Choosing Yiddish: New Frontiers of Language and Culture

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments Befitting the nature of Yiddish studies today, Choosing Yiddish: New Frontiers of Language and Culture has evolved thanks to the work of numerous people from various disciplines, institutions, and locations around the world. Many have helped in small but instrumental ways. Above all we are grateful to our home department at New York University, the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, for providing us with much of the intellectual and financial means to see this project to fruition. Speci fically, we thank Lawrence Schiffman, chair of the department during much of the period of this book’s production,and his successor,David Engel,who also offered his support and wisdom as we undertook the tricky task of coediting a volume with so many contributors from diverse fields. We are also grateful to Gennady Estraikh, who not only was the impetus behind the Yiddish/Jewish Cultures symposium in 2006, which ultimately served as the inspiration for this book,but also served as a constant source of guidance on this project.Hasia Diner and two past Dorot faculty fellows in the department also directly helped shape this project: Tony Michels and Josh Lambert, both also contributors to Choosing Yiddish, shared their insight at crucial moments in the book’s development . In addition, we thank Karolina Szymaniak for inspiring this book’s title and Nancy Sinkoff,Judah Cohen,Ilana Szobel,Olga Gershenson,Ziv Eisenberg, Jeff Newelt, and Shayne Figueroa for their creative advice and support. We are grateful for the warm enthusiasm and judicious comments we received from them and others along the way. Kathryn Wildfong, our editor at Wayne State University Press, has been a tireless supporter of this project. Her confidence in us, especially as we charted an unconventional approach, gave us the freedom to structure Choosing Yiddish x Acknowledgments in the way that we believe best reflects the scope of the field today. We owe our gratitude to her,not least of all for her insightful criticism,and to Maya Rhodes, Kristina Elizabeth Stonehill, Emily Nowak, Carrie Downes Teefey, and the rest of the staff at Wayne State for shepherding this book with such professionalism and grace. We are also incredibly grateful for the careful work of our copyeditors Kelly Burch and Mimi Braverman, and we express our thanks to Anna Verschik for her assistance overseeing the Yiddish transliterations in our book. Although we are often told not to judge a book by its cover, much thought went into visually conceptualizing what Choosing Yiddish has to offer. We are grateful to Oliver Noble for providing the initial inspiration for our cover art and to Joseph Remnant for creating it. Lastly, though not least of all, a hartsiken dank to our respective families for their tremendous support throughout the various stages of this project and for their love and patience. Lara Rabinovitch, Shiri Goren, and Hannah S. Pressman ...