Tag: Magnes Collection

The final Bancroft Round Table of the 2013 Spring Semester will take place on Thursday, April 18 at noon in the traditional Lewis-Latimer room of the Faculty Club. Eli Rosenblatt, Ph.D. candidate in the UC Berkeley Jewish Studies Program and Curatorial Intern at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life will give a talk on “The Mother Tongue in the Uttermost West: Yiddish-Language Printed Materials in the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at the Bancroft Library.”

This talk explores the collection of Yiddish-language printed materials published in California housed at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life. The collection includes a wide variety of novels, poetry collections, pamphlets, literary journals and rabbinic commentaries published by Eastern European Jews who settled on the California coast between 1881 and 1924. The modernist literature contained in the collection, and the Californian Yiddish literary circles it represents, helps us grasp the global dimensions of Yiddish literary movements. It offers a unique vantage point from which to discuss the circulation of Ashkenazi Jewish culture between its heartland in Slavic Europe and the Americas, Southern Africa, the Middle East and Western Europe.

The community is invited to join us to learn more about this little known aspect of Jewish and California history. Bancroft Round Tables aim to highlight the myriad collections of our Library and showcase the ways in which they enrich our historical experience.