The UJA Committee for Yiddish and the California Institute for Yiddish Culture & Language Invite You to an Online Talk
Building and Consoling a Nation:
The Yiddish Historians Before and After the Holocaust
Sunday, January 12, 2025
2:00pm ET / 11:00am PT, Live on Zoom
Please CLICK HERE to register for this program.
When the dream of Diaspora Nationalism was growing among champions for Yiddish in the early twentieth century, its leading intellectuals included the "Yiddish historians" who helped uncover the history of East-European Jews. Before the Holocaust, their mission had been to discover and present the formative history of a living people for an audience of educated lay leaders, drawing where possible on Jewish sources of information, in order to help build and fortify a Yiddish-speaking nation. After the Holocaust, their mission became to console its surviving remnant with information about the struggle to survive under German occupation.
In this talk, Mark L. Smith will speak about the Yiddish historians as a previously unrecognized group and the characteristics that make them noteworthy, and about his current project of bringing their works to a new audience of English speakers.
This program will be in English.
Mark L. Smith is the author of The Yiddish Historians and the Struggle for a Jewish History of the Holocaust (Wayne State University Press, 2020; National Jewish Book Award Finalist). He is currently working on a companion volume of translations of Yiddish historians' writings from before and after the Holocaust (Academic Studies Press, forthcoming 2025). Smith is a Resident Scholar at American Jewish University, Los Angeles, and has taught Jewish history at UCLA, his alma mater. He writes and lectures on East European Jewish history, with a special interest in Holocaust historiography and Yiddish scholarly writing.
His book is available in paperback or Kindle from Amazon, or in paperback or hardcover from Wayne State University Press.
This program is co-sponsored by the Toronto Workmen's Circle Foundation
and the California Institute for Yiddish Language & Culture.