Of great value. I recommend it to everyone interested in Yiddish and Jewish culture.---Isaac Bashevis Singer, Nobel Prize Laureate

Emanuel S. Goldsmith’s book was a pioneering achievement in modern Jewish scholarship. It was the first history of the Yiddish movement. In one master stroke, it enabled the bold, open-minded reader to overcome the myriad prejudices and misconceptions that continue to misguide popular notions about Yiddish and the Yiddish language movement…Now the historian of events, and (especially) the historian of ideas, are supposed to maintain a studious “distance” from their material. That Professor Goldsmith did in the first two incarnations of this splendid book. Still, the highly charged nature of the relevant controversies, and the ongoing heated debate about them, left readers wondering: And what does Professor Goldsmith say? In addition to his professorial personal at Queens College, he is, after all, an eminent Reconstructionist rabbi and a beloved writer and lecturer on Jewish thought…At long last, Professor Goldsmith has written an unabashedly subjective appraisal which appears for the first time in this new, revised third edition. In this graceful new chapter, the author keeps his scholarly wits while sharing his Jewish heart…Goldsmith feels comfortable saying: ‘Today more than ever Judaism needs Yiddishism.---David Katz, Oxford University

Emanuel S. Goldsmith is a professor of Yiddish and Jewish Studies at Queens College, City University of New York, and Rabbi of Congregation M’vakshe Derekh in Scarsdale, New York. He has lectured widely on the topic of modern Jewish literature and thought. He is the editor of the two-volume anthology Yiddish Literature in America, 1870-2000. With Mel Scult, he edited Dynamic Judaism: The Essential Writings of Mordecai M. Kaplan, available from Fordham University Press. His other publications include Thinkers and Teachers of Modern Judaism and Events and Movements in Modern Judaism.