Yiddish Culture in the Ghettos and Camps

Tuition: $360 | YIVO members: $270**

This is a live, online course held on Zoom. Enrollment will be capped at about 25 students. All course details (Zoom link, syllabus, handouts, recordings of class sessions, etc.) will be posted to Canvas. Students will be granted access to the class on Canvas after registering for the class here on the YIVO website. This class will be conducted in English, and any readings will be in English.

Instructor: Samuel Kassow

Through examination and discussion of Jewish writings from the Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna ghettos, this minicourse will explore Jewish reactions to Nazi persecution. It will consider such issues as social tensions within the ghettos, the role of poetry and song, the use of ghetto archives as a key weapon of cultural resistance and Jewish perceptions of the future. While a great deal of Jewish wartime writing was in Polish, especially in Warsaw, Krakow, and Lviv (Lemberg), this minicourse will focus on Yiddish-language writing, in part because this was the language of most of the cultural activists in these ghettos. All readings will be in English translation.

Course Materials:
The instructor will provide all course materials digitally throughout the class on Canvas.

Samuel D. Kassow is the Charles H. Northam Professor of History at Trinity College, and is recognized as one of the world’s leading scholars on the Holocaust and the Jews of Poland. He is widely known for his 2007 book, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Indiana University Press). He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research, has won numerous awards, and has lectured widely.

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