Cultural Transmission through Song: The Case of Yiddish
Tue, May 23
|Peretz Centre for Secular Jewish Culture
Singing has long formed an integral part of Yiddish life. Using the Vancouver Jewish Folk Choir as an example from her new book Yiddish Lives On, Dr. Rebecca Margolis examines how singing has come to play an increasingly important role in the transmission of the language and its culture.
Time & Location
May 23, 2023, 7:15 p.m. – 8:20 p.m.
Peretz Centre for Secular Jewish Culture, 6184 Ash St, Vancouver, BC V5Z 3G9, Canada
Event Description
Professor Rivke Margolis will be at the Peretz on Tuesday, May 23rd to launch her new book, Yiddish Lives On: Strategies in Language Transmission, which focuses on Canada and includes a chapter on the Vancouver Jewish Folk Choir as a site for Yiddish continuity.
The Vancouver Jewish Folk Choir will introduce the author with a performance of Yomervokhets, an excellent translation by Raphael Finkel of Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky, set to music by our conductor David Millard.
If you've sung this piece with us before, or if you are a quick study, the choir invites you to join us for two rehearsals in May and the performance on May 23rd. Yomervokhets is about 15 minutes long. The choir meets on Tuesdays from 7:30-9pm at the Peretz Centre.
About the Book
The language of a thousand years of European Jewish civilization that was decimated in the Nazi Holocaust, Yiddish has emerged as a vehicle for young people to engage with their heritage and identity. Although widely considered an endangered language, Yiddish has evolved as a site for creative renewal in the Jewish world and beyond in addition to being used daily within Hasidic communities.
Yiddish Lives On explores the continuity of the language in the hands of a diverse group of native, heritage, and new speakers. The book tells stories of communities in Canada and abroad that have resisted the decline of Yiddish over a period of seventy years, spotlighting strategies that facilitate continuity through family transmission, theatre, activism, publishing, song, cinema, and other new media.
Yiddish Lives On is a 2023 winner of the Canadian Jewish Literary Awards. You can buy it here.
About the Author
Rebecca Margolis is the Pratt Foundation Chair of Jewish Civilisation at the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation (ACJC) in the School of Philosophical, Historical & International Studies (SOPHIS) in the Faculty of Arts. She joined Monash University from the University of Ottawa, Canada in early 2020.
Her primary area of research is the cultural production of migrants and their descendants, in particular as it intersects with language continuity.
Margolis' publications examine the Jewish experience at the intersections of language literature, theatre, film, education, and organizational life. She is the author of Jewish Roots, Canadian Soil: Yiddish Cultural Life in Montreal, 1905-1945 and ייִדיש לעבט Yiddish Lives On: Journeys of Language Revitalization (2023). Her ongoing research project, New Yiddish Cinema, investigates a 21st-century corpus of film and television created in a Jewish diaspora language that few of its creators, actors or viewers speak. The project examines this transnational cinema as well as the processes of screen translation in the production and reception of cinema in a lesser-used language. As part of this project, she is working on a manuscript titled The Supernatural in New Yiddish Cinema: Dybbuks, Demons and a Haunted Jewish Past (Lexington Books, Jewish Science Fiction and Fantasy series) as well as research that interrogates the tropes of Yiddish as funny on American television. She researches past and contemporary Jewish cultural life in Melbourne.
Yomervokhets/Jabberwocky
