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Podcast: New Books in Medieval History
Episode: Jeffrey Shandler, "Yiddish: Biography of a Language" (Oxford UP, 2020)
Description: The most widely spoken Jewish language on the eve of the Holocaust, Yiddish continues to play a significant role in Jewish life today, from Hasidim for whom it is a language of daily life to avant-garde performers, political activists, and LGBTQ writers turning to Yiddish for inspiration. In Yiddish: Biography of a Language (Oxford University Press, 2020), Jeffrey Shandler presents the story of this centuries-old language, the defining vernacular of Ashkenazi Jews, from its origins to the present.Shandler tells the multifaceted history of Yiddish in the form of a biographical profile, revealing surprising insights through a series of...