Overview

Newly-translated works from modern Yiddish historians that seeks to expand the scholarship about eastern European Jewry. In the early twentieth century, when the dream of Jewish cultural nationalism in the Diaspora was growing among champions for Yiddish, its leading intellectuals included the ""Yiddish historians"" who helped to uncover the history of East-European Jews. Before the Holocaust, their mission was to discover and present the formative history of a living people for an audience of educated lay leaders, drawing where possible on Jewish sources of information, in order to help build and fortify a Yiddish-speaking nation. After the Holocaust, their mission became to console its surviving remnant with information about the struggle to survive under German occupation. This book makes Yiddish writings by these historians available in English for the first time, with translations by historian Mark L. Smith. The book also includes a revealing Conversation with Series Editor Michael Berenbaum and an informative foreword by Samuel Kassow.

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Reviews

“Historian Mark L. Smith has done us a tremendous service by introducing English-language readers to a “lost continent” of scholarship about eastern European Jewry by eastern European Jews themselves and written in their mother tongue. Not only does the book definitively lay to rest myths about Yiddish as a language only for the uneducated. His expert translations of works by seminal historians, linguists, and literary scholars are accompanied by indispensable introductory essays. Together, they convey the fusion of high caliber scholarship and intimacy with its audience that is the hallmark of the best in Yiddish scholarship.”  —Kalman Weiser, York University, Toronto ""This volume's selections provide a roadmap for how to think through today’s political and cultural challenges by rooting them in past experience. Though its focus is on 'the Yiddish historians,' its voices ring prophetic, showing how intellectuals imagined Yiddish futurities. Smith's careful archeology of ideas demonstrates that without Yiddish we miss a great deal."" —Justin Cammy, Professor of Jewish Studies and Comparative Literature, Smith College ""Building and Consoling a Nation is a landmark anthology that highlights one of the most vibrant but neglected chapters of Jewish intellectual history: the modern Yiddish historians. Bringing together forty-nine newly translated works by thirty-six writers, ranging from prewar nation-builders to survivor-scholars of the Holocaust, this volume reveals an extraordinary scholarly tradition that sought to write the Jewish past in the everyday language of the Jewish people. With clarity, elegance, and deep contextual knowledge, Mark L. Smith recovers a body of historical writing that shaped how Jews understood themselves in the twentieth century. These historians documented autonomous communal structures, the texture of Jewish daily life, interethnic relations, literary creativity, and educational ideals across centuries. Their authors include canonical figures such as Dubnow, Mahler, and Ringelblum alongside lesser-known historians whose work, untranslated until now, offers fresh insight into understudied aspects of Jewish history. Roughly half the selections concern the Holocaust and show Yiddish historians grappling with catastrophe through the same methods they brought to earlier periods, insisting on the continuity of Jewish social, cultural, and spiritual life even amid destruction. Collectively, these writings illuminate the distinctive priorities of Yiddish scholarship: an insistence on cultural vitality, communal agency, and the lived experience of ordinary Jews. Building and Consoling a Nation will play a vital role in restoring an entire historiographical tradition to the writing of Jewish history and will serve as an indispensable resource for scholars of Jewish history, Yiddish literature, and Holocaust studies."" —Avinoam J. Patt, Professor of Holocaust Studies, New York University

Author Information

Mark L. Smith is the author of The Yiddish Historians and the Struggle for a Jewish History of the Holocaust (2019, National Jewish Book Award finalist). He is Resident Scholar at American Jewish University and has taught Jewish history at UCLA, his alma mater. He writes and lectures on Eastern European Jewish history, with emphasis on Holocaust historiography and Yiddish scholarly writing.

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