The Holocaust & the Exile of Yiddish

A History of the Algemeyne Entsiklopedye
Erscheinungsjahr 2022
ISBN: 978-1-9788-2545-1
Verlag: Rutgers University Press

Buch, Englisch, 336 Seiten, Hardback, Format (B × H): 160 mm x 239 mm, Gewicht: 556 g

In the early 1930s in Berlin, Germany, a group of leading Eastern European Jewish intellectuals embarked upon a project to transform the lives of millions of Yiddish-speaking Jews around the world. Their goal was to publish a popular and comprehensive Yiddish language encyclopedia of general knowledge that would serve as a bridge to the modern world and as a guide to help its readers navigate their way within it. However, soon after the Algemeyne entsiklopedye (General Encyclopedia) was announced, Hitler’s rise to power forced its editors to flee to Paris. The scope and mission of the project repeatedly changed before its final volumes were published in New York City in 1966.
 
The Holocaust & the Exile of Yiddish untangles the complicated saga of the Algemeyne entsiklopedye and its editors, who continued to publish volumes and revise the encyclopedia’s mission while their primary audience of Eastern European Jews were facing persecution and genocide under Nazi rule, and then were reestablishing themselves in the first decades after World War II. Historian Barry Trachtenberg reveals how, over the course of the middle decades of the twentieth century, the project sparked tremendous controversy in Jewish cultural and political circles, which debated what the purpose of a Yiddish encyclopedia should be, as well as what knowledge and perspectives it should contain. Nevertheless, this is not only a story about destruction and trauma, but also one of tenacity and continuity, as the encyclopedia’s compilers strove to preserve the heritage of Yiddish culture, to document its near-total extermination in the Holocaust, and to chart its path into the future.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Trachtenberg, Barry

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Deutsche Geschichte Deutsche Geschichte: Holocaust
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Europäische Länder
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Historische & Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft, Sprachtypologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Europäische Geschichte
• Wirtschaftswissenschaften Wirtschaftssektoren & Branchen Medien-, Informations und Kommunikationswirtschaft Verlagswesen
• Geisteswissenschaften Jüdische Studien Jüdische Studien

Über Autor(innen)

BARRY TRACHTENBERG is the Michael H. and Deborah K. Rubin Presidential Chair of Jewish History at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. His books include The United States and the Nazi Holocaust: Race, Refuge, and Remembrance and The Revolutionary Roots of Modern Yiddish, 1903-1917.