The Joy of the Yiddish Word

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University Club, Room 212
@ 3:30 pm - 5:00 pm

Sculpture entitled OY/YO by artist Deborah Kass, held by the Jewish Museum.
Deborah Kass, OY/YO. Artists Rights Society, New York. https://thejewishmuseum.org/collection/34810-oy-yo

Sunny Yudkoff

Resident Fellow (2021-2022)

German, Nordic, and Slavic; Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies, UW-Madison

How does one say “joy” in Yiddish? The simplest answer is freyd. Yet this was not one of the three terms offered by popular lexicographer Leo Rosten in his 1968 bestselling pseudo-dictionary, The Joys of Yiddish. It was, however, the titular term of modernist Yiddish poet Yankev Glatshteyn’s collection, Di freyd fun yidishn vort (The Joy of the Yiddish Word), published seven years earlier. In the following paper, I examine the discursive spaces of “joy” mobilized by these two texts published in New York in the 1960s. I do so as part of a project to disarticulate a longer emotional history of Yiddish joy from essentializing narratives of Jewish American humor. Indeed, while mocking laughter is frequently associated with Yiddish in twentieth-century American discourse, joy rarely is. How, I ask, might we understand joy as an affective variable of modern Yiddish culture? How, in turn, does the semantic range of joy in Yiddish differ from the emotional horizons of Yiddish joy in English? And what can reading Rosten and Glatshteyn together tell us about the meaning of Yiddish joy?

Sunny Yudkoff is an assistant professor in the Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic, as well as the Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studie sat the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her first book, Tubercular Capital: Illness and the Conditions of Modern Jewish Writing, was published with Stanford University Press (2019). Her work has appeared in Comparative Literature, Prooftexts, Jewish Social Studies, Literature and Medicine, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on her second monograph, Against Jewish Humor: Toward a Theory of Yiddish Joy.