Yiddish Returns: Language, Intergenerational Gifts, and Jewish Devotion.

Abstract

This dissertation explores the political economy of Yiddish culture work in the contemporary U.S. Specifically, it tracks the creation and transformation of Yiddish spaces as language devotees negotiate their relationship with American Jewish donors, philanthropists, and foundations. On a theoretical level, it brings together scholarship that challenges ideologies of linguistic and cultural authenticity, with debates in anthropology about kinship, inheritance, and reproduction in the “new economy.” I ground this analysis within two cultural organizations: the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts and Yiddish Farm in Goshen, New York. Departing from the Book Center, I explore how the emergence of a wealthy donor class has transformed social relationships of ethno-religious identity making and Jewish cultural transmission. Most Jews outside Ultra-Orthodox communities lack Yiddish proficiencies. Yet, by funding programs designed to promote Yiddish among college-aged and twenty-something students, donors address relationships of intergenerational transmission ideologically associated with families, by facilitating their management under non-profit auspices. Focusing ethnographically on the discourse, practice and form of these exchange relationships, I theorize them as strategies by which American Jews confront the perceived absence of cultural heirs by utilizing non-profits to produce these subjects in the abstract. In the case of Yiddish Farm, an organization emerging in part from networks of philanthropically subsidized Jewish youth programs, I show how elements of these exchange relationships are taking shape within, and helping to produce, this new Yiddish space. These dynamics reverberate throughout American Jewish culture work more generally, and reflect developments extending beyond the American Jewish community alone. On the one hand, they crosscut an array of subsidized programs aimed at Jewish youth. On the other, their means of production reflect broader, postindustrial shifts in the U.S. economy, as well as related policy developments systematically accommodating non-profits and incentivizing charitable giving. Historically grounded, this analysis accounts for the role of these political and economic transformations in shaping the social conditions of Yiddish culture work in New York City—the traditional center of Yiddish activism in the U.S. Taken together, the ethnography offers an opportunity to analyze the articulation between American political economy, ethno-religious politics, and cultural production.