2/4 | Birthday of Georg Brandes
Today in Yiddishkayt… February 4 Birthday of Georg Morris Cohen Brandes, Danish critic and scholar Georg Brandes was born to a Jewish middle class family on February 4, 1842 in Copenhagen. He was educated in law and philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, and in 1862 he won the gold medal of the university for an essay on The Idea of Nemesis among the Ancients. Brandes was influenced by the writings of Heiberg, Søren Kierkegaard, John Stuart Mill and the French critics Hippolyte Taine, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, and Ernest Renan. He adopted a broad, cosmopolitan view of...
Read More1/24 | Birthday of Ayzik Meyer Dik
Today in Yiddishkayt… January 24 Birthday of Ayzik Meyer Dik, Yiddish Author Ayzik Meyer Dik (also known by his acronymic pseudonym Amad) was born in Vilna on January 24, 1814. He received a traditional Jewish education and married young, settling in the Litvish town of Zupran (today Жупраны, Belarus). When his first wife died childless, he married the daughter of a wealthy khosid from Nesvizh (today, Нясьвіж) who supported the couple despite Dik’s aversion to Hasidim. Dik considered both Hasidism and lack of Western education to be the most destructive influences on...
Read More1/21 | Birthday of Moses Hess
Today in Yiddishkayt… January 21 200th Birthday of Moses Hess, Radical Thinker Two hundred years ago today Moses Hess was born in Bonn, (his given name was Moïses as Bonn was then part of the First French Empire), at Judengasse 807. He had a traditional Jewish education, but learned French and German as well. After leaving the University of Bonn, Hess moved to Cologne and founded what was perhaps the first socialist journal. His ideas on collectives and community as well as on Jewish life would later be developed by his colleagues Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels into Communism....
Read More1/15 | Yortsayt of Rosa Luxemburg
Today in Yiddishkayt… January 15 Yortsayt of Rosa Luxemburg, Revolutionary Philosopher Rosa Luxemburg was born on March 5, 1871 in Zamość, the youngest of five children. Her family lived near the old market square, not far from the home of Y.L. Peretz. She became politically active at a young age and while she finished the gymnasium in Warsaw at the top of her class, she was denied a medal because of her “oppositional attitude toward the authorities.” In 1889, she moved to Zurich where she met exiled Russian revolutionaries and her partner, Leo Jogiches, with whom she...
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