Culture in the Shadow of Futurelessness - Lecture with Ken Moss

In 1933, the great Yiddishist and diasporist activist Max Weinreich began a study of the political outlook of Polish Jewish youth that drove him to the precipice of despair about the future of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. This lecture explores how Weinreich and other Yiddishist writers and poets like Chaim Grade, Yankev Glatshteyn, Helena Khatskels, and Mikhl Burshtin confronted their growing sense that the communal and personal futures of the largest and most culturally significant Jewish community might be catastrophically foreclosed by the politics of antisemitism, rage, and fear flourishing across Europe by the early 1930s. How did Yiddishists committed to ideals of secular culture and the power of the word look to culture and poetry to aid and succor their community, how did they reckon with the limits of culture itself, and how did they begin to reinvent Yiddish culture in the process?

Kenneth B. Moss is the…