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• #Rutgers word series

Shtetl: A Vernacular in Intellectual History by Jeffrey Shandler Through the work of novelists, memoirists, journalists, playwrights, visual artists, photographers, filmmakers and others, the shtetl has come to exemplify a distinct Jewish sensibility, embodied by life in provincial Eastern Europe before World War II. “The popular image of the shtetl, though often limited in scope and historically inaccurate in many ways, has taken on a life of its own.” “I was interested in tracking the dynamics of the term through both popular culture and scholarly approaches,” he says. When the series’ editors approached him to contribute, Shandler lobbied hard on behalf of a book on the shtetl because of its prominent, wide-ranging and sometimes provocative place in modern culture.

#Rutgers word series

Among other topics, the series also explores Jewish families, space and place in Jewish studies, and the Haskalah, an intellectual movement of the 18th and 19th centuries inspired by the European Enlightenment. Shandler’s book is the latest in the Rutgers University Press series “Key Words in Jewish Studies,” designed to introduce both students and academics to developments in the field through individual words and phrases. In popular usage, it has acquired all kinds of connotations, especially as the word moves into other languages.”

But according to Shandler, a professor in the Department of Jewish Studies at Rutgers: “In Yiddish, shtetl simply means ‘town’ – anywhere, at any time, inhabited by anyone. In contemporary culture, the word shtetl has come to represent a close-knit, religiously observant Jewish community in Eastern Europe some time before World War II. One of Jeffrey Shandler’s quests in writing his latest book, Shtetl: A Vernacular in Intellectual History, was understanding how this seemingly simple word has come to signify so much to so many.