Borns Jewish Studies Program

This course will focus on the fate of Yiddish language and culture in the post WWII world, primarily in the USA. It will offer a concise survey of the long cultural history of pre-modern Ashkenazi Jewish civilization; the rise of modern Yiddish culture until the Holocaust; and will then focus directly on postwar conditions and changing fortunes of a major modern Jewish language in the wake of physical annihilation or political repression of most of its native speakers in mid-20th century Europe.
Special attention will be paid to the socio-cultural trends of modernization, secularization, and the largely contemporaneous rise of modern Jewish ultra-Orthodoxy since the late 19th century and earlier and their latter-day growths and evolution in the postwar period, especially in North America.