"Principled diasporism": folkists, zionists, and the meaning of "doikayt"

ENThis paper analyzes the history and uses of the term doikayt, which means “hereness” in Yiddish. The term is, despite a lack of evidence, frequently associated with the prewar non-Zionist ideology of the Bund. Relying on the Lithuanian Yiddish press, published oral histories, and archival sources, I historicize the term doikayt by looking closely at several concrete examples of its prewar usage and related phraseology. I pay special attention to a 1926 exchange over the meaning of doikayt that took place between Yudl Mark (1897–1975), a leader of the Yidishe Folkspartey (Jewish People’s Party) in Lithuania, and Jacob Robinson (1889–1977), a Zionist activist. It shows how the term was evoked in the context of the conflict between Lithuanian Jewish parties over issues of language, the system of autonomy, and perspectives on the Lithuanian national project. While emigration to Palestine, or the “specter of emigration,” motivated the language of “here” and “there” that led to the coinage of doikayt, the term was employed in interwar Lithuania, I argue, in response to Zionist successes in diaspora politics and not, as has been suggested in scholarly literature, to a Zionist abandonment of the diaspora, nor in relation to the Bund. [From the publication]