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COMMENT ON WORDS ON FIRE: THE UNFINISHED STORY OF YIDDISH

    Alan Dershowitz
    Jonathan Safran Foer
    Jerold Frakes
    Ruth Gay
    Dov-Ber Kerler
    Carl J. Rheins
    Elie Wiesel 

 

Elie Wiesel:
"Dovid Katz's book on Yiddish reflects the beauty, the variety, and the warmth of a language that refuses to be extinguished. Its miraculous survival brings joy to its readers."


Alan Dershowitz:
"I love this book. It's a treasure trove of nostalgia and a beacon of hope. It warmed my heart to read how the rich emotional Yiddish jargon became an elegant language of literature; then it broke my heart to read about the near-total destruction of Yiddish civilization, one of the great cultures of the world. This book revives hope that Yiddish will still flourish, even in a small way."


Ruth Gay:
"This is a book whose time has come. Dovid Katz presents the complex and international origins of Yiddish over a thousand years in a delightfully readable narrative that belies the enormous scholarship in many languages that underlies his work."


Jonathan Safran Foer:
"Words On Fire is not only a great history, it's a great read. Dovid Katz writes with the precision of a scholar, and the heart of a poet."


Carl J. Rheins (Executive Director, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research):
"In Words on Fire, Professor Dovid Katz reaffirms his role as one of the world's leading scholars in the field of Yiddish Studies. Katz's command of Yiddish linguistics, Yiddish literature and Eastern European Jewish cultural history is unsurpassed. Words on Fire is a bold and timely book that deserves to be read not only by specialists in the field of Jewish Studies but also by anyone concerned about the future of Yiddish and Jewish culture."


Dov-Ber Kerler (Professor of Yiddish at Indiana University at Bloomington):
"This amazing book is as provocative as it is profound. Written with verve and passion, it goes far beyond recycling accepted 'truths' about the Yiddish language, European Jewish civilization, and modern Jewish cultural politics. Its bold new conceptualization of the still evolving saga of Yiddish is a product of decades of inspired research, inspiring teaching and penetrating thinking of one of the most brilliant Yiddish scholars of my generation. It will stimulate further debate among scholars and laymen who are concerned with the ethos, history, and significance of Yiddish, the Ashkenazic cultural heritage, and Jewish identity in our contemporary post-modern world."


Jerold Frakes (Professor at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles):
"In a field in which ingrained myth is regularly served up as truth, and amateurs pose as experts, this accessible history of Yiddish, written by a native speaker who is also a scholar of historical linguistics, systematically clears the debris in order to set the record straight about the past, the present, and even to offer some reasonable speculations about the future of Yiddish."

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