Beginner I Reading Yiddish

This is a live, online course held weekly on Zoom. Enrollment will be capped at about 15 students. All course details (Zoom link, syllabus, handouts, assignments, etc.) will be posted to Canvas. Students will be granted access to the class on Canvas after registering for the class here on the YIVO website. This class will be conducted in Yiddish and English.

Instructor: Josh Price

Who should take this course?
This course is for students who are new to reading and writing in the Yiddish language or would like a review. Those interested in obtaining Yiddish reading proficiency for academic purposes or archival research are strongly encouraged to enroll in this course.

What topics will this class cover?
This course will cover the basics of Yiddish grammar through close reading/translation of primary texts, beginning with selections from Uriel Weinreich's College Yiddish (1949) and branching out to include: historical and contemporary press ephemera, folktales, poems, songs, and short stories. In sum, an informal introduction to Yiddishland. Texts in the final weeks of the course will be selected in accordance with students' particular interests. By the end of the course, students will be able to navigate most Yiddish texts with the (non-intrusive) aid of a dictionary.

Is knowledge of the Yiddish alphabet required?
No, knowledge of the Yiddish alphabet is not required. The first two class sessions will include instruction/review of the Yiddish alphabet. However, students who have no prior experience with the Yiddish or Hebrew alphabets are highly encouraged to familiarize themselves with the Yiddish alphabet before class, as the course will move at a fast pace. The tools and videos provided here will be helpful in getting a handle on reading and writing the alef-beys, and are designed for independent use.

Course Materials:
Students should acquire a Yiddish-English dictionary. Recommended: Beinfeld-Bochner, available online and in print. The instructor will provide all other course materials digitally to students throughout the class.

Joshua Price is a lector in Yiddish at Yale. He received his Ph.D. in Yiddish Studies at Columbia, with a dissertation on the translation of world literature into Yiddish in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Through studies of the relationship between translation and original writing in canonical figures (Mendele—Jules Verne, Der Nister—Hans Christian Andersen, Isaac Bashevis Singer—Thomas Mann, etc.), distant readings of translations produced and discussed in and across literary markets (Warsaw, New York, Moscow), and close(r) readings of the shift from (pre-)maskilic norms of Judaization to modern and contested standards of “fidelity,” his dissertation examines the desired and intermittently realized modernization and “normalization” of Yiddish literature on the world stage.

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