This webinar with Dr. Jan Schwarz, “The Remarkable Renaissance of Yiddish in Sweden,” took place on April 23, 2022.
Webinar Documents:
In 1999, Yiddish was declared an official national minority language in Sweden. Yiddish speakers can now conduct government business in their native language. The Swedish government supports Yiddish-language courses in universities, Yiddish language TV and radio programming, and book publishers in the country are creating media in Yiddish.
In this webinar, Prof. Schwarz provided the background to these surprising developments and give us a taste of the rich Yiddish culture being produced in Sweden today. This is an uplifting story of contemporary European Jewish cultural creativity. Presented shortly before Yom Ha-Shoah, this talk brings a measure of comfort to celebrate the resurgence of European Jewish culture in unexpected places.
Jan Schwarz is an Associate Professor of Yiddish Studies at Lund University, Sweden, the only such position in Scandinavia. He is the author of Imagining Lives: Autobiographical Fiction of Yiddish Writers(Wisconsin UP, 2005) and Survivors and Exiles: Yiddish Culture after the Holocaust (Wayne State UP 2015; paperback 2021). Prof. Schwarz’s full cv can be accessed here.