This paper looks at the speech of Orthodox Jews on Columbia's campus, students affiliated with the group called Yavneh. The speakers' educational and linguistic backgrounds and attitudes are considered. The linguistic analysis examines the lexical, semantic, and syntactic influences of Yiddish, Old Hebrew, Aramaic, and Modern Hebrew, including the phonology and morphology of the borrowings. The paper concludes that Jewish English inherits most of its non-English elements from Eastern Yiddish and that it is a link in a chain of Jewish languages possibly reaching back to Biblical and Rabbinic Hebrew and Aramaic. This paper is of interest to the fields of Jewish History and Sociology, as well as the linguistic subfields of Language Contact, Sociolinguistics, and Jewish Linguistics.

On my recent visit to Poland, I stood in wonder in the center of Warsaw. Poland was once the home of the largest Jewish community in the world. Fifty years after the decimation of eastern-European Jewry, I was on a personal journey to reconnect with my Jewish roots, struggling to make some sense of the most turbulent reality of modern history.

As a young child, I leaned about the destruction of the "six million." I was constantly told to "never forget" the brutal past. As an adult, I strive to personalize the Holocaust, to try to give a face to the faceless. Most of the Holocaust historiography examines how Jews died; I am more interested with the survivors' strength and will to live. Visiting some of the mass exterminatin centers and concentration camps, I wondered how Jews survived one day to the next. I began to learn how Jewish ritual was used to maintain a sense of humanity and dignity.

In trying to redefine how to be a Jew in the modern world, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel writes, "A world has vanished. All that remains is a sanctuary hidden in the realm of spirit. We of this generation are still holding the key - the key to the sanctuary which is also the shelter of our own deserted souls." This essay marks the beginning of my journey for that key. I hope my work will add to the way we experience Jewish ritual and impact the way in which our generation tries to make sense of the past.

The classical biblical view of death as eternal rest failed to comfort the witnesses of unjust religious and national persecution in post-biblical Palestine. Consequently, the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha produced an array of alternatives to the biblical conception. Four hundred years later, after the destruction at the hands of the Romans and the disasters of both Sadducean and Messianic divisions, the Tannaim, who came to represent normative Judaism, promoted only those conceptions of the afterlife that involved physical resurrection. They rejected notions of the afterlife--such as immortality of the soul--that were too heavily influenced by Hellenistic thought or Messianic fervor. Yet, beacuse they failed to describe in any detail the afterlife that they envisioned, they left viable the possibility of alternate conceptions of the afterlife in the future.

The Amoraim presented some of these alternate visions--especially those of Gehinnom and Gan Eden--but, unlike the Tannaim, they never mandated belief in any specific one. Post-talmudic Jews were left only with a confused medley of vague and incomprehensible notions of the afterlife. This brought back the original problem of the failed biblical conceptions of the afterlife--it offered no solace to the people. Thus, in Medieval Midrashim, there arises an attempt to both show that order exists in the afterlife and that it is not as remote as the Rabbis made it seem. These texts provide quantitative measurements and tangible images to achieve this effect. 

The conflicts faced by Jews in Western Europe offer, in many ways, a case study for the problems with assimilation in today's modern, Western society. Proust and Kafka, both Jews, felt this tension at the turn of the twentieth century after witnessing the corruption of justice demonstrated by the Dreyfus Affair in France. Both authors, I argue, chose to use literature to convey their frustrations about anti-Semitism, and yet, despite the anti-Jewish sentiments wihich still resurface around the world, these two men achieved and have maintained membership in the Western canon.

These two works, I believe, retain their place in the Western canon because they open themselves to an infinite number of interpretations. These books are so rich and complex that scholars can spend their lifetimes analyzing Proust and Kafka, and I recognize that my analysis does not have the benefit of such background. I accepted the project of writing a senior thesis as a challenge, however, to use and demonstrate the skills I have developed as an undergraduate comparative literature major at Columbia. Although I must contend with my lack of sophistication in reading these exalted and perhaps impenetrable works, I also contribute a fresh perspective to them. Armed with these tools and filled with trepidation, I embarked upon this analysis to raise intelligent questions and draw my own conclusions about the works that have retained their interest for readers and scholars throughout this century. My analysis draws upon my interest in the project of Jewish emancipation and assimilation during the nineteenth century in Western Europe, and from that perspective, I offer here a new interpretation of Proust's and Kafka's projects.

A poet, singer, and provocateur, Yona Wollach was a phenomenon in Israeli pop-culture. Israeli audiences couldn't get enough of her. Some loved her, others loved to hate her. No one could ignore her. But apart from her popularity as a fantastic persona, Yona Wollach must be seen as a serious poet, a pioneer in both style and content, who left Hebrew literature and Israeli society, forever changed. What Wollach said was as revolutionary as how she said it.

Yona Wollach was born in Tel Aviv in 1946, though she spent most of her life in the small suburb of Kiryat Ono. Wollach's father, one of the founders of the town, was killed in 1948, in the Israeli War of Independence.

While Wollach wrote poetry all her life, she dropped out of high school and joined the Tel Aviv literary circles in the early sixties. Her first poems were published at this time in the periodical Achshav. She became part of a small group of avant-garde poets known as "The Tel Aviv Poets"; poets in this group included Meir Wieseltier, Yair Hurwitz, and Ahron Shabtai. All of these poets were searching for new poetic forms in an effort to make a radical break with the poetry of the fifties, which they found to be repressive. Wollach's first book, Things was published in 1966, followed by Two Gardens in 1969, Poetry in 1975, Wild Light in 1983, and Forms and Appearance in 1985. In the early 1980s Wollach began writing and performing rock music. In 1982 she produced a record of her poetry set to music. That same year she was diagnosed with the cancer that would kill her three years later. A posthumous collection of her work, The Subconscious Open Like a Fan, was published in 1992.

Wollach created a space in Hebrew literature for the new, the risque, the taboo. She was the first writer to say it all, no holds barred. Wollach broke all rules. She aimed to shock. Beyond the shock factor, however, Wollach was also one of the first to conduct a real and deep investigation of the self, of the subconscious, of the root and texture of feeling. In this paper I will attempt to show that in fact, Yona Wollach invented a new form of writing -- a form that many feminists might even call the first example of l'ecriture feminine.