Global Yiddish Culture

Khemye: Chemical Literature in Yiddish

English, along with a few other languages (e.g., German, French, Russian, Japanese, and Chinese), is the primary vehicle for transmitting chemical knowledge and discoveries today. Yet languages are not neutral carriers of information; the very act of choosing a language for instruction implies an educational, ethnic, and perhaps even a social class among the users. Given the impetus and the mea...

Sub-optimal Paradigms in Yiddish

It is well known that the phonological form of a word can depend on its morphological structure. In serial approaches, this follows naturally from the fact that words have derivational histories: morphologically complex words undergo successive levels of phonology as they are constructed. A crucial distinction is typically made, however, between derivational and inflectional morphology. Whereas...

Yiddish Language and Ashkenazic Jews: A Perspective from Culture, Language, and Literature

The typology of Yiddish and the name Ashkenaz cannot serve as arguments to support the theory put forward by Das et al. (2016) (Localizing Ashkenazic Jews to primeval villages in the ancient Iranian lands of Ashkenaz. Genome Biol Evol 8:1132-1149.) that the origin of Ashkenazic Jews can be located in ancient Iran. Yiddish is a Germanic, not a Slavic language. The history of the use of the term ...

Yiddish: Between Languages and Theories

Local Culture, Global Habits

As I wait in the lounge of Berlin’s Tegel airport, I’m three feet but half a world away from a woman tapping away on her cell phone. We’ve exchanged enough pleasantries to discover that we don’t speak the same language, but I’m convinced I can learn her story from the dance of her ngers across the screen and the movements of her face. Between bursts of action with her thumbs, her right index ng...