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Gathering and Dividing Yiddish Culture: The Anti-Communist Question in the Parisian Network of the Congress for Jewish Culture, 1946-early 1950s

Tue, December 19, 10:15 to 11:45am, Marriott Marquis Washington, DC, Marquis Salon 4

Abstract

This paper centers on postwar Parisian Yiddishists and their connection to the 1948 Congress for Jewish Culture created in and led from New York. This Parisian group comprised recent refugees from Eastern Europe in Paris and included political activists (Bundists, Left-Zionists from the Poale Zion and, to an extent, from the Linke Poale Zion), educators, journalists, and prominent or emerging writers such as Avrom Sutzkever, Chaim Grade, Shmerke Kaczerginski and Mordkhe Shtrigler. This research centers on an exploration of this community of Yiddishists' internal and transnational debates that centered on whether or not to participate in the 1948 Congress, which took place in New York in September, the 1949 Communist counterpart, which took place in Paris, or to reject any politically-based split within the global Yiddish cultural community.
Through an examination of correspondence between France and the United States and reports published in the French Yiddish press, this paper will present some of the painful and vivid debates that took place among European members of a decimated culture and community. For example, these survivors were grappling with topics such as how to consolidate forces during the early Cold War years, in midst of displacement and in between transnational networks with diverse war experiences and agendas. This paper will present, through the exploration of the French section, the first years of the Congress for Jewish Culture, an organization which has so far received very little scholarly attention. By analyzing postwar French Yiddishists in light of their relations with their American peers, this paper will also give a transnational perspective, which will underline to what extent the Parisian case was singular when it came to political questions.

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