On Disagreement Lecture Series: Anita Norich, “Yiddish Disputes”

This lecture is part of the series, On Disagreement. Anita Norich, a renowned scholar of Yiddish literature, will speak about “Yiddish Disputes.” If there is one thing we know about Yiddish culture, it is that it has always been full of debates and controversies, especially about the language itself. Since at least the Haskalah—the Jewish Enlightenment—the “language wars” among Yiddish speakers, scholars, writers, and readers unfolded alongside disputes over translation; politics; modernity and literary modernism; gender; religion; the role of Yiddish after the Holocaust; cultural centers versus peripheries; and Zionism versus doikeyt (“hereness”).

Anita Norich is the Tikva Frymer-Kensky Professor Emerita of English, Professor Emerita of Judaic Studies at University of Michigan. She is the translator of Desires by Celia Dropkin (2024), Fear and Other Stories by Chana Blankshteyn (2022), A Jewish Refugee in New York by Kadya Molodovsky (2019), and numerous short stories. She is also the author of Writing in Tongues: Yiddish Translation in the 20th Century (2013), Discovering Exile: Yiddish and Jewish American Literature in America During the Holocaust (2007), The Homeless Imagination in the Fiction of Israel Joshua Singer (1991), and co-editor of Languages of Modern Jewish Cultures: Comparative Perspectives (2016), Jewish Literatures and Cultures: Context and Intertext (2008), and Gender and Text in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures (1992). She translates Yiddish literature and teaches, lectures, and publishes on a range of topics concerning modern Jewish cultures, Yiddish language and literature, Jewish American literature, and Holocaust literature.