After hosting ten wonderful panels on the intersections of AI in Oral History, OHA is pleased to announce that the recordings of the event are now available. All registrants should have received an email on July 22nd containing the recording links for each panel. If you registered and did not receive this email, please contact […]
A new Announcement has been posted in H-OralHist.
Symposium
Date September 9, 2024
“Older Jews and the Holocaust” Public Symposium
September 9, 2024
During the Holocaust
, older Jews were among the first to be targeted for death or deportation to killing centers. Some wrote about their experiences in diaries and letters, and information can be found in other documentation and postwar testimony. Still, little is known about how older Jews endured persecution, how they responded, and their survival strategies. This symposium will explore new research on the experiences of the elderly during and after the Holocaust, preceding the publication of an edited volume on the same topic. Instead of focusing solely on their vulnerability and death, the speakers will discuss how older individuals lived through genocide and navigated its aftermath, as well as how others reacted to the needs of older Jews.
Elizabeth Anthony, Director, Visiting Scholar Programs, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Christine Schmidt, Deputy Director and Head of Research, The Wiener Holocaust Library, London
Joanna Sliwa, Historian and Administrator of the Saul Kagan Fellowship in Advanced Shoah Studies and the University Partnership in Holocaust Studies, Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany
Rebecca Carter-Chand, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Kierra Crago-Schneider, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Maria Ferenc, Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw, and University of Wrocław
Katharina Friedla, Stanford University
Michael Geheran, US Military Academy, West Point
Niamh Hanrahan, University of Manchester
Borbála Klacsmann, University College Dublin
Natalya Lazar, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Roxzann-Rio Moore, Royal Holloway, University of London
Katarzyna Person, Warsaw Ghetto Museum
Patricia Heberer Rice, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Dan Stone, Royal Holloway, University of London
Xin Tong, Shanghai International Studies University
Anna Ullrich, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Lidia Zessin-Jurek, Masaryk Institute and Archives, Czech Academy of Sciences and Stockton University
10:30–10:45 a.m. Introductory Remarks
10:45 a.m.–12:15 p.m. Panel I: Contexts of Persecution
12:15–12:30 p.m. Break
12:30–2 p.m. Panel II: Older People and Migration
2–3 p.m. Lunch Break
3–4:30 p.m. Panel III: Older Jews among the “Displaced”
4:30–4:45 p.m. Break
4:45–6 p.m. Panel IV: Older Jews after the Holocaust
6–6:15 p.m. Closing Remarks
This program is free and open to the public, but registration is required. If you wish to view the program virtually, you will receive a YouTube link upon registration.
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The Thomas Jefferson Foundation (Monticello) seeks a visionary leader to become the Saunders Director of the International Center for Jefferson Studies (ICJS) and a Vice President of the Foundation. As the scholarly hub of Monticello, ICJS serves both the mass public that engages with our interpretation on site and online, and the fields of “Jefferson […]
Mary Norris began working at The New Yorker in 1978 and spent more than three decades as a copy editor, where she worked with celebrated writers Philip Roth, Pauline Kael, and George Saunders. She is the author of Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen. Among other things, her book demystifies one of the most puzzling marks a reader is likely to encounter: the diaeresis.
If you’re reading something and you encounter a diaeresis, chances are you’re reading The New Yorker.
There is one other way to keep the “cow” out of “co-workers”: where two vowels rub up against each other, a diaeresis may be used instead of a hyphen. Often mistakenly called an umlaut, a diaeresis (pronounced “die heiresses”; it’s from the Greek for “divide,” and is devilishly hard to spell) consists of two dots carefully centered over the second vowel in such words as “naïve” and “reëlection.” An umlaut is a German thing that alters the pronunciation of a vowel (Brünnhilde) and often changes the meaning of a word: schon (adv.), already; schön (adj.), beautiful. In German, if an umlaut appears in a combination of two vowels, it will go over the first vowel, and it indicates something important: a plural, say. A diaeresis always goes over the second vowel, and it means that the vowel is leading off a separate syllable.
Most of the English-speaking world finds the diaeresis inessential. The New Yorker may be the only publication in America that uses it regularly. It’s actually a lot of trouble, these days, to get the diaeresis to stick over the vowel. The autocorrect whisks it off, and you have to go back, highlight the letter, hold down the option key while pressing the u, and then retype the appropriate letter. The question is: Why bother? Especially since the diaeresis is the single thing that readers of the letter-writing variety complain about most.
Basically, we have three options for these kinds of words: “cooperate,” “co-operate,” and “coöperate.” Back when the magazine was just developing its style, someone decided that the first could be misread and the second was ridiculous, and so adopted the third as the most elegant solution with the broadest application. By the thirties, when Mr. Hyphen was considering these things, the diaeresis was already almost obsolete, and he was through with it. He was for letting people figure things out for themselves. The fact is that, absent the two dots, most people would not trip over the “coop” in “cooperate” or the “reel” in “reelect,” though they might pronounce the “zoo” in “zoological” (and we don’t use the diaeresis for that).
Not everyone at The New Yorker is devoted to the diaeresis. Some have wondered why it’s still hanging around. Style does change sometimes. For instance, back in the eighties, the editors decided to modernize by moving the semicolon outside of the closing quotation mark. A notice went up on the bulletin board that began, “Adjust your reflexes.”
Lu Burke used to pester the style editor, Hobie Weekes, who had been at the magazine since 1928, to get rid of the diaeresis. Like Mr. Hyphen, Lu was a modern independent-minded reader, and she didn’t need to have her vowels micromanaged. Once, in the elevator, Weekes seemed to be weakening. He told her he was on the verge of changing that style and would be sending out a memo soon. And then he died.
This was in 1978. No one has had the nerve to raise the subject since.
Excerpted from Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen by Mary Norris. Copyright © 2015 by Mary Norris. With permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. To see more of our favorite books on language, click here.
You’ve probably heard about Grammarly – the Word-integrated tool that allows you to check for spelling and grammar mistakes. However, you might not be familiar with their blog yet. That’s where this article came from.
There are a few “rules” of grammar that aren’t actually rules or, at any rate, rules that people like grammarians and linguists can agree on. These scenarios show that the standards and norms around language can be inconsistent and often confusing.
One classic example of these non-rule rules is the common advice that infinitives shouldn’t be split—meaning no words should come between the to preceding an infinitive verb and the verb itself. In fact, it’s now widely acknowledged that there’s nothing grammatically incorrect about a split infinitive. Let’s not be afraid to boldly go where many have been told not to go before.
An infinitive is the root form of a verb, which is the way it appears without any of the changes that it can make to show properties (such as voice, mood, tense, person, and number). It’s also the form of a verb that can appear after the word to: to be, to have.
When we refer to an infinitive as being “split,” we mean that an adverb or adverb phrase is placed between the to and the principal verb in a sentence, as in these examples:
She seems to often be up and about early in the morning.
Wen decided to gradually decrease the amount of time they spent on their phone every day.
The short answer to the question of whether it’s OK to use split infinitives is yes. Most usage experts today agree that there is no grammatical objection to the split infinitive and that there are quite a few circumstances in which splitting an infinitive can be preferable to leaving it intact.
It’s generally preferable to place an adverb as close as possible to the verb it is modifying, and sometimes misplacing it can really change the meaning of a sentence. Compare the following two examples—the first has the infinitive split by the adverb always, and the second is rewritten in a way that doesn’t split the infinitive:
I was taught to always clean up after myself.
I was taught always to clean up after myself.
In the second sentence, the infinitive to clean up is not split. However, the placement of always after the verb phrase was taught makes the meaning ambiguous—the sentence could be read as saying that the teaching always happened rather than that the lesson was to always clean up.
There are certain constructions whose meanings are absolutely reliant on an infinitive being split. Consider this sentence:
The company had intended to more than double its output that quarter.
It couldn’t be rewritten as “The company had intended more than to double its output” or as “The company had intended to double more than its output”—neither of those versions makes any sense.
Sometimes, even when a sentence could be rewritten to avoid splitting an infinitive without its meaning being obscured, the result sounds awkward, unnatural, or like the emphasis is in the wrong place. In those cases, it generally makes sense to split the infinitive rather than sacrifice the gracefulness of your language. Here are some examples of sentences that would lose some naturalness or emphasis without their split infinitives. Try to reorganize them with the infinitive unsplit and see if you agree.
I want to really emphasize the importance of the workshop tomorrow.
Paz likes to gradually come to consciousness in the morning rather than being abruptly woken up.
We choose to not mow the lawn in order to attract pollinators.
Because so many readers, educators, and others still object to split infinitives and find them annoying, it may make sense to avoid them in cases where you don’t have to sacrifice any clarity or elegance to do so. Here are some examples of sentences that can be painlessly rewritten to avoid the split infinitive, with examples of how to do that:
Split: The women proceeded to briefly describe what they’d seen in the city.
Not split: The women proceeded to describe what they’d seen in the city.
Split: I’d love to completely go over the text with you tomorrow.
Not split: I’d love to go over the text with you completely tomorrow.
Just keep in mind that you don’t have to spoil a natural rhythm or muddy your meaning just to appease the anti-splitters.
These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before. —Star Trek
For me I’m sworn to never trust a man— / At least with letters. —Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh
But still, the policy of the army at that time was not to send—was specifically to not send—women into combat roles —NPR
Nor can I blame thee, though it be my lot / To strongly, wrongly, vainly love thee still. —Lord Byron, “Love and Death”
I knocked gently and rang as quietly as possible, for I feared to disturb Lucy or her mother, and hoped to only bring a servant to the door. —Bram Stoker, Dracula
An infinitive is the most basic form of a verb, which is the way it appears without any of the changes that it can make to show properties. It’s also the form of a verb that can appear after the word to.
A split infinitive is an infinitive that has an adverb or adverb phrase appearing between the to and the principal verb.
Though many people have been taught that using a split infinitive is grammatically incorrect, that idea has little basis in historical usage guides, and most usage experts today agree that there is no grammatical objection to the practice. Often, splitting an infinitive is clearer or more graceful than not splitting it.
