Barry Trachtenberg, ‘The Nazi Holocaust and the Exile of Yiddish’

The Carolina Center for Jewish Studies will present their annual Holocaust Remembrance Day Lecture, “The Nazi Holocaust and the Exile of Yiddish.” Barry Trachtenberg, the Rubin Presidential chair of Jewish History at Wake Forest University, will examine how the Holocaust and new post-war order brought about a near-total end to the Yiddish culture that had sustained Eastern European Jewry for centuries. Trachtenberg will focus on the complicated history of Di algemeyne entsiklopedye (The General Encyclopedia, Berlin, Paris, New York: 1932-1966), one of the only successful efforts to bridge the pre- and post-Holocaust eras and link Yiddish speakers to one another after they were scattered to the far reaches of the globe. Initially conceived in the early 1930s as a tool to modernize the many millions of Yiddish readers, the encyclopedia became a means to work through the growing crises prompted by Nazism, the murder of European Jewry and the effort to assist Yiddish-speaking Jews in resettling into their new lives after the war.