Author Talk with Dr. Barry Trachtenberg

In the early 1930s in Berlin, Germany, a group of leading Eastern European Jewish intellectuals embarked upon a project to transform the lives of millions of Yiddish-speaking Jews around the world. Their goal was to publish a popular and comprehensive Yiddish language encyclopedia of general knowledge that would serve as a bridge to the modern world and as a guide to help its readers navigate their way within it. However, soon after the Algemeyne entsiklopedye (General Encyclopedia) was announced, Hitler’s rise to power forced its editors to flee to Paris. The scope and mission of the project repeatedly changed before its final volumes were published in New York City in 1966.

The Holocaust & the Exile of Yiddish untangles the complicated saga of the Algemeyne entsiklopedye and its editors. The editors continued to publish volumes and revise the encyclopedia’s mission while their primary audience, Eastern European Jews, faced persecution and genocide under Nazi rule, and the challenge of reestablishing themselves in the first decades after World War II. Historian Barry Trachtenberg reveals how, over the course of the middle decades of the twentieth century, the project sparked tremendous controversy in Jewish cultural and political circles, which debated what the purpose of a Yiddish encyclopedia should be, as well as what knowledge and perspectives it should contain. Nevertheless, this is not only a story about destruction and trauma, but also one of tenacity and continuity, as the encyclopedia’s compilers strove to preserve the heritage of Yiddish culture, to document its near-total extermination in the Holocaust, and to chart its path into the future.

Barry Trachtenberg is the Michael H. and Deborah K. Rubin Presidential Chair of Jewish History at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. His books include The United States and the Nazi Holocaust: Race, Refuge, and Remembrance and The Revolutionary Roots of Modern Yiddish, 1903-1917.

He is the author of two additional books. The United States and the Holocaust: Race, Refuge, and Remembrance (Bloomsbury Press, 2018) brings students of the Holocaust a new understanding of this complex and often controversial topic. It demonstrates that the United States’s response to the Holocaust was (and remains) intricately linked to the ever-shifting racial, economic, and social status of American Jewry. The Revolutionary Roots of Modern Yiddish, 1903-1917 (Syracuse University Press, 2008) examines the impact of the 1905 Russian Revolution on the formation of Yiddish scholarship.

Along with being a member of the Wake Forest program in Jewish Studies, he serves on the Board of Scholars of Facing History and Ourselves. For five+ years he was a member of the Academic Council of the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University. he is a member of the Academic Advisory Board of Jewish Voice for Peace.