TRANSCENDING BOUNDARIES:
JEWISH LANGUAGES,
IDENTITIES AND CULTURES
GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY
RIGGS LIBRARY
FEBRUARY 18-19, 2007
Sponsored by the Program for Jewish Civilization,
Faculty of Languages and Linguistics,
Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University,
and National Resource Center on the Middle East
TRANSCENDING BOUNDARIES:
JEWISH LANGUAGES, IDENTITIES AND CULTURES
GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY
FEBRUARY 18- 19, 2007
Organized by Deborah Schiffrin (Georgetown) and Elana Shohamy (Tel Aviv)
Jews have been making and remaking identities and cultures through language and other
symbolic media over time, across place and within genres. Relationships among Jewish
languages, identities and cultures have been reshaped, and have been reshaping one
another, for thousands of years. Each facet of Jewish life has been woven and rewoven
together over time and across the many different places where Jews have lived, from
ancient Israel, the wide ranging Diaspora in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, to
modern Israel. Likewise, Jewish representations of selfhood, nation and culture appear
within a wide variety of genres ranging from religious texts to oral story telling, oral
history, fiction, poetry, drama and music, each of which provides different formal and
performance options for weaving language together with identity and culture.
When we started planning this conference, our goal was to explore the issues above by
bringing together our interests in language policy (Elana) and language use (Debby).
Elana had researched and written about various issues related to language policy,
language acquisition by immigrants and language ideologies in multilingual Israel. The
languages of Israel: Policy, ideology and practice (with B. Spolsky) documents the rich
repertoire of languages (Jewish and others) used and practiced in Israel today in the midst
of conflicts and paradoxes associated with the Hebrew ideology. Elana also spearheaded
the multilingual language education policy that became official in Israel. Debby’s wide
range of interests in discourse (language in text and context) had included an interest in
the way Jewish Americans tell stories and argue with one another; she had recently begun
analyzing the stories told in Holocaust oral histories and the formation of public
discourse about the Holocaust. When Elana came to Georgetown as a Visiting Professor
in Spring 05 and 06, a mutual interest in Jewish language policies and uses was kindled
and we decided to put together a short symposium. One topic led to another and we
became convinced that a conference on the many ways that Jewish identity and culture
are interwoven with language would be interesting not just for scholars, but also for
people outside of the ‘academy.’ We were fortunate enough to have PJC director Yossi
Shain, and then PJC Acting Director Jacques Berlinerblau, share our vision for the
conference. We are also immensely grateful for the intellectual and material support
provided by the Program for Jewish Civilization, Faculty of Languages and Linguistics,
Department of Linguistics, and the National Resource Center on the Middle East.
Assistance provided by Jacques Berlinerblau, Amber Kurtz, Yossi Shain, Melissa Spence,
Inge Stockburger and Rabbi Harold White is also greatly appreciated.
On the next pages, you will find the conference schedule (3-4)- and then (in keeping with
the schedule), the list of speakers, some information about who they are, a brief abstract
of their presentations (5- 18) and a map of Georgetown University (19). Enjoy!
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CONFERENCE SCHEDULE
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 18, RIGGS LIBRARY
9:00
Coffee and light breakfast
9:30
Welcome: Marjory Blumenthal (Associate Provost, Georgetown)
9:45
Introduction: Jacques Berlinerblau (Georgetown)
Deborah Schiffrin (Georgetown) and Elana Shohamy (Tel Aviv)
“I Talk, Therefore I Am: Jewishness as a Linguistic Enterprise,”
Lewis Glinert (Dartmouth)
10:30 Panel: Speaking Jewish in the United States
“Jewish American English,” Sarah Bunin Benor (Hebrew Union College)
“Who Am I?: Jewish and Russian Cultural Identities among Third-Wave Soviet
Émigrés in the United States,” David Andrews (Georgetown)
“Learning and Using Hebrew in the United States,” Jonathan Paradise
(University of Minnesota)
Moderator: Elana Shohamy
12:00 Lunch, Healy Hall
1:00 Panel: Performing Jewish Languages, Identities and Cultures
“Ladino: Performance, Survival and Resurgence,” Gloria Ascher (Tufts
University)
“Yiddish as Performance Art”, Jeffrey Shandler (Rutgers University)
“Language and Immediacy in the Hebrew Cinematic Lens,”
Eric Zakim (University of Maryland )
Moderator: Jacques Berlinerblau
2:45
Panel: Performing Memory (I)
Ari Roth (Artistic Director; Theater J, Washington D.C.)
Henry Greenspan (Psychologist and Playwright, University of Michigan);
Moderator: Deborah Schiffrin (Georgetown)
3:45
Coffee Break
4:15
Panel: Speaking Jewish in Israel
“Interpreting 'Jewish' Languages in Israel Today: Language Policy in Israel ,”
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Elana Shohamy (Tel-Aviv University)
“Language Policies and Practices of Palestinian Arabs in Israel”,
Uri Horesh (Georgetown University)
“Judeo Arabic in Israel and Elsewhere”, Benjamin Hary (Emory University)
Moderator: John Myhill (University of Haifa)
6:00 Dinner, ICC Galleria
Machaya Klezmer Band
8:00 Keynote Event: A Conversation with Cynthia Ozick
Jacques Berlinerblau (Georgetown)
Riggs Library
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 19, RIGGS LIBRARY
9:00 Coffee and light breakfast
9:30 Panel: Jewish Languages, Past and Present
“Language Loyalty and Language choice; Yiddish and Hebrew in the Aftermath
of the Holocaust”, Miriam Isaacs (University of Maryland)
“Broken Hearts, Broken Homes: The Holocaust and Its Languages",
Alan Rosen (Yad Vashem)
“Old Languages in new versions of Holocaust oral histories”, Deborah Schiffrin
(Georgetown University)
Moderator: Deborah Tannen
10:45 Coffee Break
11:30 Panel: Performing Memory (II)
“Voicing My Father: Bringing my Jewish Identity to the Stage”,
Deborah Tannen (Georgetown University)
“Voicing Anne Frank: Adaptation and Appropriation in a New Telling
of Her Story”, Derek Goldman (Georgetown University)
Moderator: Miriam Isaacs
1:00
Closing Remarks:
Elana Shohamy and Deborah Schiffrin
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SPEAKER BIOS AND ABSTRACTS (listed in order of presentation)
LEWIS GLINERT (lewis.glinert@dartmouth.edu)
I talk, therefore I am: Jewishness as a linguistic enterprise
Sunday, February 18, 9:45
We seemed so recently to have gotten over that Jewish language thing. No more
Jewish dialects, no more aleph bes. Even in Israel, they would have a language
like any other (just superficially Hebrew, but fully intertranslatable of
course). And HOW we talked, too: We were going to sound...like, Gentile. But
it hasn't quite turned out that way. They still seem to think we talk Jewish
(like Jerry Seinfeld, about nothing). So does Deborah Tannen. Meanwhile, it has
dawned on Israelis that, if nothing else, they have an identity in Hebrew. And
it's now official: language constructs reality. So the Rabbis had it right
after all: "With ten speech acts the World was created."
Speaker Bio:
Lewis Glinert is Professor of Hebraic Studies and Linguistics at Dartmouth
College. A graduate of Magdalen College, Oxford, he has held appointments at
the University of Chicago, Haifa, Bar-Ilan and London University, where he
chaired the Centre for Jewish Studies. His books include Hebrew in Ashkenaz: A
Language in Exile (Oxford), The Grammar of Modern Hebrew (Cambridge), The Joys
of Hebrew (Oxford) and Mamme Dear: A Turn-of-the-Century Collection of Model
Yiddish Letters (Rowman & Littlefield), as well as many articles on language and
discourse in Jewish life and thought, spanning such topics as myths of the
Golem, the Israeli love lyric, language policy and aliya, Hebrew and Halacha,
and Hasidic attitudes to Yiddish. Lewis Glinert's 1992 BBC documentary on the
rebirth of Hebrew was nominated by the BBC for a SONY award.
SARAH BUNIN BENOR (sbenor@huc.edu)
Jewish American English
Sunday, February 18, 10:30 (panel)
Do American Jews speak a distinctively Jewish language variety like Yiddish, Ladino, or
Judeo-Arabic? This paper shows how American Jewish English has most of the
components common among Jewish language varieties throughout history: a co-territorial
non-Jewish base language (English) and influences from a previous Jewish language
(Yiddish) and textual Hebrew and Aramaic. I show how contemporary Jewish language
varieties are likely to have an additional component – influence from Israeli Hebrew –
and are likely not to be written in Jewish orthography due to increased rates of literacy
worldwide.
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Among American Jews, variation in the distinctively Jewish features signals several
elements of Jewish identity, including religious observance, textual knowledge,
generation from immigration, ethnic heritage, Jewish social networks, and proximity to
New York. Jews several generations removed from immigration who have weak
connections to organized Jewish life and little religious observance may speak
general American English with only the addition of a few Hebrew or Yiddish words.
Strictly Orthodox Jews are more likely to use elements of “Yeshivish” – English filled
with words from Yiddish, Hebrew, and Aramaic and Yiddish influences in grammar and
pronunciation. Jews with strong affinities for the State of Israel may prefer Israeli
Hebrew pronunciation over the Ashkenazic Hebrew common among strictly Orthodox
Jews. The lesson for Jewish linguistic studies is that “Jewish language” serves not only to
distinguish Jews from non-Jews but also to distinguish Jews from Jews.
Speaker Bio:
Dr. Benor is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies at Hebrew Union
College – Jewish Institute of Religion (Los Angeles campus) and Adjunct Assistant
Professor in the Linguistics Department at the University of Southern California. She
received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in Linguistics in 2004. She teaches about the
social science of American Jews, as well as about language and culture, and she has
given lectures to Jewish groups around the country about Jewish languages, Yiddish,
American Jews, and Orthodox Jews. She is currently working on a book entitled
/Becoming Frum: How Newcomers Learn the Language and Culture of Orthodox
Judaism/. Dr. Benor edits the Jewish Language Research Website <http://www.jewishlanguages.org> and moderates the Jewish Languages Mailing List <http://www.jewishlanguages.org/ml>, both of which she founded. In her spare time, she enjoys her husband,
Mark, and their two young children, Aliza and Dalia.
DAVID ANDREWS (Andrews@georgetown.edu)
Who Am I?: Jewish and Russian Cultural Identities among Third-Wave Soviet
Émigrés in the United States
Sunday, February 18, 10:30 (panel)
In the twentieth century there were three successive waves of Russian-speaking
emigrants from the Soviet Union to the West, known as the three “waves.” The First
Wave was precipitated by the Bolshevik Revolution, the Second by World War II and its
aftermath. The Third Wave began in 1972, when the Brezhnev regime eased emigration
restrictions for Soviet Jews as a gesture of détente. The Third Wave, therefore, was
predominantly Jewish, with a complicated mix of Jewish and Russian cultural identities
that would become even more complex after arrival in the United States.
Speaker Bio:
David Andrews is a Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages at Georgetown
University, where he has been teaching for 18 years. He specializes in contemporary
Russian socio- and psycholinguistics, with a particular focus on émigré Russian and on
standard versus nonstandard speech forms. In those areas of interest he has published
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numerous articles and a monograph entitled Sociocultural Perspectives on Language
Change in Diaspora: Soviet Immigrants in the United States.
JONATHAN PARADISE (jparadis@umn.edu)
Learning and Using Hebrew in America
Sunday, February 18, 10:30 (panel)
My remarks will focus primarily on how Hebrew is studied and used in Jewish
community schools (both “Day Schools” and supplementary schools) with less attention
given to the study of Biblical Hebrew in theological seminaries and Biblical and Modern
Hebrew in universities. A content analysis of curricular materials of the leading
publishers will indicate the thrust and scope of typical school programs and lead to a
discussion of the raisons d’être for Hebrew given by the various “streams” in the Jewish
community (along with the justifications offered for not teaching Hebrew as a language
for communication). I will discuss the extent of spoken Hebrew for communicative
purposes in both formal classroom settings and informal contexts. Particular attention
will be paid to the growing extent that Hebrew phrases and terms are used in public
communal settings and in printed media. I will explore the extent that choice of (public)
pronunciation style creates a link with the spoken language, and the opportunities that
exist for enhancing and encouraging greater roles for Hebrew in the Jewish community.
If time allows I will address how children in parochial schools view learning Hebrew,
their expectations, their acceptance of learning materials that are sometimes
incomprehensible and not age-appropriate.
Speaker Bio:
Jonathan Paradise (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania) is Professor Emeritus of Hebrew at
the University of Minnesota where he taught courses in Hebrew Language and Literature,
Hebrew Bible, and occasional courses in Akkadian from 1965 to 2003. His publications
deal with Family Law at ancient Nuzi, Bibilical matters, and Hebrew language pedagogy.
Since his retirement, he has been working intensively developing multimedia materials
for teaching Hebrew and computerized tools for Hebrew teachers.
GLORIA ASCHER (Gloria.ascher@tufts.edu)
Ladino: Performance, Survival, and Resurgence
Sunday, February 18, 1:00 (panel)
Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) is a “seriously endangered” language, according to the most
recent UNESCO listing. Yet the Judeo-Spanish language has not only survived, but is
enjoying a resurgence worldwide. Both its survival and its current resurgence are
intimately connected to “performance”: the oral transmission of traditional and
contemporary songs, for example, within families and now within ever-broadening
communities. In 2003 the first Festiladino, the annual international competition, based in
Israel, to encourage the composition and performance of new songs in Ladino, was held,
and every year more lyricists, composers, and musicians of various ethnic, religious, and
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national backgrounds participate. The heart of this event is performance: it is, above all,
the singers and musicians who are showcased. Judeo-Spanish songs are being performed
by many singers and groups, including some in the U.S., who are enriching the tradition
with new compositions and musical styles. Less obviously and dramatically, the
performance aspect of Ladino is exemplified by the tradition of telling stories, which
continues not only in informal family and community settings, but in organized
presentations and competitions as well, notably in Israel. There are also theatrical
performances of new plays and musical comedies, and new poems, including some by
my students, are recited in the special programs produced and presented on Kol Israel by
Matilda Koén-Sarano. It is significant that the activities of Matilda Koén-Sarano, the
foremost activist, writer, and scholar in the field of Judeo-Spanish, include, as an
essential element, various modes of performance.
Speaker Bio:
Born in the Bronx, New York of parents from Izmir, Turkey, Gloria Ascher is descended
from Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 and grew up with the Judeo-Spanish (Ladino)
language and tradition. Co-director of Judaic Studies at Tufts University (Associate
Professor), she teaches, besides other Judaic, German, and Scandinavian literature
courses, Ladino Language and Culture – the only such courses offered regularly at a U.S.
college or university. In addition to her scholarly activity, she writes poetry (published
also in Turkish, German, and English translation) and composes and performs songs in
Ladino. The song “A kaza” (“Home”), her poem set to music by Hayim Tsur, made the
finals of Festiladino 2004. Her translation of Matilda Koén-Sarano’s two-volume text is
the only Ladino grammar in English.
JEFFREY SHANDLER (shandler@rci.rutgers.edu)
Postvernacular Yiddish: Language as a Performance Art
Sunday, February 18, 1:00 (panel)
I will discuss a variety of recent Yiddish cultural festivals and related public events in
North America as a point of entry into analyzing how performances exemplify what I
have termed the postvernacular mode of Yiddish. Though varied in their venue, format,
and agenda, the performances under consideration all transform the use of Yiddish
as a vernacular through events that are marked as special by boundaries of time and
place. At these events Yiddish is often juxtaposed with one or more other languages, and
there is, as a result, a performative self-consciousness about the use of Yiddish. These
events also frequently transform Yiddish vernacularity by replacing it with some other
activity such as singing, lecturing, dancing, reciting poetry, playing musical instruments),
and they often entail a professionalization of speaking Yiddish as a performative skill.
Taken together, these events evince a signal shift in the relationship of vernacularity and
performance in secular Yiddish culture over the course of the twentieth century.
Moreover, the analysis of these events speaks to a larger shift in notions of Jewish
vernacular behavior in the post-World War II era.
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Speaker Bio:
Jeffrey Shandler, a scholar of modern Jewish culture, is an associate professor in the
Department of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University. His most recent book is Adventures
in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture, a study of contemporary Yiddish
culture (University of California Press, 2005). Among his other publications, Shandler is
the author of While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (Oxford University
Press, 1999) and translator of Emil and Karl, a novel for young readers by Yankev
Glatshteyn (Roaring Brook, 2006). He is also co-convener of the Working Group on
Jews, Media, and Religion at the Center for Religion and Media, New York University
(www.modiya.nyu.edu).
ERIC ZAKIM (zakim@umd.edu)
Language and Immediacy in the Hebrew Cinematic Lens
Sunday, February 18, 1:00 (panel)
The aim of this talk is to explore the relationship between language and visuality, that is:
how did the development of Hebrew enable a specific way of seeing—in particular, a
way of seeing Palestine and the landscape of a rebuilt Eretz Israel as a quintessential part
of the rejuvenated individual? In this, the enactment on screen of a sense of immediacy in
the relationship of individual to nation seems derived from the sonic experience of
language itself and thus focuses the centrality of Hebrew as the essential experience of
the nation, as an analysis of Keren Hayesod’s Land of Promise (1935) brings to the fore.
Against the Zionization of a linguistic-based understanding of immediacy in visual
representations of the land, a late- or postzionist encounter with language has lately
inverted this relationship between immediacy and Hebrew, disengaging from the
immediacy of individual-national enunciation in favor of a wider historical understanding
both of language and of visuality. At least, this critical conclusion emerges from an
analysis of both Dina Zvi-Riklis’s 3 Mothers (2006) and Roee Rosen’s Zionist
Ventriloquist (2004). Can we then abstract these recent video encounters with language
within broader trends of how Hebrew is conceptualized within Israeli society as tied to
national constraint and an ideological mission? Does postzionist Israeli visuality work
against language as a fundamental element of the Zionist psyche, and thus reach toward a
strongly critical stance against language?
Speaker Bio:
Eric Zakim received his Ph.D. from the Department of Comparative Literature at the
University of California at Berkeley in 1996. From 1993 to 2002, Eric Zakim taught at
Duke University before moving to the University of Maryland where he coordinates the
Hebrew Program and serves as founding director of the Joseph and Alma Gildenhorn
Institute for Israel Studies. At both Duke and UM, he has taught various aspects of
modernist and postmodernist literature and cultural studies, focusing especially on
Hebrew literature and Israeli culture. His research concentrates on Zionism, critical
theory, and the aesthetics of poetry, film, and music. Eric Zakim’s book, To Build and Be
Built: Landscape, Literature, and the Construction of Zionist Identity, was published last
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year by the University of Pennsylvania Press. An edited volume, Mediterranean Studies:
Rethinking the Boundaries of Culture, will be published by the Modern Language
Association Press.
ARI ROTH (arirothdc@aol.com) & HENRY GREENSPAN (hgreensp@umich.edu)
Performing Memory (I)
Sunday, February 18, 2:45
This session will both reflect upon, and show in performance, the recreation of memory
in drama. Henry Greenspan and Ari Roth will discuss their plays and short excerpts from
each will be presented.
Key questions include: “What happens” when primary source material—testimonies,
documents, and so on—are transformed, written and rewritten, for dramatic
performance? What are the intended and unintended consequences for audiences, those
whose lives are re-presented, and perhaps for the playwrights and actors themselves?
What does “authenticity” mean in different kinds of plays in which Holocaust memory
and post-memory (especially of the 'second generation') are performed? What questions
arise—inside such works and outside of them--about "who can speak for whom,” with
what claims, and with what authority?
Speaker Bios:
Ari Roth is the author of some twenty plays and, for the past ten seasons, artistic director
of Theater J, the resident professional company of the Washington DCJCC at 16th and Q
streets. His repertory cycle, Born Guilty and its sequel, Peter and the Wolf (and Me), is
currently running in Atlanta at Jewish Theatre of the South. Born Guilty, based on the
book of interviews with children of Nazis by Peter Sichrovsky, was commissioned and
first produced by Arena Stage and subsequently in acclaimed productions Off-Broadway
and across the country.
Henry Greenspan is a psychologist and playwright at the University of Michigan in Ann
Arbor. He has been teaching and writing about Holocaust survivors’ retelling for more
than twenty-five years, and is the author of On Listening to Holocaust Survivors:
Recounting and Life History (1998) and, with Agi Rubin, Reflections: Auschwitz,
Memory, and a Life Recreated (2006). In 2000, he was the annual Weinmann lecturer at
the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Among his plays, REMNANTS is also
based on two decades of his conversations with survivors. The piece was originally
produced for radio and distributed to NPR stations nationwide. As a stage play,
Greenspan has performed REMNANTS at more than a hundred venues throughout the
United States and Canada, as well as in Britain, Israel, and the Czech Republic.
REMNANTS will be performed on Monday, February 19, 7:30 pm (at St. Mark's
Episcopal Church, Capitol Hill: Third and A Streets, SE, Behind the Library of
Congress (Office: 118 Third Street SE) Phone: 202.543.0053
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ELANA SHOHAMY (elana@post.tau.ac.il)
Interpreting 'Jewish' languages in Israel today: Language policy in Israel
Sunday, February 18, 4:15 (panel)
What makes languages possessions of, or associated with groups? Or, alternatively, what
makes groups belong to, or associated with, certain languages? Is Hebrew, a language
associated with the Jewish people and their scriptures, a Jewish language in the state of
Israel today, given its dominance and wide use, not only by Jews, but also by non-Jews?
Is the definition of 'Jewish languages' different in Israel where Jews are a majority than in
other places where Jews are minorities?
The paper will address these issues by claiming that languages are free commodities that
can be associated and appropriated by people and groups for various goals in different
contexts. Upon the arrival of Jews to Palestine they appropriated Hebrew as the only
language of Jews in Israel, secularized it and rejected Yiddish and other language spoken
by Jews. Hebrew became an ideological tool, the dominant language and the lingua
franca currently claimed and appropriated by non-Jews as well (e.g., Arabs, immigrants).
Hebrew today is used by 'all its citizens' of Israel, as a first, second or hybrid language.
The implications of groups defining languages as 'theirs' will be discussed in relation to
the consequences of inclusion/exclusion, membership, loyalty and 'otherness' in Israel
today. It will focus on the strategies of the 'other' groups to the ownership claims conforming, as a political reaction to the ownership of land, or as rejection (e.g., Ultra
Orthodox using Yiddish). I end by discussing the high costs paid by people and groups
for language ownership in terms of personal rights, participation, comprehension and loss
of group and personal identity. Implications to a revised language policy will be
proposed.
Speaker Bio:
Dr. Elana Shohamy is Professor of Applied Linguistics in the School of Education at Tel
Aviv University. Her work focuses on a variety of topics related to conflicts,
controversies and debates in multilingual societies, especially in Israel. Her main research
and publications are in the areas of language policy, language rights, language issues of
immigration, languages in public space and the politics of language tests. Her more
recent authored books include: The languages of Israel: Policy, ideology and practice
(co-authored w/ B. Spolsky; 1999, Multilingual Matters); The power of tests: 2001,
Longman); Language policy: Hidden agendas and new approaches, 2006, Routledge).
She is currently writing a book on methods of reviving Hebrew and is editing a volume
on Linguistic Landscape. She is also the co-editor of the journal Language policy.
Professor Shohamy was a visiting professor at the Linguistics Department at Georgetown
University in the Spring of 2005 and 2006.
URI HORESH (uh7@georgetown.edu)
Language Policies and Practices of Palestinian Arabs in Israel
Sunday, February 18, 4:15 (panel)
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The Palestinian citizens of the State of Israel, or The Arabs of ’48 as they are often
referred to in the Arab World, are at the crossroads of cultures. The linguistic
manifestation of this phenomenon—in both practice and policy—is the subject of my
talk. I begin with a discussion of two linguistic practices found among Palestinians in
Jaffa, a mixed Arab-Jewish town in which I did ethnographic fieldwork. The first
linguistic practice concerns a sound change in progress: Palestinian Arabic Spoken in
Israel (PASII)) is adopting features of Europeanized pronunciation akin to those adopted
earlier by Israeli Hebrew (presumably via Yiddish). Second is switching between Arabic
and Hebrew. Both linguistic practices are pertinent to the shaping and definition of an
emerging, complex identity.
In addition to discussing linguistic practices of native speakers of PASII, I address
language policies. This is more of a challenge because it is difficult to determine what the
policies are, what they address (e.g. schooling, occupations) or even whether such
policies exist. Basically, PASII seems to be rapidly emerging as a Jewish language
spoken by non-Jews in a country that consistently excludes non-Jews from its selfdefinition. Israeli Hebrew is already imposed as a Jewish language for Jews and non-Jews
alike. Intolerance toward non-Hebrew or non-Jewish identities is painfully abundant in
Israel, whether the victims are Palestinians, Russian-speaking immigrants, atheists, or
gastarbeiters. Although Palestinian Arabic, and its formal counterpart, Modern Standard
Arabic, are not literally close to extinction, their preservation as emblems of national and
cultural identities faces a great deal of erosion on virtually every linguistic level of
analysis.
Speaker Bio:
Uri Horesh has a BA from Tel Aviv University in Arabic Language & Literature and
Semitic Linguistics. He is currently working on his doctoral dissertation in Linguistics at
the University of Pennsylvania, which investigates phonological variation and the
intersection of diglossia and bilingualism in Palestinian Arabic Spoken in Israel. His
research interests include Arabic dialectology, sociolinguistics (language variation and
change; language contact), historical and comparative Semitic, Modern Hebrew,
language and gender/sexuality. Prior to his coming to Georgetown, Uri taught courses in
Arabic dialectology and sociolinguistics, comparative Semitic, general linguistics and
sociolinguistics at Tel Aviv University, the Walworth Barbour American International
School in Israel, the University of Pennsylvania and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
JOHN MYHILL (moderator; Sunday, February 18, 4:15 (panel)
John Myhill is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and
Literature at the University of Haifa since 1995. He received his Ph.D. from the
University of Pennsylvania in 1984 and previously taught at SUNY-Buffalo and the
University of Michigan. His articles on Jewish sociolinguistics, Hebrew semantics and
syntax, Black English, and language typology have appeared in journals and edited
collections. He is the author of Typological Discourse Analysis (1992) and
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Language in Jewish Society (2004) in which he argues that language in Jewish societies
can be understood in relation to identity. Also discussed is the revival of Hebrew, Hebrew
in the Diaspora, the survival and 'sanctification' of Yiddish, the idea of 'Jewish
languages', and sociolinguistic phenomena in the Holocaust and the Arab-Israeli conflict
BENJAMIN HARY (bhary@emory.edu)
Judeo Arabic in Israel and Elsewhere
Sunday, February 18, 4:15 (panel)
Why is Judeo-Arabic a “Jewish-defined” language? What makes “Jewish-defined”
languages? Or for that matter, “Christian-“ or “Muslim-defined” languages? How is
Judeo-Arabic used in Israel and elsewhere? How is it used and perceived by the public?
In academia?
This paper defines the nature of “Jewish-defined” languages arguing that almost all
Jewish- and Christian- defined languages bear the historical imprint of the “Holy Book.”
The paper refutes the notion that Israeli Hebrew is the only living language significantly
based on the Bible. What seems like a unique exception, in fact represents a much wider
linguistic pattern. The impetus for standardization of vernacular languages is often given
by Bible translations. The massive spread of printed Bibles among the population from
the 15th century onwards gave the “Biblical” vernaculars an extraordinarily wide
exposure and provided it with prestige. These Bible translations have to a large extent
endowed standard languages with a religious “character.”
Judeo-Arabic serves as a good example: Sa’adia Gaon’s translation of the Pentateuch in
the 10th century, popular among Arabic-speaking Jews, had a considerable impact on the
standardization of classical Judeo-Arabic. The most popular book of Yiddish printing
ever, Tsene Urene, was in effect a Bible digest targeting non-formally educated women
and men. It had a strong influence on the standardization of Eastern Judeo-German
dialects into Yiddish in 1907.
This paper argues that Judeo-Arabic as well as Yiddish and Israeli Hebrew are indeed
“Jewish-defined” languages. It also traces the historical development of Judeo-Arabic,
concentrating on its modern use in Israel and elsewhere among Arabic-speaking Jews, its
perception and prestige or lack of it by the public and in the academic world.
Speaker Bio:
Benjamin Hary is an Associate Professor of Hebrew, Arabic and Linguistics at Emory
University. His research interests include Jewish languages in general and Judeo-Arabic
in particular, corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics and dialectology. He published
Multiglossia in Judeo-Arabic in 1992 (Brill) and edited and co-edited Judaism and Islam
in 2000, Corpus Linguistics and Modern Hebrew in 2003 and Esoteric and Exoteric
Aspects in Judeo-Arabic Culture in 2006. He also published over 30 articles and book
reviews on Judeo-Arabic, Arabic and Hebrew linguistics.
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KEYNOTE EVENT
CYNTHIA OZICK
in dialogue with JACQUES BERLINERBLAU (Georgetown)
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 8:00, RIGGS LIBRARY
Speaker Bios:
Cynthia Ozick is one of the foremost Jewish authors in the world today, certainly the
most acclaimed Jewish woman writer. We have included her in our conference because
her lifework resonates so closely with the various themes of the symposium. Ozick’s
essays and fiction explore boundaries of languages, identities and cultures among Jews
across time, place and genre.
In her essay Bialek’s Hint (Commentary, February 1983), for example, Ozick explores
the notion of Jewish languages (including English, Yiddish and Hebrew), connecting
them with both sacred and secular writing across cultures and through history. In “The
Rights of History and the Rights of Imagination” (Commentary, March 1999), Ozick
probes the junctures between fiction and fact, art and history, art and politics, and the
boundary between imagination and impersonation, exploring how all can (and have been)
manipulated and exploited. Ozick’s work also crosses genre boundaries: as noted in the
New York Times book review of Metaphor and Memoir (Vintage, 1989), for example,
her arguments and expositions are like stories whose plots convince and persuade readers
to accept her point.
A partial list of Ozick’s publications includes The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1971)
The Shawl (1980), Art and Ardor (1983) , The Messiah of Stockholm (1987), Envy; or,
Yiddish in America (1989), Metaphor & Memory (1989), What Henry James Knew
(1994), A Cynthia Ozick Reader (1996), Fame & Folly: Essays (1996), The Puttermesser
Papers (1997), Quarrel and Quandry (2000),Heir to the Glimmering World (2005) and
The Din in the Head: Essays (2006)
Jacques Berlinerblau holds separate doctorates in ancient Near Eastern Languages and
Literatures, and in Sociology. He is currently the Visiting Professor of Jewish
Civilization at Georgetown University. He is also director of Jewish Studies and
Associate Professor of Religion at Hofstra University.
Berlinerblau has published on a wide variety of issues ranging from the composition of
the Hebrew Bible, to the sociology of heresy, to modern Jewish intellectuals, to AfricanAmerican and Jewish-American relations. His articles on these and other subjects have
appeared in Biblica, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, Semeia, Biblical
Interpretation, Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages, Hebrew Studies, Journal of the
American Academy of Religion, and History of Religions. He has published three books,
including Heresy in the University: The Black Athena Controversy and the Responsibility
of American Intellectuals (Rutgers University Press). His most recent book is The Secular
Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must take Religion Seriously (Cambridge University Press).
Berlinerblau is currently at work on a collection of interviews with sixteen of the world's
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most famous biblical scholars which is tentatively titled, Thumping the Bible: Experts in
Sacred Scriptures Speak Out on the Use and Abuse of the Bible in Contemporary Politics
MIRIAM ISAACS (misaacs@umd.edu)
Language Loyalty and Choice in the Aftermath of the Holocaust
Monday, February 19, 9:00 (panel)
Central to the factors that shaped Jewish culture in the Displaced Persons camps in the
immediate aftermath of the Holocaust were language issues. Drawing from the press of
the DP camps this paper examines how refugees addressed language and identity issues.
The future of Yiddish, the native language of many of the victims of the war, was a topic
for concern. Once the language of only a relatively few Zionist Jews, Hebrew was
growing in prominence as the central vernacular Jewish language for the soon to be
Jewish homeland of Israel. In that case, what was to be the role for Yiddish? What about
the many other, non-Jewish languages brought from former homelands, especially Polish,
Hungarian, Czech and Russian? How did Jewish survivors’ attitudes and aspirations
relate to language practices? In the American and British zones of occupied Germany and
Austria how would English or German figure in their recovery? Jewish survivors writing
in postwar Europe viewed the era in which the DP camps functioned as a critical time and
this paper address that period and its impact and the effects of the survivors’ efforts to
preserve and reconstruct whatever they could. This talk will describe the linguistic shift
that took place, with a focus on Yiddish, its destruction and its shift of locus away from
Europe.
Speaker Bio:
Miriam Isaacs (University of Maryland, College Park) holds an Ph.D. and M.A. in
Linguistics from Cornell University. Her research has largely been in socio-linguistics,
and especially the role of Yiddish as a heritage language in Yiddish-speaking Hasidic
communities. Her interest in the DP camps and in ethnic identities stems from the fact of
her birth in such a camp in occupied Germany and her later experiences among refugees
in multi-ethnic Montreal and Brooklyn. A native speaker of Yiddish, her teaching focuses
on aspects of Cultural Studies and Yiddish language and culture and she has also taught
and consulted on ESOL and multi-lingualism. She has recently published on language
loyalty and choice with respect to the Yiddish playwright, Peretz Hirshbein.
ALAN ROSEN (rosenac@gmail.com)
Broken Hearts, Broken Homes: The Holocaust and Its Languages
Monday, February 19, 9:00 (panel)
The choice of language among European Jews was never neutral. During the Holocaust,
contention over languages intensified: idealistic calls for a return to Jewish languages
competed with realistic defections to the vernacular; speaking a flawless German, Polish,
or Ukrainian could, moreover, help one escape the persecutor’s net. The main arenas of
terror forged their own tongues: coded communication in the ghetto, a fabricated jargon
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in the camps. Language in the war’s aftermath was marked by these wartime struggles.
Psychologist David Boder claimed that the victims’ postwar speech bore evidence of
trauma, and this was one of the factors that led to his 1946 interview project.
A Latvian Jewish émigré to America, Boder traveled to Europe in 1946 to carry out 120
interviews with those whom he referred to as "wartime sufferers"--interviews that he
conducted in nine languages and recorded on a state-of-the-art wire recorder. Seventy
English-language transcriptions totaling some 3100 pages were eventually brought out by
Boder. My paper will glance at some language issues during the Holocaust as a prelude to
discussing Boder's handling of them in its aftermath. The interplay between Jewish and
non-Jewish languages forms a crucial dimension of his work, and implicates issues of
audience, advocacy, retribution, trauma, ethnicity, and ethics.
Speaker Bio:
Alan Rosen lectures in English and Holocaust Literature at Bar-Ilan University and the
International School for Holocaust Education at Yad Vashem. He is most recently the
author of Sounds of Defiance: The Holocaust, Multilingualism and the Problem of
English; the collaborator on a French edition of I Did Not Interview the Dead, by David
Boder; and the editor of Approaches to Teaching Wiesel’s Night. He is a 2006-2007
research fellow of the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, working on a book
entitled “That Great Mournful Period: David Boder and the Ethnography of Holocaust
Testimony.”
DEBORAH SCHIFFRIN (schiffrd@georgetown.edu)
Old Languages in New Versions of Holocaust Oral Histories
Monday, February 19, 9:00 (panel)
Although the majority of oral histories from Holocaust survivors, at least in the United
States, are told in English, none of the survivors were native speakers of English. This
means that both the initial experiences and the memories of those experiences were lived
through, and initially remembered in, the survivors’ native languages. Linguists know
little about how life events and their memories develop and persist across different
languages. By focusing on the use of different languages within one person’s multiple
tellings of an oral history, I examine how those languages reveal not only the intricacies
of her own life, but also the construction of public testimonies and memory culture about
the Holocaust.
I begin by developing the idea of a ‘language autobiography’ and noting briefly how
language is both a topic and a practice within a life story and how the use of several
languages provides an important resource through which to portray both events and
feelings. I then examine three versions of an oral history from one Holocaust survivor.
Here I observe the changing roles of three different languages in the reenactment of life
experiences that are discursively constructed at different times, in different places and
with different people. We will see that Hebrew, German and English play very different
roles in the oral histories. Although Hebrew fades away, and English is limited to a
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pivotal point after the war, the use of German is both constricted (as some episodes
disappear over time) and expanded (to structure the description of Auschwitz).
Speaker Bio:
Deborah Schiffrin, Professor of Linguistics (and currently Chair of the Department) at
Georgetown University, teaches and does research on discourse. Major publications
include Discourse markers (Cambridge 1987) that analyzes the use of small words like
oh, well and y’know, Approaches to Discourse (Blackwell 1994, 2nd edition forthcoming)
and In Other Words (Cambridge 2006) that analyzes speech repairs, references and retold
stories. She is also co-editor of the Handbook of Discourse Analysis (2001 Blackwell)
and Discourse and Identity (Cambridge 2006). Schiffrin has always been interested in
personal narratives and life stories and has more recently, turned her attention to the
narratives (and other kinds of discourse) that emerge during oral histories of Holocaust
survivors, as well as public discourse concerning the Holocaust. With the help of a
Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum, in Fall 2000, she initiated a research project on Multiple interviews
with Holocaust survivors.
DEBORAH TANNEN (tannend1@georgetown.edu)
Voicing My Father: Bringing my Jewish Identity to the Stage
Monday, February 19, 11:30 (panel)
My doctoral dissertation and first linguistics book propose a framework for analyzing
conversation based on a tape-recorded dinner-table conversation in which I took part;
consequently I ended up providing an account of New York Jewish conversational style.
Though my Jewish identity was thus foregrounded at the start, it became so not by design
but as a byproduct of my analytic method. In the quarter century of linguistic research
and writing that followed, that identity has been backgrounded. But it took center stage–
literally as well as figuratively--in a play I wrote about a trip I made with my father to
Warsaw, his birthplace. Supported by a brief reading from the play, I discuss the process
of writing and presenting the play as it relates to my Jewish identity and as it compares
and contrasts with the creative process of linguistic research.
Speaker Bio:
Deborah Tannen is University Professor and Professor of linguistics at Georgetown
University. Her most recent research, supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation,
examines family discourse. Among her twenty books, Conversational Style: Analyzing
Talk Among Friends was recently published in a new edition by Oxford University Press,
and Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse will
soon be published in a new edition by Cambridge University Press. Her book You Just
Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation was on the New York Times best
seller list for nearly four years and has been translated into 29 languages. Her book
You're Wearing THAT?: Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation was
recently published in paperback. She has recorded two series of audiotaped lectures as
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part of the Recorded Books' Modern Scholar series. She has published a book of literary
criticism about a modern Greek writer, as well as poems and stories. Her play "An Act of
Devotion" was included in The Best American Short Plays: 1993-1994 and was
performed, together with her play "Sisters," by Horizons Theater in Arlington, VA in
1995.
DEREK GOLDMAN (dergold@aol.com)
Voicing Anne Frank: Adaptation and Appropriation in a New Telling
of Her Story
Monday, February 19, 11:30 (panel)
This presentation explores questions of individual and collective memory by examining
the process of developing Right as Rain, a play about Anne Frank and the Holocaust. In
1993, I was commissioned, along with my theater company in Chicago, to develop a new
play in association with Facing History and Ourselves' traveling exhibit "Anne Frank in
the World." As we reread the diary, what struck us most was the ferocity of Anne's
imaginative gifts and her relentless sprit of inquiry. As we dug deeper, we were troubled
by the sense that as Anne has become iconic and mythologized, the diary has been
reductively romanticized as a "song of hope." Her legacy has, as Cynthia Ozick
expresses, left us with complicated questions about "who owns Anne Frank." By
personifying Anne's relationship to Kitty, the imaginary friend to whom she famously
addresses her diary, and by juxtaposing the events of Anne's life with excerpts from the
trial of Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the Nazi official most responsible for the round-up of Jews
in the Netherlands, we sought to open an imaginative space for interrogation and
commemoration. I will present selected scenes from a recent workshop production of
revised version of Right as Rain. Among the issues raised will be the implications of
converging different kinds of source material (e.g. diary, trial transcripts, oral and
written testimony, composite monologues and dialogues), questions of authenticity, and
ethical responsibility; and the politics and poetics of representation-- e.g. what stage
forms are best equipped to evoke the un-representable atrocities of the Holocaust.
Speaker Bio:
Derek Goldman is Associate Professor of Theater and Performance Studies(Georgetown)
and Founding Artistic Director of the StreetSigns Center for Literature and Performance,
an acclaimed, socially-engaged professional theater company founded in Chicago in
1992, now based in Chapel Hill, NC. Under Goldman's leadership, StreetSigns has
produced 57 productions, and has received numerous awards and honors. Recent
adapting/directing credits include his adaptation of Studs Terkel's Will the Circle Be
Unbroken which premiered at Steppenwolf and was remounted at Chicago's Millennium
Park with an all-star cast including Garrison Keillor. Most recently it was presented by
Playmakers Rep with David Strathairn. He directed the long-running Off-Broadway hit
Sholom Aleichem -- Now You're Talking. He is the author of more than twenty
professionally produced plays and adaptations, and has directed more than sixty
productions. His articles on adaptation, performance ethnography and political theater
have been featured in Sage's Performance Studies Handbook and numerous journals.
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