Dovid Katz

Dovid Katz (Yiddish:, also , Hirshe-Dovid Kats, , born 9 May 1956) is an American-born Vilnius-based scholar, author, and educator specializing in Yiddish language and literature, Lithuanian-Jewish culture, and the Holocaust in Eastern Europe.

In recent years, he has been known for combating the so-called "Double Genocide" revision of Holocaust history which asserts a moral equivalence between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

Born in the New York City borough of Brooklyn into the Litvak (Lithuanian-Jewish) family of Yiddish and English poet Menke Katz, Dovid Katz attended the Brooklyn day schools Hebrew Institute of Boro Park and East Midwood Jewish Day School, and then Yeshivah of Flatbush High School, where he led a student protest calling for the inclusion of Yiddish in American Hebrew day school curricula, and founded and edited the Yiddish-English student journal "Aleichem Sholem" (1972–1974).

He majored in linguistics at Columbia University, where he graduated in 1978, having studied concurrently at New York's Herzliah Yiddish Teachers' Seminary.

He relocated to London in 1978 to work on a doctorate (completed in 1982) on the origins of the Semitic component in the Yiddish language at the University of London, where he won the John Marshall Medal in Comparative Philology (1980).

In his early linguistic work, he began to argue for "continual transmission" of the Semitic component in Yiddish from Hebrew through to Aramaic through to Yiddish, challenging the standard "text theory" that postulated entrance principally via religious texts later on.

He proposed novel reconstructions for parts of the proto-Yiddish vowel system, modifications in the classification of Yiddish dialects, and joined the school of Yiddish scholars that argues for a more easterly (Danube basin) origin of Yiddish over the western (Rhineland) hypothesis, bringing to the table Semitic component evidence; it was in that connection that he came across a thirteenth-century Hebrew and Aramaic prayerbook manuscript in the Bodleian that exhibited the vowel system he had earlier, in his thesis, reconstructed as underlying that of the Semitic component in Yiddish.

For eighteen years (1978–1996) he taught Yiddish Studies at Oxford, building the Oxford Programme in Yiddish.

His posts, at the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies (renamed the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies) were instructor and junior fellow (1978–1982), senior research fellow and director of Yiddish studies (1983–1994).

His contributions include initiating a new four-week summer course at four levels of language instruction (in 1982), the annual Stencl Lecture (from 1983), annual winter symposiums (from 1985); University of Oxford BA, MSt and MPhil options (from 1982), and a doctoral program (from 1984), these being concentrated in the university's Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages.

Some of his former doctoral students are today professors of Yiddish, at Indiana University (Bloomington) and Düsseldorf among others.

He was Research Fellow at St. Antony's College Oxford from 1986 to 1997, and a member of the Modern Language Faculty's Graduate Studies Committee from 1984 to 1997.

He founded the series Winter Studies in Yiddish in English (vol. 1 appeared in 1987), and Oksforder Yidish (or "Oxford Yiddish"), entirely in Yiddish (vol. 1 appeared in 1990).

His publications on Yiddish language include his "Grammar of the Yiddish Language" (London, 1987) and his book in Yiddish, "Tikney takones. Fragn fun yidisher stilistik" (Oxford, 1993), both of which aimed to enhance the teaching of Yiddish as a vibrant language both spoken and for new literary and academic works, even if in (and for) small circles.

In both works, he advocated a descriptivist stance, rejecting what he considered to be the excessive purism prevalent in the field, particularly in New York.

After an initial trip to his ancestral Lithuania and Belarus in 1990 (during which he negotiated an agreement enabling Lithuanian students to enroll in Oxford Jewish studies courses), Katz pioneered the mounting of in-situ post-Holocaust Yiddish dialectological and folkloristic expeditions in Eastern Europe.

He focused on the "Lithuanian lands" (Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, etc.) and continues work on his Atlas of Northeastern Yiddish.

He has amassed thousands of hours of recorded interviews with "the last of the Yiddish Mohicans" in these regions but as far as is known has thus far failed to find a permanent home for the materials.

For years he wrote regular columns for the Forverts (1990s), and in more recent years for the Algemeiner Journal, which seemed to have stopped with the departure of Y.Y. Jacobson as editor around 2010.

After experimenting with modern themes in the 1990s, he abandoned them for the vanished life of old Jewish Lithuania, to some extent violating norms of modern Yiddish to write works set in older Jewish Lithuania in local dialect.

He began to write short stories in Yiddish following his father's death in 1991, and published four collections in book form under the nom de plume (Yiddish: —Hirshe-Dovid Meynkes): Eldra Don, 1992; The Flat Peak, 1993; Tales of the Misnagdim from Vilna Province, 1996; Einstein from Svir and Other Yiddish Short Stories, 2020.

He also (controversially) championed the traditionalist variant of modern Yiddish orthography, and was the author of the "Code of Yiddish Spelling" (Oxford, 1992).

In 1994 he founded the Oxford Institute for Yiddish Studies and served as its research director until 1997.

Awards for his fiction came from within the secular Yiddish environment: the Hirsh Rosenfeld Award (Canadian Jewish Congress, 1994), the Zhitlovsky Prize (Ikuf, 1996), the Itzik Manger Prize (1997) and the Rubinlicht Prize (2020).

In 1994 he founded at Oxford the then sole literary monthly magazine in Yiddish, "Yiddish Pen" and edited its first 27 issues.

He twice founded and directed (one-time only) Yiddish teacher training programs: at Oxford, a one-year program in 1996, and at Vilnius, an intensive course in spring 2005.

After a year as visiting professor at Yale University (1998–1999), Katz relocated to Vilnius in 1999 in order to take up a new chair in Yiddish language, literature and culture at Vilnius University, and to found the university's Center for Stateless Cultures, which he directed for its first two years.

He had relocated his old Oxford Yiddish summer program to Vilnius a year earlier (summer 1998).

In 2001, he co-founded the Vilnius Yiddish Institute at Vilnius University and remained its research director and primary instructor until 2010.

For a nonspecialist English readership he wrote a history of the language and its culture, "Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish" (Basic Books 2004, revised edition with added academic apparatus, 2007), which attracted both acclaim and robust criticism, particularly over his predictions of a vernacular future for Yiddish based in Haredi communities, and his contention that modern Hebrew could not replace the European-nuanced vibrancy of Yiddish.

His works on Litvak (Lithuanian Jewish) culture include the folio volume "Lithuanian Jewish Culture" (Baltos lankos, Vilnius 2004, revised edition 2010), "Windows to a Lost Jewish Past: Vilna Book Stamps" (Versus aureus, Vilnius 2008), and "Seven Kingdoms of the Litvaks" (International Cultural Program Center, Vilnius 2009).

He is editor of the web journal Defending History which he founded in 2009.

He is known to spend part of each year at his home in North Wales.

His website includes a list of his books, of some articles by topic, a record of recent work, and a more comprehensive bibliography.

In 2009 he directed the "Jewish Lithuania" program for Summer Literary Seminars in Vilnius.

He has proposed "Litvak Studies" as a potential program of study.

In early 2013 he began posting clips from his interviews of Boro Park Yiddish speakers gleaned from his return trips to his native Brooklyn.

In 2015, his book Yiddish and Power was published in the UK by Palgrave Macmillan.

He is the author of a number of articles on Yiddish in encyclopedias (including The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe) and book introductions, including the Yivo's reprint of Alexander Harkavy's trilingual Yiddish-English-Hebrew dictionary.

Over the years he published papers in Yiddish and English on various "history of ideas" topics, including the role of Aramaic in Aramaic-Hebrew-Yiddish internal Ashkenazi trilingualism (he rejected the notion of a single fused Hebrew-hyphen-Aramaic); medieval rabbinic disputes over Yiddish; rabbinic contributions to Yiddish dialectology; the importance of the German underworld language Rotwelsch for Yiddish linguistics; Christian studies in Yiddish; and the 19th century roots of religious Yiddishism, among others.