Book Reviews 119

Kuznitz, Cecile Esther YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture. Scholarship for the Yiddish Nation. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 307 pp. ISBN 978-1-107-01420-6

Readers of this journal are undoubtedly familiar with the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, widely recognized today as the scholarly authority for the standardization of the Yiddish language. During its first, “European period” between the two world wars, YIVO was a global organization with headquar- ters in Vilna, Poland and branches elsewhere in “Yiddishland.” As war engulfed and ultimately consumed the eastern European heartland of Yiddish-speaking Jewry, its American division in New York City was transformed into its world center under the leadership of its guiding spirit Max Weinreich. Given the decisive role played by Weinreich, a path-breaking scholar of the Yiddish language and its cultural history, in shaping both the field of Yiddish Studies and YIVO, it is no surprise that the institute remains closely associated in the contemporary mind with his name and legacy. But YIVO (an acronym for Yidisher visnshaftlekher institut or Yiddish Scientific Institute, the name by which it was known in English into the 1950s as a statement of its commitment to Yiddish) was never the accomplishment of an individual or the expression of a single voice. Nor was academics in its most narrow sense nor the research and cultivation of the Yiddish language ever its exclusive focus. Rather, YIVO, as historian Cecile Kuznitz explains, was the creation of a cohort of scholars and cultural activists animated by a populist mission, many of whom knew each other since their days as politically engaged students at the University of St. Petersburg prior to the Russian revolutions of 1917. According to her invalu- able and engaging study, YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture, they sought to study the Yiddish-speaking folk, its recent past, and its contemporary problems in order to empower that folk to achieve a brighter future. YIVO’s four sections—Historic, Philological, Economic-Statistical, and Psychological- Pedagogical—conducted and disseminated original research in Yiddish to an audience, both specialists and laymen, about the recent Jewish past and pres- ent in eastern Europe and its diaspora. In doing so, YIVO scholars hoped to contribute to the project, underway since the late nineteenth century, to con- struct a modern identity for a Jewish people that was physically scattered as well as linguistically, politically, and religiously divided. Kuznitz, who worked as a YIVO archivist prior to graduate school, has ploughed through the institute’s mammoth internal documentation in addi- tion to consulting a host of publications by and about YIVO, memoirs, the European Jewish press, and relevant secondary literature in multiple lan- guages. The result is a “biography” of YIVO, the first sustained scholarly history

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi 10.1163/22134638-12340064 120 Book Reviews of the institute. While meticulously researched, the book avoids overwhelming the reader with excessive detail and observes an easy-to-follow chronological structure that divides YIVO’s history over five chapters framed by an introduc- tion, epilogue, and conclusion. Its lucid prose provides a coherent overview and analysis of the institute’s activities, organization, publications, and popu- lar reception during its formative European period (1925–1941). Kuznitz’s study complements a number of recent monographs (e.g., Joshua M. Karlip, The Tragedy of a Generation; Jess Olson, Nathan Birnbaum and Jewish Modernity; Simon Rabinovitch, Jewish Rights, National Rites; this author’s Jewish People, Yiddish Nation) exploring the subject of Diaspora Nationalism, which, she explains in the book’s introduction, has largely been overshadowed, if not ignored, in Jewish historiography by the success of Zionism and despite cur- rent interest in the affairs of nations lacking territory. Founded in 1925—the same decade that saw the birth of the Hebrew University and Soviet institutions of Jewish scholarship—YIVO sought to raise the status of the traditional vernacular of Ashkenazic Jewry and its emerging modern, secular culture in both the eyes of Jews and those of the wider world. As Kuznitz details, it was intended to be the pinnacle of an entire Yiddish- language educational network, from kindergarten to university. This network would cultivate a generation of producers and consumers of highbrow Yiddish culture, thereby assuring the existence of an economic base for that culture and its intelligentsia. Its founders themselves had by necessity received what- ever higher education they possessed in languages other than Yiddish and were with a few notable exceptions autodidacts in the fields they sought to develop. By elaborating an academic register for the language and demonstrat- ing its suitability as a vehicle of European high culture, they aimed to stay the “defection” of Jews to more prestigious languages in the pursuit of intellectual and cultural opportunities, material gain, and prestige. Disappointed by the collapse of a liberal regime responsive to minority national cultures in Ukraine and fleeing the general atmosphere of violence and instability in the former tsarist empire, several of YIVO’s founders joined the colony of eastern European intellectuals present in cosmopolitan Berlin during the early Weimar years. While not the first to propose a higher educa- tional or research organization functioning in Yiddish, Jewish literary scholar Nokhem Shtif was the chief architect of the plan for YIVO’s founding and orga- nization. Shtif did not remain long with YIVO, however; demoralized by years of poverty, he was drawn in 1926 by the promise of state-supported Yiddish culture to accept a research position in the Soviet Union despite a lack of genu- ine enthusiasm for the regime’s ideology. The individual most responsible for implementing Shtif’s vision was, Kuznitz clarifies, Weinreich, who was born

Journal of Jewish Languages 4 (2016) 109–124