So to sum up Eva, autobiographies give us unique access to almost all dimensions of Jewish life seen from the perspective of young Jews who grew up in interwar Poland. And what is also important to underline is to say that they give us a non alitary view from below that is not from the press reports, not from the political party reports or cultural organizations. How adults look at the youth, but exactly how youth was looking upon itself. And here are just a few examples of protagonists of the people, young people who wrote these autobiographies. So, for example, boy from Belzer Tzadik family trying to pursue both Orthodox and secular education. L trying to retain her Orthodox religious allegiance but also become a teacher. Son of Lutma's from settled in central Poland with strong resentment towards traditional Jewish culture. Traditional Jewish social hierarchy conditions of peripheral Polish capitalism joining the communist movement. Finally, girl from upper class acculturated Polish language family joining Hekalots and left of Zionist movement. People from Bundes families, people from small peddler families who joined the Bund. And so, as I said, people from all possible milias. And in two slides, in two quotations, I wanted to show you how big potential is kind of given by every actually autobiography. And you can see it only by this very few tiny quotations. First quotation from autobiography of Gershon Pipa actually brat of Shmuel Zandville Piper, one of Drivo Zamlers that was described in Itzik Gottesman book on indie shotography. His less known young brother writes in his autobiography. I was wondering in which language to write my autobiography in Yiddish in Hebrew or simply in Polish. There are things that I think about in Yiddish, in short that they are issues relating to my everyday life. I think about Eretz Isle and matters related to Zionism in Hebrew. There are also a few things I think about in school. Polish history and general history, world geography, etc. I finally decided to write my autobiography in Yiddish because at least half of it would be about my daily life. And some of you probably heard or read the seminal article of Honesh Meruk regarding Polish Jewish culture as a language poly system. And usually we kind of think about these Polish Yiddish and Hebrew systems like working, being in relation to one another, but kind of being autonomous, but actually studying evolve topographies. We can see how these systems work in a life of particular people. And somehow different people use different languages in different social dimensions. Also I used evo topographies to study the class and stratification accessibility towards different languages depending from which social strata A young person came, for example, for whom it was really accessible to learn modern Hebrew or traditional Hebrew, for whom it was accessible only to speak Yiddish with the parents like the simple kind of traditional Yiddish and who had really ability or possibility to learn secular high version of Yiddish language. So all this is provided or enabled by close study of FIFA autobiographers. Very different quotation from another author. Fate of the young workers. Spiritual and material tragedy. Young person starts to learn his trade at the age of 12. Studies to become a tailor or a shoemaker. Other occupations are hardly accessible in the small. Shtetl parents need to pay for the children occupational education. Despite that, while studying they are working in the workshops of their masters. Poor papas and mamas strongly believe that their son will become professional. Shtetl parents do not have any other hope. Anti Semitic policy threw them onto their knees. They cannot engage in the trade anymore. Peasants have already their own merchants. Commerce is already not in the Jewish hands. Stole trade was eradicated by the great boycott which was strongly felt in the country. Parents became superfluous people. So they pass all their hopes onto their children. When the child is 10 or 12 years old, already needs to earn money for his family. So in this one quotation you can really see three crucial phenomena happening in Polish Jewish or in general in Polish life in the beginning of 1930s. First, this is the restratification of Jewish love enforced by the conditions of interop Poland. And I guess Nicola will have something to say about that, because the EVO Economic and statistical section is very much working about this on this program. Secondly, this altobrickian field was written in 1934 and it was the peak of the prolonged consequences of the Great 1929 World Economic Crisis that was felt in Poland and Polish countryside much longer than in US or in Germany. And it very much affected also Jewish provincial economy. And this effect of the world crisis was only boosted by the state discrimination of the Jews on the job market. And the great boycott campaign in Chotus by the far right that also included anti Jewish violence or violence against the Christians who bought or had or sustained any economic relations with the Jews. And how it really works in the Jewish life in the Jewish province. We can see studying this autobiography of Haimberl and many and many others. So to sum up, I wanted to say that everything, almost everything, what is important in Polish Jewish life in last 10 years before the Holocaust is addressed. And you can study it from the uniform perspective using the EVO material. And finally, in last five minutes, I want to speak about some of the things that were, at least for now understudied. But again, EVO autobiographies provide amazing perspectives for the research on this topic. And first, fascinating problem that I want to mention that is under research, I think, concerning interupoland in interwar Jewish Poland at Least is the issue of Jewish transnationalism of Polish Jewry in the 1930s. And again, Evo auto topographies provide a fascinating glimpse of how young Polish Jews perceived the Jewish world outside Poland and how they tried or their families were in connection with it. They wrote about and their cousins in Palestine or United States States. They wrote about Arab Jewish conflict in Middle east and how it affects the Polish Jewish communities. They wrote about help of American Jewish organizations towards the Polish Jewry or fate of the Jews in the Soviet Union. Finally, they wrote about their hopes for the emigration. And there are already some authors who kind of use EVA autobiographies to see to study Polish Jewish community as the transnational community. One work that I should put here its cover, but I forgot to do it is Hebrew work of Ron Iona Kolamni Halutzim about the Polish movement, how much it is transnational movement and how much it works between Poland and Palestine. So in order to understand what's happening in Poland, you actually need to understand what's happening in the land of Israel and and in other dimensions of Jewish life. What is happening in us. Very much of course affects poverty. And one of the groundbreaking works who kind of start to deal with these issues in this way is a very recent book of Kenmore that you see here on the presentation and out chosen People in which actually showed how. How again Polish Jews are transnational community, how much thoughts about immigration are strong among police Jewry. And also actually he deconstructed this notion of that kind of. I kind of very much advertised or kind of pushed forward in my own book that. Political culture of Polish Jews in 1930s was mainly about the radical politics. But also what Ken found also using EVA autobiographies and other evil resources is that there were some new thoughts kind of deconstructing or kind of new ways of political thinking emerging among Polish Jews and that we can understand them only from the standpoint of transnational lens. And in my strong opinion, book of Knos and Aganiva autobiographies provide us fascinating glimpse of into important kind of a point or moment in the longer phenomenon that is the ATS Europe. That is what's happening from 1870s, that is the abandoning or departure from Europe of Eastern European Jewish community and Eastern Europe stopping to be a Jewish center already before a process that already starts before the Holocaust. Finally, regarding the Holocaust, I want to say that evil autobiographies and other materials provide a fascinating input into the Jewish Christian relations before the Holocaust. That is in last 10 years, before the Holocaust in last decade that enable us to much better understand the dynamics of Jewish Christian relations during the Holocaust. And here you can see two books addressing these problems in two very different ways, that is Brutalands of Timothy Snyder and Anatomy of Genocide of Omer Bartov. And not to go on regarding that, I want to say that studying. If the problems that they study in a book would only approach from the standpoint of autobiographical materials of the Jews and written in the 1930s, not the memoirs that were written after the Holocaust, they would enable us to much deeper understand the radical modernity of 1930s, the impact of radical nationalism on neutral relations between Polish Jews and Ukrainians or other Central Eastern Europeans. And this provides us, would provide us a much better understanding of their relationship during the Nazi genocide that took place in this part of Europe during the Second World War. And actually, this is what I want to do in my next project. So at the end, I wanted to say that if you once start engagement with the resources and materials, it becomes a lifetime thing. You never finish with that. Thank you very much.
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C
Thank you very much. That was really interesting and great place to start to kind of get a sense of what it means to look at material from the YIVO archive and what kinds of worlds it opens up for you. So we'll turn next to Nicolas Valois and I'll just read biography first. So, Nicolas Valois current research focuses on the history of Jewish statistics or Jewish social sciences, which refers to the important development of statistical studies of Jewish populations that began to emerge in Europe and and the United states in the second half of the 19th century. He's interested in the theoretical influences of this current of research in the way in which it gradually developed into an autonomous intellectual field. His work is therefore related to the history of economics and statistics, but also to cultural history, since he's more generally interested in economic representations and stereotypes associated with Jews in economic thought. His previous research was in the history of neuroeconomics and behavioral economics. So, Nicolas, I'll let you take it away.
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A
Thank you, Jessica. Hello everyone, and thank you so much for inviting me to be part of this panel. So my presentation today focuses on a specific aspect of YIVO scholarship, which is the Economic Statistical section, also known in Yiddish as the ECSTATS section. So this section was one of the four original divisions of the YIVO, alongside philology, pedagogy and psychology and history. And this extat section was at the time one of the most important departments of the GiveU, but maybe nowadays it is a little less known or studied, so that's why I think it's interesting to focus on it. And I try to argue that it was also quite different from the rest of the institute, mostly because it was built on a pre existing academic domain, what was known at the time as Jewish statistics or. Or in German, Judische Statistik. And this difference raises important questions from the perspective of the history of science, and particularly the use of minority languages in scholarly spaces. How do such languages enter the academic sphere? What kinds of challenges or tensions arise when trying to impose alternative linguistic standards within institutional frameworks? These are the main questions that I will try to address now, and I will also briefly mention, but not fully explore other topics such as issues of race, gender, journalism, Jewish political life. And I can discuss any of those further during the Q and A if you are interested. So, just a few words about what I mean about Jewish statistics. This expression refers to a domain of knowledge that had its intellectual roots in the German tradition of statistik, which was closely tied to what was known at the time as Staats Wissenschaften. So the sciences of the states. And in that tradition, statistics didn't mean mathematical analysis as we understand it today. It referred instead to a very large descriptive overviews of society, covering subjects as varied as agriculture, professions, climate, customs, languages, legal systems and more. And these descriptions might include numbers or not, but they were always mathematically, let's say unsophisticated. So if you are allergic to mathematics, don't worry, you can follow this presentation. And this legacy is clearly reflected in the YIVO statistical publication and journals. So for instance, here in the table of contents of one of the section's journals, you can find articles not only on economics, economic output, occupational structure, but also on Jewish criminality, Jewish education, Jewish literacy, Jewish migration and so forth. So a very wide range of topics that in many ways anticipate what we now call the social sciences. So these journals were quantitative in the sense that they included many statistical tables, but they were filled with numbers but without mathematical complexity. So there was no equations, no strange mathematical symbols, just swirls and columns of data with basic additions and subtractions. Over the course of the 19th century, the field became more and more quantitative, largely thanks to the growing variability of census data. In both Germany and the Russian Empire, state census categorized Jews as a distinct group, and this created new sources of data on Jewish population. This data began to be studied by Jewish scholars themselves, and the field started to institutionalize at the turn of the century. In 1905, an association of Jewish statistics and a scientific journal were founded in Berlin, the Zeitschrift for Statistik Undemographie dar Luden. This journal declined in the 1920s, but a new publication appeared in 1925, the bletter for Yiddish Demographie UN statistics. This was a Yiddish journal which was co edited by Yakov Leshinski, who would later become head of the YIVO's Economic Statistical Section. So now I'm speaking of the Vivo. Don't worry, my presentation will be on the YIVO. So in 1926 the YIVO's Economic Statistical Section was officially created. And its first goal actually was to publish a new journal which was called the Schriftenfahr Economic Unstatistik and which was conceived as the successor of the bletter, which itself had been conceived as the successor of the Zeitschrit. And also many contributors of this journal wrote for the three journals. And there was even talk at some point of merging the Yiddish language and the German language publication. So once again the idea here is that the section did not emerge from nothing. It was part of a chain of continuity between 1926 and 1933. The section was based in Berlin, unlike the rest of the Giveaw, which was in Vilna. But the section quickly ran into financial trouble, like the rest of the institute. Also in 1933, Leshinsky and his assistants Yisroel Koralnik were arrested by the Nazis. They were then released, but they were forced to emigrate. So between 1933-3637 the section was in limbo before being re established in Warsaw. And it was in Warsaw in this later period that the section was in its most productive phase publishing a new journal called so the key point I want to emphasize here is that the YIVO's Economic Statistical Section was built upon a pre existing research tradition and one in which German had been the dominant language of publication and communication. In contrast, the Economic Statistical Section and the YIVO more broadly made a deliberate linguistic commitments to Yiddish. They wanted to publish scholarship about Yiddish, but also in Yiddish. And here I want to explore the implication of this decision. This choice to use Yiddish as the medium for economic scholarship or social science scholarship, rather than German, Polish or English. And first of all, it should be noted that this linguistic commitment created many challenges in the day to day operations of of the section. One of the most pressing issues was that some of the philanthropic organizations which funded Yiddish statistical journals insisted that these journals should be published in English or German instead instead of Yiddish. And they were arguing that the use of Yiddish as A language of publication prevented to reach a broader international audience and to influence a larger public opinion. Of course, this kind of pressure was not unique to the Economic Statistical Section. It applied to the Yivo as a whole. And that's why the YIVO eventually developed a principle of linguistic hierarchy, meaning that Yiddish was the preferred language for publication, but not the only one. And for instance, the Yivo accepted to publish translation into German as long as the original text had been published in Yiddish first. But I argue in my research that these linguistic tensions were perhaps more acute within the Economic Statistical Section for at least three reasons. First, because of the nature of its research topics, the section was very closely connected to Jewish relief and philanthropic organization, who often wanted their funding to support publications accessible to also to a non Yiddish reading audience. Second, several of the section contributors had very strong academic ties to German speaking academia. And they were probably more concerned, I think, than other sections with the international academic visibility. That's what Leshinsky said in one of his letters to the YIVO headquarters in Vilna. He said, we need foreigners to understand what we are working on. And I think that was an important point of the section. And third, the use also of the Hebrew Alphabet in Yiddish raised technical challenges for the publication for the edition of statistical charts and quantitative data. But it is also important to note that Yiddish offered some benefits as well, notably the fact that most, not all, but most contributors of the section were of course native Yiddish speakers. And also, despite what it is often assumed about the proximity between Yiddish and German, these Yiddish speaking authors were not necessarily proficient in other languages such as German. So, for instance, Liebmann Hirsch was then a very well known demographer and member of the section, specifically said in one of his letters that he was not able to make conference or to write directly in German, even though he was a native Yiddish speaker. So the section, I think, looked for a balance between these constraints and benefits. And as a result it established what I call a linguistic compromise. And an important part of this compromise concerned the translation of some parts of its journals and into foreign languages, non Yiddish languages in the journals of the section. So you can see here a table showing the presence of foreign languages in the journals. So the basic observation here is that all of these journals had parts in foreign languages so that non Yiddish readers could have at least partial access to the content. And I think it's interesting to compare in this regard two journals, the Schriften, the Economist Schriften, here you can see on the right, which was published by the yivo and Virtchaft um Leben, another statistical journal which was not published by the yivo. Both journals were very similar in form and content. They had similar contributors, they received funding from similar organizations, they published similar content on similar topics. But as you can see, VirtualBen on the left side was fully in Yiddish, Unlike the Schriften, where you had the front page both in Yiddish and German, you had also the table of contents in both languages, and you had also German summaries at the end. So, once again, this clearly confirms that the economic statistical section was concerned with the academic visibility. And similar comparisons can be made with other Yiddish statistical journals that were published at the time by. By Soviet academies or by the bun. I think that there was, however, some limits to these linguistic compromises, and one of the most important came from the design of statistical charts, because the problem was that including multiple languages within a single chart creates significant editorial challenges. The basic problem is one of visual clarity, because the more languages you try to include, as you can see, for instance, in this table, which came from a Yiddish statistical journal, the harder it becomes to ensure that data remain readable and well structured. Now, this issue, of course, wasn't entirely new. You can find similar problems, for instance, in the Polish census. You can see an extract here. And this census was the results were printed in both Polish and French. So if you look at this extract, for instance, you can also see how multilingual layouts can undermine the readability of statistical information. But once again, I think it was a matter of degree in the sense that the challenge was perhaps even greater in journals such as Judicial Economic, where you can see an extract here. And because the editors didn't just want to publish in two languages, but here they aim for three. Yiddish, Polish and English. And also one of these languages was with Yiddish, so written with the Hebrew Alphabet, which made the typographic and editorial work even more complicated. Let me now very briefly turn to some other dimensions of the topic that are no less important, so I can discuss further in the Q and A. So one of them is the issue of race and race science. So the general idea here is that the YIVO as a whole moved away quite quickly from race theory and race science, but the economic statistical section remained more ambivalent on the topic. So, on the one hand, you had leaders, such as Max Weinreich in particular, who understood very early on that race science was not just about ideology, about political ideology, but it was also a form of knowledge, an epistemological structure that had to be fought against and criticized from the perspective of the social sciences. Also, obviously after 1933, after the Nazis came to power, racial antisemitism became a foundational component of of the German Nazi state ideology. So the intellectual abstraction of race theory and race science sharply decreased within the YIVO as a whole. On the other hand, the position of the EXTAT section was more ambiguous. And one important reason was that the German academia had long been the intellectual and scientific model for the section, which for this reason was closely tied to the German academic field. And this mattered because Germany was at the time the academic center of race science and race theory. And also the main journals in Jewish statistics had long been contributing to race theory. They published a lot of articles on Jewish on the question of so called Jewish racial purity, for instance, in the 1920s, this started to shift. You can see in the YIVO statistical journal more and more publications that are critical toward the idea of racial heredity. They began to emphasize more and more the role of the environment, but they never completely rejected the framework of racial typologies. Another important issue was the section's relationship with Yiddish journalism. And this will have, I think, some connections to William's presentation. So the section adopted a model that resembled journalism more than academia, in the sense that articles in Nevo Statistical Journal were commissioned, they were not peer reviewed. But the main issue was financial, because the section often didn't have the money to commission enough articles. And that's why many contributors were also professional journalists. They were dependent on journalism for their income. And as you can see in this table, the section relied on a very small pool of contributors, far smaller than similar journals of the times. And that's why the editors themselves were overworked and often had to write many articles on their own. Also just a few words on the political dimensions. The section was closely connected to Jewish political organizations, especially through funding from relief organizations in interwar Poland. The section had to navigate the major Jewish political forces. Bundism, Zionism and Marxist Zionism and so forth. But despite this dependence, I think that the section made real efforts to maintain political neutrality and to define a scientific identity that was different from the political field. And just to conclude on the achievement of the Section, as I said earlier, the Section reached its peak of development during the Warsaw period. So roughly from 193637 to 39. And at that point it began to resemble a real scientific community. This took shape through two institutional mechanisms. First, a network of about 200 correspondents, mostly based in Poland, which played a very important role in the rebuilding of those sections. And second, The Aspirant, or the YIVO graduate program, which was created in 1935. Only seven out of the 68 students specialized in economics and statistics, but several of them became major contributors to the section. And one of them in particular, Menachem Linder, became the leader of the section after Leshinsky immigration to the US in 1338. And this is important, I think, because it shows that the section was able to reproduce itself in the sociological sense, meaning that it was able to train students who could carry the field forward. So an important consequence of that institutional development was the standardization of the field. So by that I mean that over time the section's publication became more and more homogeneous. But I think I'm running out of time, so I've jumped directly to my last point, which is about masculinization. So along with this process of standardization came of a process of masculinization. And by masculinization I mean, first of all, that the section was entirely male, unlike other YIVO departments, and unlike also earlier Jewish statistical initiatives. And this had a very direct consequence, which was the almost total absence of women as subjects of research and object of research. Sorry. And there was not a single article published in the YIVO statistical publication which was focused on Jewish women. Occasionally they were mentioned in passing, but more often than not they were simply erased, even when the data were allowed for gender based analysis. So just to give you a quick example here, on the right side you can see a table from an article written by Leshensky published in Judicial Economics. So this table showed the occupational distribution of Jews in Warsaw, and it was built from the table on the left, which was extracted from the Polish census data, which in this case explicitly distinguished between men and women. So Leshinsky could have used this data and could have analyzed the economic roles of Jewish men and women separately in his article, but he chose not to. He analyzed the Jews in general, treating them as a single undifferentiated category. So of course, this is just an example, but this was very common. Actually. This was the basic rule in these articles. So Jewish women were systematically erased from the statistical picture, despite the fact that they had the data. And also that we know that Jewish women labor played a central role in the economies of Eastern European Jewish communities. So why this masculinization? Of course, no definitive answer. But one reasonable hypothesis I think is that it also reflects the growing influence of economics as a discipline, a field that still today remains one of the most male dominated within the social sciences. That's all from me, and thank you for your attention.
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C
Thank you very much. Fascinating talk. And I was surprised, actually, how much familiar some of these issues sounded from where I sit as an editor of a. A journal now. So we will maybe in the discussion we'll talk about some of that as well. So I will turn to William. I'll introduce you first. Okay, here we go. William Pimlot's current project investigates the global Jewish press, focusing on the polycentric development of Jewish journalism, politics and aesthetics in the period from 1890 to 1920. He recently completed a visiting lectureship at Royal Holloway University of London on the project Global Jewish Studies as or Holocaust Studies. And he finished his PhD Yiddish in Britain, Immigration, Culture and Politics, 1896-1910 at UCL in 2022. Dr. Pimlot has written for the London Review of Books, Tribune and Jewish Currents, and I'll add ingivebab to that list and recently published an article in Shofar. And so I will. I'll turn it over to him.
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E
William and I'd somehow I'd muted myself in the most, like, predictably like early Zoom Covid era way shock for everyone. I'm actually not talking about the global Yiddish press and due to a miscommunication, that was very much where I was in, in 2022, 2023. So I feel a little bit exposed. It's all my faults, but I feel a little bit exposed because you now see how my career is or isn't developing and the course of projects I took. But anyway, that's a good thing. First of all, can I thank. It's very exciting to be on the panel with Kamil and Nicolas. I read both of your articles about Yivo as I was writing an article myself on the history of Yivo in Britain. And so it's very nice to be on this panel. And then I'd like to thank Jessica for the amazing work at ingvab, which is just brilliant. And I think anyone in Yiddish studies knows it's a completely different world because you've built that. So thank you so much. And lastly, I see Cecile is there in the audience and I think Camilla Nicolai would agree with me. We're only standing on the shoulders of the work that Cecile did in this amazing book. Actually, I just did a lecture at the Lithuania National Library on this topic and I reread the book from beginning to end. And it's just such a wonderful book that captures this emotion because also no one's talked about it so far. But Evo is an emotion, an affect, a passion for Collecting. I think, Camille, you got there when you said you suddenly find your whole life becoming evo. And maybe that itself is a synecdoche for Yiddish, which I think we're maybe not tackling head on. But the fate of Yivo is also the hate of Yiddish. And to thank Alex for organizing this panel. I think we can be really excited about the robust good health of Yiddish research of Yivo in this moment 100 years on. And I kind of question I want to ask everyone is, look, what would the founders of YIVO have made at this moment? What would they think if they were hearing me with my English accent, I'm not Jewish, for example, involved in these kind of exciting evo projects and all the new forms Yivo research has taken. So to actually start the presentation, which I now see, I can't. Oh, thank. Okay, so this. I'm starting with this image, which really struck me when I got into the archives. It's a photo from a newspaper and it shows Yivo in the jet age. Here we have, of course, the kenner in this group. They'll all know who these two are, but for the audience won't. But I wanted to say Yivo went global, Yivo went around the world, and Yiddish culture stepped out of a jet in South Africa. And so this is kind of. I find this in evocative photo because of the kind of cheerful expressions, the fact that a Yiddish journalist was sent to just outside to Johannesburg to take this picture. But also it's about the subject of my talk today, which is Yivo around the world, the friends of Yivo societies. So here these are images of Yivo from. And I realize I can't see the notes, but this is from the publications from YIVO in Mexico, in Miami and in Uruguay. It's interesting to me to see Yivo refracted through all these different societies around the world which honored YIVO both 1925 and then when the building was built in the 1930s, but also took its mission into a global space. What did it mean that Yivo had friends societies around the world? How does that change our understanding of Yivo? That's the subject of my little talk. The first thing is that this was very practical, as Cecile's book really demonstrates. It was important for Yivo to have French societies for fundraising purposes. But there was more to it than that. There was also the question of collecting material. And then on top of that, there was prestige and ideology, because YIVO had French societies all over the world. It could say it was global, it could Say it spanned the whole world. But actually the nature of this relationship between the center and the periphery at YIVO has never been very clearly theorized. And I think that's what I'm going to talk about today is what is the complexity of that relationship and also what can it tell us about the global in Jewish history? The global to me remains very under theorized beyond the idea that, oh, there were lots of Yiddish settlements around the world and they all had different organizations that interacted with. Can we get to a deeper understanding of what global Jewish history might mean? And you know, this is the entry hall of the YIVO building in Vilna. Well, what did they have? They had the map there because that was such an important issue for them that YIVO was spread around the world. And then I want to put the cats among the pigeons and say, look, should we even talk about YIVO as a singular entity, or has YIVO always been multiple? Nicolas touched on it when he was looking at the fact that the statistical section moved to Warsaw in 1936. He also could have mentioned the historical section in the 30s, which also had that kind of base in Paris. So you had this one thing which was yivo's kind of central administration that was based across Vilna, Warsaw and Paris. And then you had this friends network. And then with the tragedy of the Holocaust, there was this question of, well, who is the yivo? New York, of course, claimed it was the yivo, but actually Argentine yivo, which is this amazing successful organization, existed as well. So I'm going to put the cat among the pigeons and say, what does it bring to understanding Yivo? If you don't understand Yivo as one thing, but as multiple. So not YIVO, but YIVOs. Okay, so this is the coolest headline for me as a Yiddishist going, this is an article about Max Feinreich's visit to America in the late 1920s. And he was a prophet of a new Yiddish era. Of course, I think Isaac Goldberg was already a sympathetic journalist. So this is a bit of a planted article. When I was writing up my notes for this talk, I was thinking, to what extent could I really say that maxweich had an enthusiastic reception when he went to America. But the point is that to try and understand the difference between one might think that it was natural and organic, wherever there were Yiddish speaking Jews, they set up their Yivo societies. And of course that is the truth to a certain extent. But those Yivo societies were also built or gained different importance or had different functions based on the Tours of Yiddish speaking Yivo activists around the world. So we started with Schatzki and Goldberg, but here we. Not Goldberg, Sorry, but here actually, yes, Goldberg, but Isa Goldberg, not Isaac Goldberg, which is a confusing thing here. But these tours were a big part of how Yivo kept all these societies around the world together. And here you can see the menus, which are delicious sounding and incredibly elaborate. And so here we can see the fundraising function. When Max Weinreich came, they had a big dinner and celebrated it. But it's also an element of Yivo that I think goes much too under discussed, which is that Yivo was a social club. Yivo was sociability, Yivo was being together. Look how much fun they're having here in Argentina. And Yivo was a venue for Yiddish speaking intellectuals all over the world to visit. Sorry, I shouldn't have skipped that. So one thing to remember is that Yivo didn't occup, you know, when it was doing these fundraising tools around the world, it wasn't operating in a vacuum. And something that's been very interesting in doing this research on Yivo around the world is to see the competitive environment Yivo had to struggle in. In particular, when Schatzky was visiting South Africa, which we saw the photo at the beginning, he was told by the South African Jewish Board of Deputies that they were already doing a United Israel appeal for Israel. So it meant that he wouldn't be allowed to attend certain parts of South African Jewish life. And on top of that, in the end, he would only be allowed to attend if he said, okay, we're selling memberships to Yivo, but not properly fundraising. So this is a big element of yivo's history after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. But of course, earlier, even in the 1930s, YIVO was trying to fundraise in a competitive Jewish fundraising market. And it's worth saying in the 1930s, with all the other different problems facing world Jewry, Yivo would come sometimes fifth or sixth on the list of the priorities behind, say, appeal for Polish Jews, the Orton, the Aussie, all this broader space. This was frustrating for Yivo and also a problem that developed and which would be an enduring problem was, well, look, why should we give money to Yivo when Yivo's based in New York? Shouldn't the Jews in New York fund Yivo all over the world? If you read Cecile's book, you see that actually the Jews in New York were funding a lot of Yivo's activities in the 1930s. Although it depends exactly when you look at after the crash, which raises deeper question, who is YIVO for and who should pay for it? Okay. The most controversial thing in the British Jewish history of YIVO was that YIVO took Lucian Wolf, who was a great Anglo Jewish diplomat. He managed to get his whole archive. Lucian Wolf archive is not in Yiddish. Okay? But a collector, Moskovich Moshevich, who was a Zamler, ended up sending it to New York. So you have this great paradox of YIVO was collecting things that weren't Yiddish, but it wasn't paying his Yiddish activists who were collecting it. There's all these ethics of YIVO as a global organization that are kind of interesting to think about. So now I'm going to move on to the second part of what I'm discussing, which is about this kind of comparative aspect that I think is interesting. The history of YIVO around the world is not just a history of yivo, it's the history of Yiddish. It's about where did Yiddish flourish and why? And it won't be a surprise to anyone in this group that Yiddish flourished most of all in South America and in Central America. So why did Yiddish flourish there? Well, mainly because the effects, you know, Argentina boomed economically during the period of the Second World War. And that's why also had an influx of Polish Jewish emigres. And so the Argentine society, unlike all the other YIVO societies, say the Society in Australia, in the Kadima in Melbourne, or the Society in London, the Society in South Africa, in Argentina, for a variety of cultural and economic reasons, the YIVO office was in the AMIA building, in the center of the Jewish community. So where YIVO was at the center of which was more broadly speaking, where Yiddish was more central to Jewish communal life, YIVO flourished much more. And the achievements of the Argentine YIVO society are formidable. I'll just get this list out. It's not, you know, the journal they published well into the 80s of Yiddish scholarship in Argentina. There was the library, this kind of amazing 12 room purpose built floor of the Athosiacion Mutual Israelita Argentina. But even it's worth pausing for thought when you hear about the achievements of the EVO and Uruguay, which is, you know, I don't think anyone was probably imagining hearing about Montevideo today, which is a shame, because their YIVO was brilliant in Montevideo, had a library of 1400 books. It staged two exhibitions in 1946 and 1949, and it also started researching the Jewish history of early settlers to Uruguay. These are some more photos of Argentina this is when Cholermach was in London at the British Yivo branch. Okay, so the. I'm going to conclude as not conclude, but the third part of what I'm talking about is to say, I think the real achievement of YIVO around the world, it wasn't unfortunately, in prolonging Yiddish culture, although that was a significant element of it. Nor was it necessarily in collecting materials about these various Jewish societies, although that helped. But something that was really amazing it accomplished was the commemoration of the Holocaust. So the more research I do, the more I find that just as in the United States, one of the first exhibitions was organized by the Yivo, so in Australia, so in Uruguay, Argentina, because YIVO had the technologies of Yiddish there to do history on the ground. It was also the first place that brought Holocaust consciousness to these publics. Of course, we know that the idea that there was a silence about the Holocaust after the Holocaust is to a large extent a myth. But I don't think there's been, there hasn't yet been this focus on the fact to which it was YIVO societies around the world that pioneered the commemoration of the Holocaust. And here I just want to show you what the Belgian society was able to preserve and send to New York. On the left is a piece of Bern Sefertura that they managed to save. And on the right is a diary in French of a Jewish Holocaust survivor, of a teenage girl, and something. Here's images from the Argentine exhibition. The thing I think is really important about this is when Yiddish speaking Jews were commemorating the Holocaust, the destruction was one third of what they were commemorating. The other two thirds were resistance and reconstruction, which shows a kind of radically different Holocaust memory than what we now recognize today. Okay, so I'll finish with this slide. In 1994, Amir was bombed and Yivo too was bombed. Rajansky said to a journalist, I've seen my life's work go up in flames. Okay, so Yiddish didn't escape history, you know, and Yiddish is still under attack here. It was under attack and destroyed. And you know, even the irony, the tragic irony of this is it's in a place like Argentina where this attack happened. But Argentina was the very place which was the least affected and was why the Evo had flourished. It's a kind of difficult historical irony. So I want to make two last conclusions from a more theoretical Ben. What actually are we brought to consider if we don't consider Yivo as a Yivo, but as multiple Yivos? Well, first of all, we realized that it's through the multiple Yivos that the TIE has Priest historical project was able to build an archive that can rival the Hebrew University. Okay. So although there's not the the living Yivo societies anywhere other than Argentina, so far as I know, the archive lives on, and it captures a slice of Jewish history of the 20th century, which remained true to the ideologies of its founders. But second, it shows us that what we call global. Okay, needs to be nuanced. In the 30 years from 1930 to 1960, YIVO expanded globally, but after that period, it massively shrunk into effectively two main centers, Buenos Aires and New York. Now, what I would suggest as the last reflection is, well, did that also, to an extent, mirror both the consolidation of Jewish cultures worldwide, which became less diverse over the course of the 20th century as Jewish settlement condensed into certain countries? But does it also, if you look at what actually happened with the history of Yivo, namely an American institution gaining the intellectual and archival materials of Jewish communities all over the world, is that evidence that globalization also took place? If we understand globalization as being the development of American resources and extraction from other parts of the world, of course, many of the EVO activists who collected these materials were very happy for them to be safeguarded in New York. So the ethics of the question is more complex, perhaps, than I'm making out. So thank you.
- [59:19]
C
Thank you so much. I'm sitting here typing furiously because I have so many thoughts and questions. So I invite everyone who is watching this to please put your questions in the Q and A. I do have some questions of my own, but I would really like to also ask other people's questions. As you know, I'm not a historian, so I imagine that there are many better questions than the ones I will ask. But I wanted to start off by giving you all an opportunity to reflect a little bit on what you've heard from one another. How does working on the YIVO material alongside other scholars who are doing research related work, enrich your understanding more broadly? And in particular, I want to kind of think about one piece of it that I. That I heard all of you talk about, which is language choice, let's call it, and the implications of it in each of your work. And so the idea of what kind of language someone is using in an autobiography, influencing the subjects that they make, or perhaps the certain subjects being more likely to be discussed in certain languages. I'm not sure which one is influencing the other, but that's a question for you, Camille, and for you, William. Thinking about the Argentinian Yibo, and then what language is their publication in? Are they struggling with similar kinds of questions that Nicola is talking about, about what should be the language of scholarship? And what are the implications of having a Yiddish language scholarship that's maybe not legible to a broader scholarly community? And so what's the value of speaking in an enclosed Yiddish environment versus to a broader environment? And maybe how does that change over time, over the course of the various EVOs and parts of YIVO that you're discussing? So I'll put that big question up for you and then let you all have a conversation about that.
- [61:14]
E
I can jump in, although you're all sick of hearing my voice and my increasingly hoarse English accent. It's a great question, this question of language choices. I mean, Yiddish in Argentina, communal life is the, like the dominant language well into the 1960s. So they don't have the same kind of. And I don't think in the Argentine time setting, they're feeling the same pressures of the German influence that Nicolas was describing to me. Nicolas has hit a nail on the head, which is this, you know, Yiddish science wants to do a diaspora nationalist project centered on Yiddish. On the other hand, it has Freud, you know, on its presidium. It wants also all the Yichas that come from the towering achievements of German Jewry. And I think that's a paradox that equally this question of, well, should Yivo really collect materials that have nothing to do with the Yiddish language or the Eastern European Jews? I mean, nothing is going too far. But it's true that there are some oddities in the collection. It's this other delicious tension which is Yivo aspires for Yiddish universalism, and yet it's using this particularist language. And it only makes sense in the 1930s, when Yiddish is the global Jewish interlanguage. If even then you can say it is, just because it's a nice invitation to respond to what Nicolas and Kamil said. I think, you know, I'm just. I think the masculinization point is just wonderful. And it's, it's. It's very male. Also, everything I read in the archive of these global societies, and I think that's a really important point to also apply a critical lens to Yiva, not just it. To celebrate it on its 100th anniversary. And with Camille, I kind of want to push you on this point, which was really interesting about. Even in the 1930s, Jewish life was ceasing to be so centered on Poland. I just wonder where you think, like, the. The success of these global branches which were still copying and looking to Poland. Where does that fit in that narrative? I mean, does that confirm your point, or is it in a sense in opposition of your point, that the Polish Jews who did escape Poland rebuilt a global Yiddish culture in their image? Which would be kind of my take on it. But thank you all. And also thank you, Jessica, for a fascinating question.
- [63:40]
A
Maybe let me jump into this discussion, if you don't mind. So, yeah, thank you, William. I think you are absolutely right in pointing out that the YIVO was a global initiative. And in my talk I spoke only about Warsaw and Berlin. But you were right. This was right for the Economic Statistical section too. They were in contact. They created alternative center all over the world, also in Paris, where I live right now, as you can see in the book of Nick Underwood. So they were all over the world. And what it's interesting, I think, is that it was a very global initiative, but it was also very local in the sense that all of this for the statistical section was made possible thanks to basically two guys working in a small apartment in Berlin just spending all day writing statistical tables and sending letters to statistical institutes and doing unpaid work. And they were reaching a very large worldwide audience. So it was very local and very global at the same time. Also, another point about your presentation, you said, I think it's a very interesting point. You said that the Yivu was not the priority of Jewish fundraising. And I think it was a bit different for the Economic Statistical section because they were arguing that funding their section was a way of helping philanthropic organizations. So it was a kind of social work. It was sometimes disguised as a kind of social work. And publishing in Yiddish was also an argument, especially in the correspondence with the joint. Leshensky said, well, we are publishing in Yiddish, so we are actually doing social work in Eastern Europe. We are not like a Western European organization doing unnecessary stuff. We are doing real economic social work in Eastern Europe. And just a comment on Camilla with more question. Actually, I think what is interesting is that we are sharing some common sources in the sense that the Jewish autobiographies you are speaking about were also a material for the Economic Statistical Section that used it for documenting the economic and social life of European Eastern European Polish Jewry in the interwar period. But you said that it was a kind of direct source into the life of the Jewish, but at the same time it was also kind of informed by the theoretical agenda of the yivo. Especially when I read the extract about I don't remember the name of the boy telling his life about finding Difficulties to be employed in Jewish trade and the anti Semitic policies of the Polish government and so forth. So this way of documenting the difficulties of Jewish commerce was actually a very important theoretical agenda of the Economic Statistical section who run a survey specifically on this. So in what sense would you say that these very direct sources were at the same time framed by the giveaw's theoretical agenda?
- [67:15]
D
Okay, wow, thank you. It's a privilege, kind of. It's very good to be at the end. And also I see we have a very interesting progression of accents. Like, you know, at the beginning, William finishing with perfect British English. And now I'm finishing with outrageous polished English. So very shortly, starting from Jessica's comment and the question, I think what is common for all our presentations? And I think it's a very important kind of conclusion. The importance of looking at Yiddish as a language in a dialogue, in a dialogue with other languages, in a struggle and in constant engagement that actually what we are pushing forward is kind of attacking this idea of kind of Yiddish land like functioning somewhere in a void. That actually it's always about the relation and the struggle and actually it's a part of all the evil work interoperative afterwards. But even before the caucus has struggled to be recognized as a modern national language of high culture that can address everything. And we touched it upon very different in different places. But in relation to what Nicolas said again the historical section and the historical Christ in Warsaw again they had the same kind of think whether to write in Polish like also as in Yiddish. And they wrote in both why it's important to write in English, but also one needs to write in Polish and then in German. Also regarding Max Weinreich and his seminalidish work regarding Yuval autobiographies. Parts of it were published in Polish, also in Polish main sociological journal. So it's always regarding the struggle and the relation and not so easy choices. Also the fact that in Eastern Europe there was a very strong tendency also among the Polish language Jews, also big part of Zionist movement, to denigrate, to actually attack and marginalize Yiddish Yiddish language. But regarding what Yujasika said, I wanted also to say that Yiddish was a choice for our protagonists, for EVA scholars. But it was not always a choice actually for Polish Jews, including the ones who wrote autobiographies on the evil context. Because what I have discovered actually the paradox is that we have few autobiographies that were written in Polish in very terrible Polish, obviously of the young people whose milie was Yiddish speaking. But the thing is, if you are From a Luftman family, very poor family. And the only Jewish education was a header for fears in the beginning. And then the only free, like the school that you the parents could afford, because they did not needed to pay for school, was a Polish school. So actually someone was speaking English. But the only language in which he or she could really write, even terribly, but still write, was Polish. So that's actually one of the biggest problems that Ivo interwar Poland faces. What will happen to the rich culture because of this influence of these two factors, the economic degradation that also Nicola touched upon. And also the modernizing and nationalizing pressure of the Polish state. And again, Ivo struggled with this problem, not only in Poland, but in terms of English language acculturation in us, in what is happening in Soviet Union and et cetera. And regarding also what what William said and kind of the centering of the evil. I think, like William, it's a very important point. If evil was not to be global and global already before the Holocaust, it would not reborn so much swiftly during the Holocaust, after the Holocaust, all around the world. And then when we look on our protagonists like Janke Fleschinski, Ariet Tartakova, that Nicholas showed Max Weinreich, Ligman, Hedge Hirsch was in Switzerland, Weyrek still being Europe, wrote to Forwards. Tartakova was very important activist of World Jewish Congress and Zionist activists. And finished as a professor at the Hebrew University, actually and wrote in Polish the amazing sociology of Polish Jewry. So yes, they were aware that the Yiddish culture is a global endeavor. And also it could be only saved through global measures already before the Holocaust. And of course, the Jewish youth was not aware of all these things. Not all of the young people who wrote the EVO autobiographies were aware of this. But they were very strongly aware of the Jewish world, how much it moves, how much it shifts. And that was my point, that it can be found in the EVO autobiographies. And actually adding to what Williams said about the globality, but also locality and about the sponsoring giving money for Ivo. I think that Cecil Kuznets actually shows in her book, and I found it in few other sources, that many Polish municipalities, in which there were Jewish municipal board members also co founded EVO during the interwar period. So also it shows how much it is the endeavor of a Jewish society and through which members and municipalities they kind of contribute to evil in interwar period. Nicola, regarding one last thing, regarding the induced source, I analyzed 100 autobiographies. And only minority of these young people, they really read before they wrote autobiography. They read the EVO letter. They know what really EVO is. Mostly they encounter the ad in some Yiddish language or Polish language newspaper. And they wrote the autobiographies on the basis of very short kind of characteristics, what should be in autobiography. And the thing that Heim Berle wrote about the impact of economic crisis. You did not need to be scholar or expert to feel the importance and impact of the crisis. As a simple Jew in Poland of boycott of state discrimination and the economic disaster that it happened on the Jewish street. And actually Yankee Flezinski that you have mentioned a few times, studied thoroughly. Also through interviews with people from the wars of Jewish neighborhoods. There is a very important study of him and other colony beginning of 1930s. And you know, this is the thing that is on the Jewish agenda, not only just by Evil, but any newspaper, every Jewish political party and the newspaper newspaper in Poland. So I would say that most of the evil, actually autobiographies are not affected so much by. By the evil methodology or agenda. Adding to that, 30, like more than 20% of autobiographies in Polish also around half of them have some Zionist affiliation, at least for. For some time of the people who contributed the autobiography. Also many colonies members of Algodat Israel, writing for the autobiographical context. So actually, through the youth contest, Evil was able to kind of transcend its political limitations and internal political struggles that again William mentioned and Cecile wrote a lot about this in her book on EVO facts.
- [74:44]
C
So I have a question and also there's a fantastic question from Elena Hoffenberg in the chat, and I'm going to try to combine the two of them for you. And also recognizing we don't have very much time so to briefly ask these questions and have you answer them. How does your work, looking at Yivo as an institution in the past, thinking about funding the idea of a small number of people working to create and sustain global work, questions about methodology and agenda and language, trying to stay politically neutral, to create scientific study in a politically volatile world. How do all of those things inform you, help you as you think about the state of Yiddish studies today? I do think that there are maybe some continuities or, or, or continued relevances to some of those questions. And then Elena's question is also, I think, about Yiddish studies today. She says, of course, thank you for these fantastic talks and from all that your respective projects have helped us to understand about Yibo and its contributors and its audiences. And she wants to hear about your research processes. She says, from What I know of these projects, they have been long in development and specifically helped by visits to the reading room to work with physical materials before the release of the Edward Blank Vilna collection. Did that digitization project shape your respective projects? How does the digital availability of so much of YIVO's interwar material shape our understanding of the YIVO itself itself? And what might we miss by only reading digitized sources? And just to combine the two questions, I do think that the question about digitization is also a question about kind of the global nature of Yiddish studies in a time when there's global access to YIVO resources or some resources. So I'll throw that out there and let you all talk. And I do want to note that we are ending in 10 minutes, so try to kind of keep your answers as consistent, concise as you can. Though the questions are big.
- [76:41]
E
I suppose if we're doing it in the round, I'll give a very concise and very prompt answer. Something I was thinking a lot, because it's the 100th anniversary. I think we should all be thinking about the exact question you ask, like, what is the future of Yivo? I'll say two things on that quickly. The first is that it was inspiring rereading Cecile's book, the extent to which even the founders of Yiddish came to Yiddish like they wrote earlier in Russian. Maybe Max Weinreich's family was German speaking. And I think that's something that can never be underestimated, is that this appeal, this magic, the kishuf, you know, whatever you want to call it, the affect, the passion of Yiddish, the present in Evo, people will always be turning to Yiddish, maybe greater numbers or lesser numbers, but from different places as well, you know, and here, as Camille was saying, with our different accents, a different accented Yiddish, like when you go to Yiddish song program and you hear an Argentine inflected Yiddish that's now being taught, you know, this kind of thing. And then also the. This was a project about a people, a folk, you know, but where are the Jewish masses now and what's Yiddish to them? I think that's one of the tragedies that then has class elements, gender elements for the future. On one hand, I think evoke can always have this future. But the concept of folk seems to me kind of quintessentially last century, even in contemporary politics. Just very lastly, because as you say, to be prompt on the digitalization question, Schatzky, that anecdote I was telling you about, how Schatzky Wasn't allowed to speak anywhere. I saw at the back of one of these letters that had been written to him, his frustrated response in his handwriting saying, this is unfair. You know, I can't remember the exact words with a kind of exclamation mark. And of course, I would have missed that if it had been digitalized. So it is a risk that the digitalization also brings a loss. But then, of course, it was really nice to see so much digitalized. And when I was in Lithuania last week, there are materials there that aren't digitalized still, you know, although a lot of them are. So I would also remind everyone it's still worth going to Lithuania, going to National Library, and you'll see things that aren't digitalized. Thank you everyone for coming.
- [79:01]
A
Thank you for the questions. I try to be concise too. First, about the digitization question by Elena. Elena. Thank you, Elena, for the question and thank you for attending. I think I've been very, very lucky in this regard because I've started to work on the yivo archives in 2018, 2019 maybe. So this was just before the pandemic, so I was able to look to a lot of archives and then there was a pandemic. And after the pandemic there was a lot of the digitization coming on. So I used a lot the remote reference session. And also I want to thank Halel Yadin, who helped me a lot at the yivo. And also I live in Paris, so I can benefit also from the Medem BiBiotech. So I think I'm very, very lucky from this perspective. But about the point of digitization, on the whole, I'm a big fan and big supporter of it. I think it's just so great to be able to use these digital archives. Of course you miss something. I think that not going into the physical archives you miss. I think the main point is that you don't open the boxes, so you miss the opportunity of just spending the afternoon looking into just two letters that you hadn't expected to find. So when you digitize, you just pick something, so it's a different relation. So I think ideally we should use both. But just the ability to use wherever you want, any kind archives is very useful. Just two weeks ago, I'm participating in a research project on the ghetto, and I was able to send extracts from YIVO archives to a colleague just in two minutes. And four or five years ago I would have to go to New York. So I think this is a real game changer. And about the future of Yiddish studies. I think that one name that came back into the discussion is Cecil, Cecil Kuznets. I think she made a real central contribution to the literature on the YIVO and more generally on the Yiddish studies. So I'm speaking for myself, but my work is just merely, I hope, a footnote on her book. But what is fascinating, I think, is that after Cecil's work, you can still find exciting. There are still so many archives to work on. Just to give Elena is a good example on this. Elena Offenbach, who asked this question, because in my archives there are many authors that are not really known or studied. For instance, Dieben Hirsch. But I mentioned Elena worked on this very important scholar whose archives are in the. Whose personal papers are in the YIVO archives. And I think Helena made a real important contribution in the literature working on this, also on the Gemiles reset cases. But I think there are so many archives still to work on after this.
- [82:34]
D
So I think almost all what was important was said. So I'll just say a few sentences that I totally agree with Elena that digitization is amazing thing. But if we'll just work with digitized material, we will not go to EVO archives and see some material. Physically, we'll miss something. But I wanted to say about the first stage that for me also as a teacher, as a history teacher, and I teach students who study Yiddish at my Jewish studies department. But it's very hard to convince them at the very beginning that, you know, don't be afraid, just take the Yiddish sources and read the manuscripts. Now, having it digitalized and having the opportunity just to show students, you know, read 1, 2, 3 pages, see if you can read it and what it says to you. It's an amazing kind of pedagogical tool and makes for you much easier to convince people that they could become a scholar. But at the end of the day, if you want to do a really serious scholarship, you should start from the EVA blank correction and use the digitalized material. For example, now, when I will do some micro history of Holocaust in one particular area, I just very easily could read from home, not from New York, all the autobiographies that are from this area. But at the end of the day, if you want to do a very serious scholarship on some particular area topic that evil sources are important, you should go to New York. Myself, I contributed very much also, like I gained a lot of. From what William said, that physically I found some things because I was working. So what Nicola said, talking to archivists, in my case, Truman Mora and Leo Greenbau. They were essential in my own work and in my own book. And also meeting other scholars in the YIVO reading room working on similar topics, including Ido, Basok, Cecile and other people.
- [84:28]
C
I think that's a wonderful way to bring in actually what one of Cecile made a comment about how we're all describing ways that YIVO creates a kind of community. So thinking about the people you meet in the reading room also as a kind of community and a good place, I think to end is to say that it was just really a pleasure to meet all of you and to be in this community and with you and and to be able to do it virtually is really an advantage of the global nature of EVO and the ways that it continues to have that kind of global reach and the different ways we can continue to engage with each other across physical space in this close digital space. So thank you to our conveners to for putting this together and to thank you, thank all of you for your wonderful scholarship.