University of Michigan doctoral student Joshua Friedman, with the guidance of Dr. Andrew Shryock, will undertake research on the relationship between the ideologies and the material practices of institutional endeavors of language and text preservation. The researcher will explore how engagements with texts may change as they are collected from previous places of use, and rematerialized according to institutional dynamics of preservation. In what ways do these processes influence the transmission and reproduction of language? How might they shape, and how are they shaped by, ideologies of what language preserves?
The research will be carried out in the United States using Yiddish text and language preservation as a case example. The researcher will focus on the relationship between ideologies, discourses, and narratives of "saving" the Yiddish language, and the material practices by which Yiddish texts are preserved by different American Jewish institutions. The researcher will employ an ethnographic approach including methodologies of long-term participant observation, structured and semi-structured interviews, and archival research. This project will analyze (1) the material changes Yiddish language artifacts undergo as they are preserved, and the effect of these changes on their discursive, symbolic and social significance, (2) how practices of language preservation shape, and are shaped by, the social value given to textual objects and their materiality (3) the relationship of Yiddish language preservation to the broader preservation work by Jewish communities and institutions.
It has been estimated that the world today is losing languages at the rate of one every two weeks. This systematic case study will help shed light on how alternative discourses and practices of saving -- as preservation, as rescue, as salvation -- affect language preservation. Thus research findings will inform language researchers and policy makers working to address the contemporary challenges and dynamics of preventing language loss. Funding this research also supports the education of a graduate student.
Efforts to revive Yiddish in the United States bear an ambiguous and sometimes contradictory relationship to Jewish religious practice. Throughout the history of secular Yiddishism, Yiddish study has often been understood as a kind of "replacement" for the study of sacred texts—in which Yiddish literature would become akin to the Oral Torah of the Jewish people. Mirroring this clearly metaphoric relationship to religion, in the post-War period, efforts to revive or "rescue" Yiddish are generally assumed to be matters of secular Jewish heritage, or a project of "symbolic" ethnic identification. Interestingly, this remains the case even as the membership bases of Yiddish institutions have shrunk (while others have folded) and the major vernacular Yiddish speaking communities today are composed of Ultra-Orthodox Jews. Yiddish institutions that have managed to weather the storm of the declining population of Yiddish speakers, like the Yiddish Book Center, have increasingly engaged in practices that mirror Jewish non-profit institutions more generally. Specifically, they have sought to appeal to major Jewish philanthropists whose interest in Jewish culture more generally—above and beyond Yiddish—is often motivated by goals that transcend language maintenance alone, and extend to the maintenance of "Jewish continuity" writ large—a term that carries demographic cultural and religious connotations depending on its context of use. This research, which is currently being written up into a dissertation, explores how these shifts in the political economy of cultural production have effected the relationship of Yiddish to Jewish religion and secularism in the United States. In particular, I do so based on long term ethnographic study at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst MA, interviews Yiddish activists and institutions in New York, and ethnography conducted at a new Yiddish institution called "Yiddish Farm." More specifically, I analyze the success of the Yiddish Book Center in, and the more recent efforts of Yiddish Farm to, make Yiddish revival into a popular American Jewish mission, and thus a source of private investment. Doing so allows me to understand how shifting relationships in the political economy of cultural production are currently reshaping ideologies about the relationship between language, culture and peoplehood. The intellectual merit of this study is grounded in the way it places what Jeffery Shandler has referred to as "postvernacular" Yiddish in conversation with political economy on the one hand, and anthropological theories of religion and secularism on the other. Much of the recent work on the anthropology of religion has departed from case studies that focus on highly adept religious subjects—converts, missionaries, and so forth. They thus tend to focus on certain discursively based forms of religious practice such as reading, recitation, sacred text study, and others. Yet, many religious subjects not only lack familiarity with religious discourse; as I learned during my research, many individuals mediate their alignment with Jewish tradition through secular cultural forms. Rather than focus on religious virtuosos, this dissertation takes the cultural institution as a central node in wider networks of (in this case Yiddish) practice that encompass people with a wide variety of relationships to the language, and a range of orientations toward religion practice. A focus on institutions allows us to move beyond grounding the study of highly adept religious subjects. The institutions studied here cultivate not only linguistic virtuosos—those particular subjects who cultivate their Jewish subjectivities in and through Yiddish linguistic practice; Yiddish institutions can also be understood, I argue, as physical and conceptual centers that anchor wider economies of practice: not only speaking, reading, and understanding Yiddish, but postvernacular practices like listening, mourning, gazing, celebrating, buying and selling. The DDIG grant provided me with the necessary funds to live in Amherst, MA and Brooklyn NY while conducting research at the Yiddish Book Center, with Yiddish activists in New York City and at Yiddish Farm. Equipment purchased with funding from the grant was used to conduct interviews with informants, and also record Yiddish classes at the Yiddish Book Center, which have become the source of invaluable data for the analysis on which my dissertation will be based. In addition, funding for a transcription assistant has allowed me to quickly transcribe the most complicated and important of my interviews, thus allowing me to concentrate on the analysis of data.
