For the Selma Stern Lecture 2025 of the Selma Stern Centre for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg, the renowned professor of German and German-Jewish History and PI in the Belongings program Prof. Dr. Aya Elyada from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has been invited to give a lecture on ‘The Afterlife of Yiddish in German-Jewish Culture: Diachronic Translation and the (Re)turn to the Past’.
The lecture explores the engagement of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German-Jewish authors, scholars, and intellectuals with their Yiddish literary heritage. Although Old Yiddish literature ceased to be published in the German territories already in the beginning of the nineteenth century, various texts of this early modern corpus gained a rich afterlife in modern German-Jewish culture, serving as the focus of lively discussions on a range of pertinent topics: tradition and secularization, acculturation and nostalgia, emancipation and antisemitism, gender relations, and religious reform. The ideological and emotional implications of Yiddish as a post-vernacular in German-Jewish culture will stand at the focus of this lecture
TIME & PLACE
November 13, 2025, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. at Freie Universität Berlin (Campus, Holzlaube, Fabeckstraße 23/25)