Download Free Dear Mendl Dear Reyzl Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Dear Mendl Dear Reyzl and write the review.

“Explore[s] the Jewish past via letters that reflect connections and collisions between old and new worlds.” —Jewish Book Council At the turn of the 20th century, Jewish families scattered by migration could stay in touch only through letters. Jews in the Russian Empire and America wrote business letters, romantic letters, and emotionally intense family letters. But for many Jews who were unaccustomed to communicating their public and private thoughts in writing, correspondence was a challenge. How could they make sure their spelling was correct and they were organizing their thoughts properly? A popular solution was to consult brivnshtelers, Yiddish-language books of model letters. Dear Mendl, Dear Reyzl translates selections from these model-letter books and includes essays and annotations that illuminate their role as guides to a past culture. “Covers a neglected aspect of Jewish popular culture and deserves a wide readership. For all serious readers of Yiddish and immigrant Jewish culture and customs.” —Library Journal “Delivers more than one would expect because it goes beyond a linguistic study of letter-writing manuals and explicates their genre and social function.” —Slavic Review “Reproductions of brivnshtelers form the core of the book and comprise the majority of the text, providing a ground-level window into a largely obscured past.” —Publishers Weekly “The real delight of the book is in reading the letters themselves . . . Highly recommended.” —AJL Reviews
At the turn of the 20th century, Jewish families scattered by migration could stay in touch only through letters. Jews in the Russian Empire and America wrote business letters, romantic letters, and emotionally intense family letters. But for many Jews who were unaccustomed to communicating their public and private thoughts in writing, correspondence was a challenge. How could they make sure their spelling was correct and they were organizing their thoughts properly? A popular solution was to consult brivnshtelers, Yiddish-language books of model letters. Dear Mendl, Dear Reyzl translates selections from these model-letter books and includes essays and annotations that illuminate their role as guides to a past culture.
This Year Book, now in its 115th year, provides insight into major trends in the North American Jewish communities and is the Annual Record of the North American Jewish Communities. The first two chapters of Part I examine Jewish immigrant groups to the US and Jewish life on campus. Chapters on “National Affairs” and “Jewish Communal Affairs” analyze the year’s events. Three chapters analyze the demography and geography of the US, Canada, and world Jewish populations. Part II provides Jewish Federations, Jewish Community Centers, social service agencies, national organizations, overnight camps, museums, and Israeli consulates. The final chapters present national and local Jewish periodicals and broadcast media; academic resources, including Jewish Studies Programs, books, articles websites, and research libraries; and lists of major events in the past year, Jewish honorees, and obituaries. For those interested in the North American Jewish community—scholars, service providers, volunteers—this volume undoubtedly provides the single best source of information on the structure, dynamics, and ongoing religious, political, and social challenges confronting the community. It should be on the bookshelf of everyone interested in monitoring the dynamics of change in the Jewish communities of North America. Sidney Goldstein, Founder and Director, Population Studies and Training Center, Brown University, and Alice Goldstein, Population Studies and Traini ng Center, Brown University The American Jewish Year Book is a unique and valuable resource for Jewish community professionals. It is part almanac, directory, encyclopedia and all together a volume to have within easy reach. It is the best, concise diary of trends, events, and personalities of interest for the past year. We should all welcome the Year Book’s publication as a sign of vitality for the Jewish community. Brenda Gevertz, Executive Director, JPRO Network, the Jewish Professional Resource Organization
The Dream of Social Justice and Bad Moral Luck examines the intertwined lives of five women and three men, Russian Jews in the first half of the twentieth century, as their belief in social transformation unraveled. The book looks at why these eight people bought into the dream, and what they did when things went bad. Under what circumstances did they bow to political pressures antithetical to the ideas they professed, and under what circumstances did they resist, even heroically? Political cowardice is a constant theme, but so is moral resistance that had no point beyond an individual’s conscience.
The Routledge Companion to Jewish History and Historiography provides an overview of Jewish history from the biblical to the contemporary period, while simultaneously placing Jewish history into conversation with the most central historiographical methods and issues and some of the core source materials used by scholars within the field. The field of Jewish history is profitably interdisciplinary. Drawing from the historical methods and themes employed in the study of various periods and geographical regions as well as from academic fields outside of history, it utilizes a broad range of source materials produced by Jews and non-Jews. It grapples with many issues that were core to Jewish life, culture, community, and identity in the past, while reflecting and addressing contemporary concerns and perspectives. Divided into four parts, this volume examines how Jewish history has engaged with and developed more general historiographical methods and considerations. Part I provides a general overview of Jewish history, while Parts II and III respectively address the rich sources and methodologies used to study Jewish history. Concluding in Part IV with a timeline, glossary, and index to help frame and connect the history, sources, and methodologies presented throughout, The Routledge Companion to Jewish History and Historiography is the perfect volume for anyone interested in Jewish history.
Reappraisals and New Studies of the Modern Jewish Experience brings together twenty scholars of Modern Jewish history and thought. The essays provide a fresh perspective on several central questions in Jewish intellectual, social, and religious history from the eighteenth century to the present in the contexts of Russia, Western and Central Europe, and the Americas.
An investigation of the connections between the parallel rise of modern Hebrew and modern media After lying dormant for two millennia as a mainly written language, Hebrew awoke from its literary slumber to become a living modern vernacular. This revitalization is unique and unprecedented in world history, and its success has been studied in fields from linguistics to cultural history. However, the role of modern technologies in mediating this revival has not yet been considered. What happens when an ancient language meets modern technology? Lingua Ex Machina explores such a moment in its investigation of the role media technologies—including typewriters, phonographs, and computers—played in the revitalization and modernization of Hebrew from the end of the nineteenth century into the present day. Ido Ramati examines the role sound recording technologies played in shaping the reemergence of modern Hebrew speech, reveals how the Hebraized typewriter pushed for the modernization of writing in Hebrew, and ultimately argues that these media—whose development and adoption paralleled the revitalization of Hebrew—were an active force in shaping the language as a modern communicative medium. This case study of Hebrew furnishes researchers with a rare opportunity to investigate the complex relation between language, its speakers, and technology at a decisive moment, and sheds new light on the study of media technologies and their theoretical, lingual, and social implications.
The Holocaust radically altered the way many East European Jews spoke Yiddish. Finding prewar language incapable of describing the imprisonment, death, and dehumanization of the Shoah, prisoners added or reinvented thousands of Yiddish words and phrases to describe their new reality. These crass, witty, and sometimes beautiful Yiddish words – Khurbn Yiddish, or “Yiddish of the Holocaust” – puzzled and intrigued the East European Jews who were experiencing the metamorphosis of their own tongue in real time. Sensing that Khurbn Yiddish words harbored profound truths about what Jews endured during the Holocaust, some Yiddish speakers threw themselves into compiling dictionaries and glossaries to document and analyze these new words. Others incorporated Khurbn Yiddish into their poetry and prose. In Occupied Words, Hannah Pollin-Galay explores Khurbn Yiddish as a form of Holocaust memory and as a testament to the sensation of speech under genocidal conditions. Occupied Words investigates Khurbn Yiddish through the lenses of cultural history, philology, and literary interpretation. Analyzing fragments of language consciousness left behind from the camps and ghettos alongside the postwar journeys of three intellectuals—Nachman Blumental, Israel Kaplan and Elye Spivak—Pollin-Galay seeks to understand why people chose Yiddish lexicography as a means of witnessing the Holocaust. She then turns to the Khurbn Yiddish words themselves, focusing on terms related to theft, the German-Yiddish encounter and the erotic female body. Here, the author unearths new perspectives on how Jews experienced daily life under Nazi occupation, while raising questions about language and victimhood. Lastly, the book explores how writers turned ghetto and camp slang into art—highlighting the poetry and fiction of K. Tzetnik (Yehiel Di-Nur) and Chava Rosenfarb. Ultimately, Occupied Words speaks to broader debates about cultural genocide, asking how we might rethink the concept of genocide through the framework of language.
A fascinating glimpse into the complex and often unexpected ways that women and ideas about women shaped widely read Jewish newspapers Between the 1880s and 1920s, Yiddish-language newspapers rose from obscurity to become successful institutions integral to American Jewish life. During this period, Yiddish-speaking immigrants came to view newspapers as indispensable parts of their daily lives. For many Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, acclimating to America became inextricably intertwined with becoming a devoted reader of the Yiddish periodical press, as the newspapers and their staffs became a fusion of friends, religious and political authorities, tour guides, matchmakers, and social welfare agencies. In A Revolution in Type, Ayelet Brinn argues that women were central to the emergence of the Yiddish press as a powerful, influential force in American Jewish culture. Through rhetorical debates about women readers and writers, the producers of the Yiddish press explored how to transform their newspapers to reach a large, diverse audience. The seemingly peripheral status of women’s columns and other newspaper features supposedly aimed at a female audience—but in reality, read with great interest by male and female readers alike—meant that editors and publishers often used these articles as testing grounds for the types of content their newspapers should encompass. The book explores the discovery of previously unknown work by female writers in the Yiddish press, whose contributions most often appeared without attribution; it also examines the work of men who wrote under women’s names in order to break into the press. Brinn shows that instead of framing issues of gender as marginal, we must view them as central to understanding how the American Yiddish press developed into the influential, complex, and diverse publication field it eventually became.
Pura Belpré Award Winner Ruth Behar's inspiring story of a young Jewish girl who escapes Poland to make a new life in Cuba, while she works to rescue the rest of her family The situation is getting dire for Jews in Poland on the eve of World War II. Esther's father has fled to Cuba, and she is the first one to join him. It's heartbreaking to be separated from her beloved sister, so Esther promises to write down everything that happens until they're reunited. And she does, recording both the good--the kindness of the Cuban people and her discovery of a valuable hidden talent--and the bad: the fact that Nazism has found a foothold even in Cuba. Esther's evocative letters are full of her appreciation for life and reveal a resourceful, determined girl with a rare ability to bring people together, all the while striving to get the rest of their family out of Poland before it's too late. Based on Ruth Behar's family history, this compelling story celebrates the resilience of the human spirit in the most challenging times.