Dovid Katz

Dovid Katz ( jidd. הירשע - דוד כּ " ץ Hirshe - Dovid Kats, born 1956 in Brooklyn, New York City ) is an American linguist and political activist who lives in Lithuania.

Life

He was born into a emigrated to New York Lithuanian- Jewish family, the son of Yiddish poet Menke Katz ( 1906-1991 ). Menkes father in 1914 was broken up from Lithuania to the United States, but could his family due to the First World War make up only after 1920.

Dovid Katz joined in 1978 to study at Columbia University and received his doctorate at the University of London on the origins of Yiddish. He was involved as a lecturer at the inception of the program for Yiddish Studies at the University of Oxford. After the death of his father 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) involved, as its research director he worked until 1997.

After spending 1998-1999 for a year as a visiting professor at Yale University, Katz 1999 joined the University of Vilnius to take over the newly created Chair of Yiddish language, literature and culture, and to found the Center for stateless culture, which he headed for the first two years. His otherwise previously held in Oxford Summer Course in Yiddish he had already given in Vilnius in 1998. In 2001 he founded the Yiddish Institute at Vilnius University, whose research director he remained until 2010.

Publications about the Holocaust

Katz notes for Lithuania, a phenomenon of " Holocaust obfuscation " ( " Holocaust Obsfukation "), which was connected to a " terrible and powerful anti-Semitic anchorage which is not located in the general population, but among the elites of the government and some of its organizations and some quasi- academic institutions. "

Katz is an outspoken critic of the presentation of the history of the Holocaust in the national historical narrative of Lithuania, which he accuses desirable, both to reduce the extent of local participation, as well as to trivialize the Holocaust and to conceal.

In connection with the treatment of the history of the Holocaust in Lithuania Katz has spoken of an organized campaign to Operating the different strategies

In 2009, Katz expressed his rejection of aspirations of the British Conservative Party to ally with the Eastern European political rights, and demanded that one should the party not " let their dalliance with some of the worst racists and Holocaust twister go through in Eastern Europe, from concealment and distortion of history have made a foreign policy and for the dilution of the concept of genocide is a main principle, " which Katz called the support of such a block by British politicians as an ethically untenable position.

Katz occurs against the Prague Declaration, published in 2008, which he accused of equating the crimes committed by the Nazis and the Soviet Union crime. Together with the Australian filmmaker Danny Ben- Moshe Katz The Seventy Years Declaration has written ( " The seventy - year - Declaration"), released 20 January 2012 on the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of the Wannsee Conference and seventy current or former members of European national parliaments or the European Parliament was erstunterzeichnet.

Katz also maintains a website Defendinghistory.com on which he writes to -date, attempts to reduce, or obscuring relativization of the Holocaust, the history of the Holocaust in the Baltic States and is dedicated to the study of Yiddish 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 of Giedre Beconyte, 12004, 2nd edition Baltos lankos in cooperation with the Central European University, Vilna 2010.
  • Words on Fire. The Unfinished Story of Yiddish, with maps and table of Giedre Beconyte, 12004, 2nd revised edition Basic Books, New York, 2007.
  • Seven Kingdoms of the Litvak, International Cultural Program Center, Vilnius, 2009.
  • To dialectology of Yiddish, in: Werner Besch et al ( eds. ): Dialectology. A guide to German dialect and general research; W. de Gruyter, Berlin 1983, half of Volume 2, pp. 1018-1041.

Fiction

  • Eldra Don un other mayses, Three Sisters Press: Rowen, Wales in 1992.
  • The flakher shpits. Mayses fun Vilner gubernye, Three Sisters Press: Rowen, Wales in 1993.
  • Misnagdishe mayses fun Vilner gubernye ( to " Tales of the Misnagdim in the province of Vilnius " ), Yerusholaimer Almanac Press, Jerusalem 1996.
  • East European Jewish stories from the old Lithuanian, German Melitta Depner, Salon Literature Verlag, Munich, 2012.
  • City in the Moonlight. Stories of the Old-time Lithuanian Jews, Yiddish stories, selected and translated by Barnett Zumoff, Ktav, New York, 2012.
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