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More than shtetl and pogrom: Inside the movement to translate Yiddish

“Yiddish has been made to represent the failure of Jewish life in Europe,” remarked Mindl Cohen, academic director of the Yiddish Book Center. Connecting Yiddish with shtetls, pogroms and the Holocaust created a narrative of an old-fashioned way of life that disappeared in the wake of modernity and antisemitic violence. The message was that “this…