Yiddish Wo:men -
Another Story of Modernity
This Year's Special Topic

What is this year’s topic all about?
Since its beginning in the middle ages, women shaped the Yiddish world. Through time, their tastes, talents, interests and needs were constant motors of development. Change did not just happen to women, they were driving forces leading Yiddish culture into modernity. But, as we all know, their achievements and talents were often neither valued nor validated. Rather, they found themselves being written out of the story.

When Nobel Prize winner Isaak Bashevis Singer and his brother Israel Joshua speak about their mother Bas Szewa Zylberman, they claim that worldly modernity “seeped” into their home through their mother’s reading of world literature in Yiddish translation. Suddenly topics like “love” or “women’s needs” were supposedly “a thing”. But Yiddish-reading women had access to the literature of the world in Yiddish translation and adaptation since the middle ages. So Bas Szewa Zylberman was neither an exception nor a novelty. Rather, she stood in a long tradition of cultural translation and practice. 

The complaint about women and the book was, however, already centuries old at the time of the Singer siblings. 

Jewish authorities tried to rule women in.They forbade books, they did not allow singing in public, took issue with many songs, specific melodies and mixed dancing – in vain. How do we know? Because prohibitions and complaints kept repeating. 

Yiddish Summer Weimar 2026 connects the worlds of Yiddish-speaking women from the medieval period to the 21st century through this year’s projects, workshops, lectures and stories. We will discover women not only as culture bearers, but as agents of change. 

But reading the title you might think, why “Yiddish Wo:men”? 

Because “Yiddish” is more than just a language. It is a vernacular. And today, we speak about vernacular music, literature, architecture, language or culture in general. It refers to everything that is an authentic expression, the informal, everyday cultural forms produced and practiced by ordinary people, rather than by elites. So, did a woman consider herself Jewish? Maybe. But if her vernacular was Yiddish, then she was, most certainly, a Yiddish woman. And this contains an entire cultural universe. 

And what about “Wo:men”? Well, we do not make it easy for you this year, do we?!

It is a wonderful play with letters and dots behind which lie centuries of an often rather hard social reality. We know of many instances where women had to pose as men to make their way in the (cultural) world. Most famous are certainly those who took on male pseudonyms in order to be published as authors. But there are also examples of men who needed to appear as women (on title pages or in other forms) in order to be published or otherwise recognized. Let alone all those who could not live or express the gender of their choice. But we also see, especially in the history of professions, that the boundaries were often blurred and spheres supposedly reserved for men also inhabited by women and vice versa.

Thus, to only say “women” is not inclusive in the way we want to understand it and does not do justice to the long centuries of negotiating gender in the Yiddish world.

 

Dive in and read all about this year's special projects.

Projects

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