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Selma Stern Lecture 2025: Prof. Dr. Aya Elyada (Jerusalem): The Afterlife of Yiddish in German-Jewish Culture: Diachronic Translation and the (Re)turn to the Past

13.11.2025 | 18:00 - 20:00
Prof. Dr. Aya Elyada

Prof. Dr. Aya Elyada
Bildquelle: privat

In honour of its namesake, the Selma Stern Centre for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg has launched the Selma Stern Lecture 2019, a series of lectures dedicated in particular to topics related to the development and advancement of Jewish studies – from the Haskalah to contemporary Jewish studies.


For the Selma Stern Lecture 2025, the renowned professor of German and German-Jewish History 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.

 

Aya Elyada is Associate Professor of German and German-Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the author of A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish: Christians and the Jewish Language in Early Modern Germany (Stanford University Press, 2012). Her second book, A Lingering Legacy: The Afterlife of Yiddish in German-Jewish Culture, 1818–1938, is forthcoming in 2026 with Stanford University Press. 

Zeit & Ort

13.11.2025 | 18:00 - 20:00

Freie Universität Berlin, tba