Yiddishland – David Mazower

How might we be inspired by a worldwide community of Yiddish-speaking Jews, whose cultural identity was broadly internationalist?

David Mazower is the author of Yiddish: A Global Culture, which accompanies an exhibit he curated at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Our conversation explores the heritage and influence of Yiddish – the everyday language of East European Jews, which became a diaspora lingua franca and the medium for bold creativity, from avant-garde art and subversive writing to radical politics that shaped socialist and anarchist movements.

David’s great-grandfather, Sholem Asch, was a pioneering Yiddishist writer and another of his ancestors – his father’s father Max – was a revolutionary in tsarist Russia, becoming involved with a socialist party called the Bund, whose deeply humanistic perspective has since been marginalised.

As David observes, the impact of the Bund is now the focus of a book by Molly Crabapple (titled Here Where We Live is Our Country). And an outing of London Bundists from the early 1900s features on the cover of David’s book.

Before joining the Yiddish Book Center as its research bibliographer and editorial director, David was a senior journalist with BBC World News and deputy curator of the Jewish Museum London. He writes for a range of publications on topics from Yiddish theatre and popular culture to British Jewish history.

Selected highlights from the exhibit that accompanies his book are available here. There’s also a digital guide via the Bloomberg Connects app (see here for details).

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