LIMMUD FSU Recharge Presenters 2016

Professor Dovid Katz, a native of Brooklyn, New York, completed his doctorate on the history of Yiddish at the University of London and founded Yiddish Studies at Oxford University, leading the program for 18 years. After a stint at Yale (1998-1999), he settled in Vilnius, Lithuania to take up a chair in Yiddish Studies which he held for 11 years (until 2010). His books on Yiddish include Grammar of the Yiddish Language, Issues in Yiddish Stylistics, Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish and three collections of original Yiddish fiction. He is a pioneer of Litvak Studies focusing on the Lithuanian-Jewish experience in time, space and ideas, producing among others the books Lithuanian Jewish Culture, Seven Kingdoms of the Litvaks and Vilna Jewish Book Stamps. In 2008 he became active in resisting and refuting the revisionist theories of the Holocaust coming out of Eastern Europe, particularly the "Double Genocide" theory and the related glorification of local Nazi perpetrators and vilification of Jewish survivors who joined the anti-Nazi resistance. In 2009 he founded the web journal DefendingHistory.com, which he has edited ever since. His articles on the current history battles have appeared in the Guardian, Tablet, Jewish Currents, Times of Israel and most recently, Global Independent Analytics (GIA). In recent months he began to translate the Bible into Lithuanian Yiddish completing I and II Kings and Esther. His personal website is www.dovidkatz.net.