Josh Horowitz

Josh Horowitz is a senior in Performance Studies at NYU minoring in Hebrew and Judaic Studies, focused on Yiddish performance and performances of Yiddish. Josh graduated from the Beginner Cohort of the Yiddish Book Center's 2022 Steiner Summer Yiddish Program, and is returning this summer for their Intermediate track. He is captivated by the worldmaking potential of the Yiddishist project, and hopes to contribute to it and demonstrate what it holds in his own small way.

Title of Capstone Project

A yidisher shrayber-parashutist: Performances of Yiddish and yidishkayt in the 82nd Airborne, 1942-1945

Description of Capstone Project

Combining a reading of original translations from the collected World War II reportage of Meyer Hurvits (1913-1983), Iberlebungen fun a Yidishn Parashutist (Experiences of a Jewish Paratrooper, 1948) with a critical reflection on Jeffrey Shandler's Yiddish Studies framework of postvernacularity, I argue that the utterance of Yiddish was performative before it ceased being vernacular, exemplified by Yiddish-speaking soldiers in the American army during the Second World War and the specific example of Hurvits. Hurvits, born in Minsk before coming to America as a young child, had native proficiency in both Yiddish and English. His intentional performance of Yiddish and yidishkayt in an environment he understood as non-Jewish demonstrates that postvernacularity is not necessarily post-vernacular, and that even the vernacular use of language is not always a neutral act.

What Inspired Your Project?

Once I felt comfortable enough in Yiddish to translate, I felt obligated to. These are not histories seperate from our comfortable English ones. New York City once held a million Yiddish speakers, Hurvits only one of them. If English-speakers will not learn Yiddish, then there is only one solution- fartaytshn un farbesern.