‘Bad Yiddish’ is theme of the 2025 virtual Yiddish conference, Farbindungen
In line with the topic is a lecture on Yiddish literature about Warsaw’s prewar Yiddish-speaking criminals.
Warsaw’s Krochmalna Street was a center of the Yiddish criminal underworld Photo by picryl
By Rukhl Schaechter January 13, 2025
For the past four years, academics in Yiddish-related fields have been flocking to a unique online conference on topics that don’t always fit the mold of a standard scholarly convention.
This year’s bold, yet playful title, ‘Bad Yiddish’, reflects the counter-cultural atmosphere of the event. At first glance, it seems to refer to the concern among many Yiddish instructors that their students use proper grammar when speaking the language. But, as can be gleaned from the conference schedule, the term also refers to descriptions of impropriety in Yiddish literature, as for example a session by Marcin Dzidek (University of Warsaw) about Krokhmalne Street in Warsaw which was a center of the Jewish criminal underworld.
The two-day collaborative event, Farbindungen (Connections), is not just fun and games, though. Like all academic conferences, it enables young professors and budding scholars of Yiddish studies to share their research and to network, even if only online.
Among the other topics to be discussed at this year’s conference:
- “Badly (?) Yiddishized Arabic Components in the Yiddish Press,” presented by Uri Horesh (University of St. Andrews)
- “Yoshke in Crown Heights: A Yiddish-Yeshivish New Testament for the 21st Century,” by Pamela Brenner (Harvard University)
- “Yiddish Socialism and Class Conflict in Montreal,” by Sam Bick (York University)
- “Mickey Katz, Postwar Yiddishism, and the Vulgar Postvernacular,” by Uri Schreter (Harvard University)
- “Yiddish in the Land of the Perpetrators: Newspapers in Jewish DP Camps 1945-1948,” by Benedikt Putz (Freie Universität Berlin)
See the entire schedule and register for the conference
A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
