Advanced Yiddish: Reading Academic Yiddish Texts

Undergraduate / Graduate

What is the language of Yiddish Scholarship? Today, we find Yiddish studies largely in English, Polish, German, and Hebrew - and only rarely in Yiddish itself. But it was only a few short decades ago that Yiddish Studies scholarship was regularly produced in Yiddish, both simply because it was the shared language of its scholarly community and as a defiant activist sensibility that Yiddish could and should remain a language of scholarly inquiry. Through this course, students will read articles from late 20th century Yiddish academic journals such as YIVO Bleter, Yidishe Shprakh, Kheshbn, Leket, and Oksforder Yidish, exploring how academic language activists used Yiddish to express and circulate their research in addition to using it as a language for reading and research. Students will write short response essays and will try their hand at writing their own academically-oriented scholarship in Yiddish. Ultimately, students will be encouraged to produce proposals to give talks in Yiddish about their own scholarship, either for the Farbindungen conference or the Symposium for Yiddish Studies in Germany (Dusseldorf), two contemporary conferences in which presentations in Yiddish are encouraged. Students must have completed intermediate Yiddish or its equivalent to take this course and are encouraged to speak with the instructor if they are unsure about placement.