Yiddishland Pavilion is the first independent transnational pavilion bringing together artists and scholars who activate Yiddish and the diasporic Jewish discourse in contemporary artistic practice. The Pavilion’s activities—performances, discussions, presentations of new artworks, physical and digital interventions—will unfold in Venice and online between April and November 2022.

The Yiddishland Pavilion takes place in a dialogue and collaboration with national pavilions of countries with histories of Yiddish-speaking Jewish migration. Being a fluid and nomadic project that is dispersed between Venice and the virtual world, the Yiddishland Pavilion represents Yiddishland ( ייִדישלאַנד or אידישלאַנד)—an imaginary country/land/space/territory and a stateless network connected through the Yiddish language and culture.The term “Yiddishland” was coined by Yiddish anarchist literary critic and editor Boruch Rivkin (1883-1945) and has since been widely used to describe a linguistic and cultural space rather than a shared physical territory.

From its historical birthplace in the Jewish communities of Central and Eastern Europe of the 12th century, the Yiddish language and culture have developed in close contact and cross-pollination with languages and cultures of their non-Jewish neighbours, while also experiencing violence and discrimination. The Holocaust, antisemitic state policies in the USSR, and assimilation caused almost complete eradication of the Yiddish language in the Eastern Europe. Through waves of Jewish migration from Central and Eastern Europe in the late 19th and then 20th centuries, by now the enclaves of Yiddishland have expanded to the Western Europe, the Americas, and beyond. Since the 1970s, a new and largely post-vernacular Yiddish culture (Jeffrey Shandler) has started to develop in many, often unexpected, locales around the world and to reappear in music, theatre, literature, TV series, and contemporary art, especially in the U.S. This phenomenon was in parallel to and a continuation of the surviving secular Yiddish culture that descended from pre-War culturati circles of Vilnius, Warsaw, Moscow, and New York. Hence the map of Yiddishland at the biennale includes such diverse parts of the world as Lithuania, Ukraine, Hungary, Poland, Mexico, China, Japan and more.

Constant positioning of Yiddish culture as “Other” to dominant cultures, its portability and fluidity, alongside vanishing stigmatization of Yiddish as a “dialect” of the Holocaust victims, made a return to Yiddish culture possible on new terms. Alternative but also familiar, the new Yiddish culture allows secular Jews and non-Jewish allies to mark their identity without necessarily connecting themselves with religious beliefs or associating with the state of Israel.

Yiddishland Pavilion does not concentrate solely on Jewish-related issues: the project is cross-cultural and transnational. Yiddishland Pavilion analyzes the erosion of global political constellations, practices collective remembrance, condemns war and occupation, and documents consequences of migration and politics of exclusion that target “Otherness.” It highlights the necessity to stand in solidarity with those under attack and oppression while bringing into focus the themes of dehumanization and displacement. It unveils hidden ideological strategies of nation-building and colonization while presenting a complex yet hopeful vision of the construction of a new intersectional Jewish identity in the diaspora.

By placing the Yiddishland Pavilion into the framework of the Venice Biennale and the system of the national pavilions, the project challenges the principle of national division within the biennale. It forces the questions of national representation, selection, and inclusion in the art world into the political domain while also making connections between different art scenes through shared Jewish and Yiddish history. While revisiting traumatic and difficult pasts of the 20th century, the project acts as is platform for context and the critique of the continuing military aggression, imperialism, and colonialism practised by contemporary governments through wars, invasions of sovereign territories, and terror.

In 2022 the Yiddishland Pavilion comprises a multidisciplinary online platform for presenting existing and new works, an audiowalk at the territory of the Venice Biennale that will connect different parts of Yiddishland through relevant national pavilions, and a series of public discussions, conversations, and performances, both online and offline.

Maria Veits and Yevgeniy Fiks

Curators of Yiddishland Pavilion