Presider: Madeleine Cohen, Academic Director of the Yiddish Book Center (Amherst, MA)
Papers:
“Will I Always Be Laughed at in America?”: Stakes of and Strategies for Translating the English in American Yiddish
Madeleine Cohen
Abstract coming
Madeleine Cohen is academic director of the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, MA. She has a PhD in Comparative Literature with an emphasis in Jewish Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.
Letters and Sounds: Hearing Meaning in Yiddish-American Folk LPs
Zeke Levine
Introducing a performance of the Yiddish agricultural anthem “Dzankoye,” Pete Seeger explains: “I can’t always speak a full language well, but I know I’ve learned something by singing songs that are not in the English language.” Seeger’s preamble directs us to think about what it means to sing folk songs: are songs’ meanings embedded in the experience of singing , the intention of the original lyrics, or somewhere in between? Are audiences attracted to folk music because of the text, or simply the sound of the language?
In this paper, I pursue answers to these questions by analyzing the liner notes of several American Yiddish folk albums of the mid-twentieth century, including selections from Ruth Rubin, Mark Olf, and Theodore Bikel. I focus on the ways in which these artists present Yiddish texts: a combination of English translation, Romanization, and texts set in the original Yiddish script. For example, Mark Olf’s 1951 Jewish Folk Songs features Yiddish text with English translations—effectively discouraging participatory singing but directing the audience to the song’s meaning. Drawing from work by scholars such as Jeffrey Shandler, Josh Kun, and Benjamin Filene, I seek to unpack the intention behind the various strategies for text presentation in Yiddish folk albums, considering both individual artistic decision-making and its relationship to the larger context of Yiddish and Jewish life in mid-twentieth century America.
Zeke Levine is a Ph.D student in historical musicology at NYU, where his focus is the relationship between Yiddish song and the American folk revival.
Translating the Yiddish Past for the American Future: A History of The Jewish People Past and Present
Barry Trachtenberg
Immediately after the Holocaust, Yiddish intellectuals and activists began the task of preserving a legacy of Eastern European Jewish civilization that could be transmitted to the “new” Jewish community in America. One of the projects central to this mission was the four volume encyclopedia The Jewish People Past and Present (1946-1955), a collaboration that included dozens of prominent Jewish scholars and writers, as well as labor, religious, and communal leaders. Although unnoticed by contemporary scholars of postwar American Jewry, this encyclopedic set provides a unique look at the first efforts by the surviving remnants of European Yiddish culture to shape the future of American Jewry.
Barry Trachtenberg is the Rubin Presidential Chair of Jewish History at Wake Forest University. He is the author of The Holocaust and the Exile of Yiddish: A History of the Algemeyne Entsiklopedye, forthcoming from Rutgers University Press.