American Hasidic Yiddish Pedagogical Materials: A Survey of Sixty Years of Children’s Publishing

After arriving in the United States following the Holocaust, Hasidic Jews established educational publishing networks in Yiddish to replace those lost in Europe. How these publications developed and changed from the 1950s to the present day reveals a great deal about how the Hasidic communities that created them adjusted to American life, how their spoken and written Yiddish changed during this period and how competing linguistic ideologies emerged to address these changes. This lecture will provide an overview of three generations of American Hasidic Yiddish pedagogical materials using a representative sample of grammar workbooks, guided readers, storybooks, children’s magazines and oral-medium games. Through a close reading and sociolinguistic analysis of these materials this lecture will examine how the perception of Yiddish in these communities has changed from viewing the language as a simple vernacular to perceiving it as a semi-holy tongue. Furthermore, the lecture will examine how Yiddish is viewed as being uniquely able to transmit specific religious and cultural values, bind Hasidic Jews together and distinguish them from other Jews.

Hasidic Yiddish has undergone significant changes on American soil and is now recognized by scholars as a distinct written dialect with respect to grammar, lexicon and spelling conventions. This lecture will show how these changes were reflected in pedagogical materials for children and how authors consciously and unconsciously took both prescriptivist and descriptivist stances towards them.