*IN YIDDISH* Dov-Ber Kerler, "Yiddish scholarship in Yiddish and Yiddish Studies af goyish (any other language)"
When and Where
Speakers
Description
Himel Family Yiddish Lecture Series
Co-sponsored by the Al and Malka Green Fund in Yiddish Studies
Dov-Ber Kerler (Indiana University)
"Yiddish scholarship in Yiddish and Yiddish Studies af goyish (any other language)"
Yiddish studies and the research into Yiddish didn’t start in Yiddish. In fact, Yiddish scholarship in Yiddish did not exist until as late as 1908 and 1912. It was largely conceived within the European conceptions of national languages and national philologies. Leaving aside the fashionable progressive debunking of all things “national(ist), we should see what Yiddish studies in whatever other national, international language can gain from Yiddish-focused, introspective perspective of yidish-beyidish scholarship.
Dov-Ber Kerler is the Cohn Chair in Yiddish Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. He has taught Yiddish as well as courses on Yiddish literature, culture and scholarship in Jerusalem, Oxford, Moscow, and Vilnius. And he is directing the Indiana University AHEYM project curating its hundrets of in-depth Yiddish interview by the last native Yiddish speakers in Ukraine, Moldova, Romania. Hungary, and Poland recorded and collected by the Project in 2002-2017. Moscow-born, Jerusalem raised, and Oxford trained he is a son of a major Yiddish poet Yosef Kerler. Dov-Ber has been publishing his own original Yiddish poetry since 1993, in addition to many scholarly and general publications (mostly in Yiddish). To date, since 1996, six collections of his poetry have been published in Britain and Israel, including a joint volume of his and his father’s poems, entitled “Shpigl–ksav” (Words in a Mirror, Jerusalem 1996).