Building and Consoling a Nation - by Mark L Smith

Book Synopsis

In the early twentieth century, when the dream of Jewish cultural nationalism in the Diaspora was growing among champions for Yiddish, its leading intellectuals included the "Yiddish historians" who helped to uncover the history of East-European Jews. Before the Holocaust, their mission was to discover and present the formative history of a living people for an audience of educated lay leaders, drawing where possible on Jewish sources of information, in order to help build and fortify a Yiddish-speaking nation. After the Holocaust, their mission became to console its surviving remnant with information about the struggle to survive under German occupation. This book makes Yiddish writings by these historians available in English for the first time.

About the Author

Mark L. Smith is the author of The Yiddish Historians and the Struggle for a Jewish History of the Holocaust (2019, National Jewish Book Award finalist). He is Resident Scholar at American Jewish University and has taught Jewish history at UCLA, his alma mater. He writes and lectures on Eastern European Jewish history, with emphasis on Holocaust historiography and Yiddish scholarly writing.