Adventures in Yiddishland

Download or read book Adventures in Yiddishland written by Jeffrey Shandler and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2005-12-05 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adventures in Yiddishland examines the transformation of Yiddish in the six decades since the Holocaust, tracing its shift from the language of daily life for millions of Jews to what the author terms a postvernacular language of diverse and expanding symbolic value. With a thorough command of modern Yiddish culture as well as its centuries-old history, Jeffrey Shandler investigates the remarkable diversity of contemporary encounters with the language. His study traverses the broad spectrum of people who engage with Yiddish—from Hasidim to avant-garde performers, Jews as well as non-Jews, fluent speakers as well as those who know little or no Yiddish—in communities across the Americas, in Europe, Israel, and other outposts of "Yiddishland."