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Reviewed by:
  • The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture
  • Matthew Hoffman
The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture, by David E. Fishman. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. 190 pp. $30.00.

As of late, there has been no shortage of books on Yiddish. Ranging from popular to semi-academic to academic works, dozens of recent books have examined the Yiddish language, its literature, culture, and history. With few exceptions, most of these works have presented trite and sentimental overviews of the history and development of Yiddish, with frequent emphasis on its inherent wit and charm. They tell a general, often facile, story of the origins of Yiddish and its evolution, aimed at readers who are relatively unfamiliar with this story.

A rare and welcome exception to this trend comes from David E. Fishman, a scholar of east European Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. The primary objective of Fishman's book is not an all-encompassing history of the Yiddish language, but a mapping out of the evolution of modern Yiddish culture from its fledgling years in the 1860s to its growth and diffusion in the years after World War One. Fishman claims that he is setting out to reevaluate the rise of modern Yiddish culture from a sociological approach rather than an ideological one. However, to my mind, his book is not completely free of ideology. From beginning to end, Fishman attempts to break the paradigm of seeing Yiddish culture in tandem with the rise of Jewish Socialism, especially the Bund. He sets up a bit of a straw man by first claiming that most histories of Yiddish place an exaggerated significance on the role of the Bund in developing a modern Yiddish culture, but he does not really cite which works he has in mind. He simply asserts that this was the view propagated by Bundists themselves, then later accepted as the consensus view in mainstream scholarship. He then proceeds to tear down this straw man by marshalling evidence to show that the Bund's role was limited and that modern Yiddish culture was a much larger phenomenon, not at all confined to socialist circles. Yet, even in trying to deemphasize the role of the Bund, he actually shows just how important it was in creating the audience for the modern Yiddish culture whose development he chronicles. Despite this subtle yet persistent attempt at "deradicalizing" modern Yiddish culture (also evident in Fishman's almost total dismissal of Soviet Yiddish culture), Fishman's book is an illuminating work of serious scholarship that provides a fresh look at the growth of Yiddish culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Fishman divides the book into two sections, the first dealing with the emergence of modern Yiddish culture, mainly literature, press and theatre, in [End Page 137] tsarist Russia from the late nineteenth century to World War One; and the second focusing on Yiddish culture in Poland between the wars. The major contribution of the first section is Fishman's elucidation of how tsarist policy was the chief obstacle to the growth of Yiddish culture from the 1880s until 1905. He persuasively refutes the common assumptions that Yiddish cultural development was delayed because Russian Jews were not sufficiently modernized, or because the Maskilim effectively opposed Yiddish, showing instead that the tsarist government's censorship laws and bans on Yiddish theatres and schools were the central factors limiting the rise of modern Yiddish culture. Fishman singles out 1905 as the turning point for Yiddish culture in Russia, owing to a loosening of tsarist restrictions and a growth in Jewish national identity, across ideological spectrums, in which Yiddish became widely championed by Jewish communal leaders and intellectuals. Fishman emphasizes that in 1905 and afterwards, this new pro-Yiddish orientation was shared by a wide range of Jewish intellectuals, Zionists as well as Bundists and diaspora nationalists, all motivated by three primary factors: pragmatism, populism, and nationalism.

Fishman dedicates a chapter of the first section to reevaluating the Bund's contribution to this burgeoning Yiddish culture, ultimately concluding that "Yiddish played a crucial role in the history of the Bund" but not vice versa (p. 49). He contends that the...

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