Dovid Katz

Dovid Katz

Dovid Katz ( Yiddish הירשע־דוד כּ״ץ Millet dovid kats; * 1956 in Brooklyn , New York City ) is an American linguist and political activist living in Lithuania .

Life

He was born into a Lithuanian-Jewish family who emigrated to New York as the son of the Yiddish-speaking poet Menke Katz (1906–1991). Menke's father left Lithuania for the United States in 1914, but was only able to bring his family to join them after 1920 due to the First World War .

Dovid Katz graduated from Columbia University in 1978 and received his PhD from the University of London on the origins of Yiddish. He was a lecturer in the creation of the Yiddish Studies program at Oxford University . After his father's death in 1992, Dovid Katz began to publish Yiddish fictional texts under the pseudonym Heershadovid Menkes . In 1994 he was involved in the founding of the Oxford Institute for Yiddish Studies (Oxford Institute for Yiddish Studies) , as its research director until 1997.

After spending a year as a visiting professor at Yale University from 1998–1999 , Katz moved to Vilnius University in 1999 to take over the newly created chair for Yiddish language, literature and culture and to found the center for stateless culture there, which he founded for the first two years. He had already given his summer course in Yiddish, previously held in Oxford, in 1998 in Vilnius. In 2001 he founded the Yiddish Institute at Vilnius University and remained its Research Director until 2010.

Publications on the Holocaust

Katz states that Lithuania is a phenomenon of “Holocaust obscuration”, which is associated with “terrible and powerful anti-Semitic anchoring that is not part of the general population, but rather among the government elites and some of them Organizations and some quasi-academic institutions ”.

Katz is an outspoken critic of the representation of the history of the Holocaust in the national historical narrative of Lithuania, which he accuses of trying to both reduce the extent of the participation there and to trivialize and disguise the Holocaust.

In connection with the treatment of the history of the Holocaust in Lithuania, Katz spoke of an organized campaign that uses various strategies,

“Including a deligitimation of the anti-Nazi resistance (resulting in recent prosecution campaigns against Holocaust survivors who had resisted); a deligitimation of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and attempts to bring Nazi war criminals to court; extreme embellishment of Jewish participation in the rule of the Soviets; a legal redefinition of the word 'genocide'; of provocations of anti-Semitic sentiments against local Jews and Holocaust survivors; a marginalization of courageous local non-Jewish advocates of establishing the truth, and their replacement by generously supported 'double genocide' commissions, research centers and museums. "

In 2009, Katz expressed his opposition to efforts by the British Conservative Party to ally with the Eastern European political right, demanding that the party should not "let go of its flirtation with some of the worst racists and Holocaust twisters in Eastern Europe The obfuscation and distortion of history have made a foreign policy for which the watering down of the concept of genocide is a main principle, ”with Katz describing the support of such a bloc by British politicians as an ethically untenable position.

Katz opposes the Prague Declaration published in 2008 , which he accuses of equating the crimes committed by National Socialism and the Soviet Union. Together with the Australian filmmaker Danny Ben-Moshe , Katz wrote The Seventy Years Declaration , which was published on January 20, 2012 on the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of the Wannsee Conference and by seventy current or former European members national parliaments or the European Parliament was signed for the first time.

Katz also maintains a website Defendinghistory.com, on which he writes against current attempts to downsize, relativize and play down the Holocaust, presents the history of the Holocaust in the Baltic states and is devoted to researching the Yiddish language and the culture of the Lithuanian Jews.

Works (selection)

Non-fiction

• Grammar of the Yiddish Language, Gerald Duckworth and Co, London 1987.
• Klal-takones fun yidishn oysleyg, Oxford Yiddish Press, Oxford 1992.
• Tikney Takones. Fragn fun yidisher stylistics, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1993.
• Lithuanian Jewish Culture, with maps and tables by Giedre Beconyte, ¹ 2004, 2nd edition Baltos lankos in collaboration with the Central European University, Vilna 2010.
• Words on Fire. The Unfinished Story of Yiddish, with maps and table by Giedre Beconyte, ¹ 2004, 2nd revised edition Basic Books, New York 2007.
• Windows to a Lost Jewish Past. Vilna Book Stamps, Versus Aureus, Vilnius 2008.
• Seven Kingdoms of the Litvaks, International Cultural Program Center, Vilnius 2009.
• Yiddish and Power . Palgrave Macmillan , 2015

Essays

• On the dialectology of Yiddish, in: Werner Besch u. a. (Ed.): Dialectology. A handbook for German and general dialect research; W. de Gruyter, Berlin 1983, half volume 2, pp. 1018-1041.

Fiction

• Eldra Don and other mayses, Three Sisters Press: Rowen, Wales 1992.
• The flakher shpits. Mayses fun Vilner gubernye, Three Sisters Press: Rowen, Wales 1993.
• Misnagdishe mayses fun Vílner gubernye (on “ Fairy tales of the Misnagdim in the Vilnius Province ”), Yerusholaimer Almanach Press, Jerusalem 1996.
• East Jewish stories from ancient Lithuania, in German by Melitta Depner, Salon-Literaturverlag, Munich 2012.
• City in the moonlight. Stories of the Old-time Lithuanian Jews, Yiddish stories, selected and translated into English by Barnett Zumoff, Ktav, New York 2012.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Devra Kay: Katz, Menke, in: Sorrel Kerbel, Muriel Emanuel, Laura Phillips (eds.): Jewish writers of the twentieth century. Taylor & Francis, London 2003, pp. 513-516
2. ↑ David Singer (Ed.): American Jewish Yearbook , Vol. 98, American Jewish Committee, New York 1998, ISBN 0874951135 ISBN 978-0874951134 , p. 245
3. ↑ "dreadful and powerful anti-Semitic establishment that is based not among everyday people, but among the elites of government and some of its agencies and some quasi-academic institutions", quoted from: Raphael Ahren: When Lithuania was 'Yiddishland' , Haaretz , February 24, 2009
4. ↑ Edgar Levkofits: Baltic states assailed for 'Holocaust obfuscation'  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Jerusalem Post, June 29, 2009.  
5. ^ "Including delegitimization of the anti-Nazi resistance (resulting most recently in prosecutorial campaigns against Holocaust survivors who resisted); delegitimization of the Wiesenthal Center and efforts to bring Nazi war criminals to justice; extreme embellishment of Jewish participation in Soviet rule; redefinition by law of the word 'genocide'; provocation of anti-Semitic moods centered on local Jews and Holocaust survivors; marginalization of valiant local non-Jewish champions of truth-telling, and their replacement by lavishly sponsored 'double genocide' commissions, research centers and museums. ", Dovid Katz: Baltic Project to Delete the Holocaust from European History. Observations from Lithuania  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Lecture 12 of the eighth Herbert Berman commemorative series, given in Jerusalem June 23, 2009.  
6. ↑ "off the hook for their dalliances with some of the worst racists and Holocaust perverters in eastern Europe, who have turned obfuscation and distortion of history into foreign policy and for whom the watering down of the notion of genocide is a prime principle", Dovid Katz: Cameron must end Tories' far-right fling, Irish Times, October 31, 2009.

Web links

• Dovidkatz.net , homepage of Dovid Katz
• Defendinghistory.com , Dovid Katz's blog