This year's Amsterdam Yiddish Symposium will take place on sunday 9 December 2012 at the Goethe Institute. The theme is: Yiddish Cities: Montreal, Melbourne, Tel Aviv:

The story of Yiddish speaking people is not only restricted to the shtetl. In the course of Ashkenazi history they were also living in big cities throughout the European continent (as in Amsterdam from the seventeenth century), and cities are main centers of Yiddish culture from the middle of the nineteenth century on: as Warsaw, Vilnius, New York and Buenos Aires. In the symposium three such modern Yiddish cities will be described and analyzed: a relatively important center (Montreal), a faraway city and on the margins of Jewish life (Melbourne) and a location where Yiddish had to compete with Hebrew, the hegemonic language of the city (Tel-Aviv). The three lectures may reflect a micro historical study of Yiddish culture in the twentieth century.

The speakers are: