Description
- Abstract:
- Abstract of A FRAGILE INHERITANCE: THE FATE OF YIDDISH IN ARGENTINA, 1930-1970, by AMY K. KERNER, Ph.D., Brown University, May 2019. Mass migrations of ethnic minorities can destabilize immigrants’ relationships to states, nations, and languages. How do immigrants who share a language use it to navigate a situation in which the national and political meanings of an ethnic language have become contested? This dissertation asks how Jewish immigrants who settled in Argentina used a widely shared ethnic vernacular, Yiddish, to redefine their relation to a new national context between 1930 and 1970. Sources include periodicals and archival documents in Yiddish and Spanish from Buenos Aires, New York, and Tel Aviv, and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Chapter 1 shows how Yiddish language activism traveled from Europe to Argentina, and the responses of acculturating Jewish immigrants in the Década Infame [Infamous Decade] when fascism and anti-fascism defined the political climate. Chapter 2 analyses the Yiddish theater in Buenos Aires and its responses to the ethnic politics and cultural policies of President Peron. Chapter 3 shows the extent of post-World War II Yiddish cultural activism in Buenos Aires and the responses to it by multilingual Jewish survivor-refugees who settled in Argentina. Chapter 4 uncovers the uses of Yiddish by Argentinian and Israeli Zionists after 1948, including the use of Yiddish in Argentina as an informal language of state by Israeli cultural diplomats. Each case shows that linguistic performances of Yiddish served multiple and often contradictory political ends, including legitimizing or delegitimizing Jewish ethnic difference in Argentina; signaling allegiance to anti-fascism or populism; advocating pro-state Zionism, or registering objections to it; validating Jewish cultural survival, or mourning cultural genocide. Histories of Yiddish often refer to “language death” from a European perspective in which the Holocaust is central. The Argentinian case brings out the global contours of the fate of Yiddish, and the importance of national context in shaping group responses to the uncertain political meanings of an ethnic language. I join linguistic anthropologists in advocating for an understanding of “language death” not as an event, but as a symbolic process performed by speakers and non-speakers at moments of political crisis and national realignment.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2019
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Citation
Kerner, Amy,
"A Fragile Inheritance: The Fate of Yiddish in Argentina, 1930-1970"
(2019).
History Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/bptf-7t29
