Building Yiddish Culture: Doikeyt and Jewish Architecture, with Cecile Kuznitz

This year’s offering in Stanford University’s Clara Sumpf Yiddish Lecture Series features Cecile Kuznitz, Associate Professor of History and Director of Jewish Studies at Bard College.

How did Yiddish language and culture leave their imprint on the cites where Jews resided? And what can an examination of architectural and urban form contribute to the field of Yiddish studies, which is defined by the intangible factor of language? This talk will explore these questions and link them to the Diaspora Nationalist principle of doikayt [hereness].

This lecture is in English. The one the next day is in Yiddish on a different subject.

Cecile E. Kuznitz is Associate Professor of History and Director of Jewish Studies at Bard College. She is the author of YIVO and The Making of Modern Jewish Culture: Scholarship for the Yiddish Nation (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and numerous articles on the history of Yiddish scholarship, the Jewish community of Vilna, and Jewish urban history. During 2019-2020 she was a Lady Davis Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as well as a Ruth Meltzer fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies.