These conversations will explore how those who achieved so much overcame limitations, pursued their goals, and took responsibility for themselves and others.
May those we honor in these conversations inspire us today and in the future. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is Ronald S. She is the recipient of the Dan David Prize. For more than two decades, he was an award-winning BBC News journalist and program editor, and also worked at the Jewish Museum, London, where he produced a major exhibition about Yiddish theatre in Britain.
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Browse A-Z Find articles, photos, maps, films, and more listed alphabetically. For Teachers Recommended resources and topics if you have limited time to teach about the Holocaust. He showed that literature could be Jewish without being overtly Jewish, and that many concerns of Jewish culture mirrored universal, controversial, and even outright Christian themes. His openness earned him both criticism and respect from secular and religious audiences alike.
Yiddish writers emigrated from Europe, and though Yiddish writing all but ceased after the Holocaust, it is seeing a small rebirth today. We use cookies to improve your experience on our site and bring you ads that might interest you. Yiddish playwright and novelist Sholem Asch in Join Our Newsletter Empower your Jewish discovery, daily.
Sign Up. Discover More. Yiddish Yiddish Literature in the 20th Century Yiddish writers emigrated from Europe, and though Yiddish writing all but ceased after the Holocaust, it is seeing a small rebirth today. East River A novel by Sholem Asch. Seeking to comfort fellow Jews in the face of mounting antisemitism in Europe, Asch evoked the moral beauty of Jewish piety in a sensitive depiction of the rise and growth of Hasidism. At the same time, the novel provides a panoramic overview of the history of Polish Jews through the whole of the nineteenth century.
In , he visited Palestine once more and produced a romantic narrative titled Dos gezang fun tol Song of the Valley; in praise of young pioneers working to reclaim the Land of Israel. In reaction to the rise of Hitler, Asch idealized Zionist dedication in this novel by holding out to world Jewry the promise of a restored Jewish homeland. An equally short novel, Baym opgrunt At the Abyss; , was effectively a sequel to his earlier account of revolutionary upheaval, moving from the Russian border in to the economic and spiritual collapse of Weimar Germany five years later, and depicting with disturbing clarity the despair that facilitated the rise of Nazism.
In , as war threatened once more, Asch returned to the United States. Troubled all his life by what he regarded as the senseless dichotomy between Judaism and Christianity, Asch persuaded himself that by retelling the story of Jesus and portraying him as an observant Jew, he would repudiate the calumnies heaped on Jews for centuries.
He articulated these beliefs in Der man fun natseres The Nazarene , in psychological content a novelistic development of Der tilim-yid. The result was an estrangement between Asch, Yiddish literature, and the Jewish community. The Yiddish text of Der man fun natseres appeared in full only in Undeterred, though deeply hurt by this torrent of negative criticism, Asch went on exploring the origins of Christianity, reading deeply and widely before writing The Apostle, a novel about the life of the apostle Paul which, never published in Yiddish, appeared in English in In the last 10 years of his life, Asch returned to Jewish themes and settings.
Ist River East River; , another realistic social novel about the assimilated metropolitan Jews of New York, attempted to harmonize the realities of American life with idealized memories of the lost shtetl. Der brenendiker dorn The Burning Bush; , a collection of short stories dealing with Nazi atrocities, was followed by Moyshe Moses; , a novel drawing extensively on traditional sources to present a psychologically sympathetic portrait of Moses as prophet and revolutionary.
Prolific and continually expanding the range of his themes, Asch brought Yiddish literature into the mainstream of European and American culture, while he himself remained deeply attached to the legacy of the Jewish past. In accordance with his wishes, his house there was converted into a museum.
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