2023 Faculty

Language Classes

Sharon Bar-Kochva works as a Yiddish teacher and a librarian in the Paris Yiddish Center, where she is also head of the pedagogical team. She has been teaching Yiddish in various levels worldwide since 2004, both in academic and non-academic frameworks. She received her PhD from Inalco University in Paris on the topic of Pseudonymes of Yiddish and Hebrew writers.

Dovid (David) Braun has taught all levels of Yiddish language at YIVO's intensive summer program since 1990 at Columbia University and New York University. He initiated and taught in the intensive summer programs of the Yiddish Book Center (Amherst, MA) and Jewish Historical Institute (Warsaw, Poland). He has taught Yiddish language, Yiddish linguistics, and/or general linguistics as a faculty member of Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and he regularly participates in varied research projects involving Yiddish language and culture. He serves as co-president of the Sholem Aleichem Cultural Center (Bronx, NY) which is now the only NYC area venue where public Yiddish cultural events are held on a regular basis.

Nachum Lerner was raised in a Yiddish-loving home in Miami Beach, Florida. He studied Yiddish language and literature at Bar Ilan University, the YIVO Summer Program (at Columbia University), and the University of Pennsylvania. In addition, he holds an MA in modern Jewish history and literature from the Jewish Theological Seminary. He has taught Yiddish at the Workers Circle/Arbeter-Ring, Makor, the 92nd Street Y, and Yeshiva University, and since 2010, has been instructor of Yiddish language at JTS.

Dr. Adi Mahalel is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Yiddish Studies at the University of Maryland. He received his doctoral degree in Yiddish Studies from Columbia University. His book, The Radical Isaac: I. L. Peretz and the Rise of Jewish Socialism, was published by SUNY Press in 2023. Adi’s areas of interest include modern Hebrew and Yiddish literatures, Jewish cultures in modern times, and the crossroads between culture and politics. He has published articles and translations on these subjects in multiple languages, and has taught in various institutions.

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.

Vera Szabó was born and raised in Budapest, Hungary. She holds an M.A. in Yiddish Studies from Columbia University as well as an M.A. in English and German Studies from ELTE University, Budapest.

She has taught Yiddish language, literature and folklore at various universities in the US (University of Michigan, Stanford, the University of Washington) and in Israel (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev) as well as in various intensive summer programs (NYU/YIVO, Vilna, and Tel Aviv University.) She currently teaches various levels of Yiddish at Beth Shalom Aleichem.

Vera also translates literary and non-literary texts from Yiddish and Hungarian into English. Her research interest is Yiddish folklore. A certified yoga teacher, Vera has been teaching yoga in Yiddish for the past five years in Jerusalem, where she resides. More information on her website: www.verele.com

Karolina Szymaniak is assistant professor at the Jewish Studies Department at the University of Wrocław and Research Fellow at the Jewish Historical Institute. Her research interests range across modern Yiddish literature, Polish-Jewish cultural relations, and translation studies. In addition to having taught Yiddish language and culture throughout Poland and Europe, she has also served as a consultant for the POLIN Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in Łódz. Her recent publications include Montages. Debora Vogel and the New Legend of the City and My wild goat. Anthology of women Yiddish poets (in Polish). She is also the editor of Rachel Auerbach's ghetto writings, which received the 2016 Polityka History Award.

Perl (Paula) Teitelbaum was born and raised in a Yiddish-speaking home in post-war Wroclaw. After immigrating to the United States in 1967, Paula became actively involved in New York City’s Yiddish-speaking circles. During her professional career Paula has taught Yiddish as well as Spanish and English to Speakers of Other Languages (ESL) in a variety of settings, including college, and pre-K through high school and adult education classes. Using her TESOL background Paula has applied some of the most successful teaching methods into her Yiddish classes.

Nina Warnke currently teaches online Yiddish language courses for Gratz College. She was born and raised in Germany, where she started to learn Yiddish before studying in the Oxford Summer Program and receiving her Ph.D. in Yiddish Studies from Columbia University. During that time she directed the YIVO zumer program for a few years. Since then Nina taught Yiddish language, literature and culture courses at Indiana University, the University of Texas at Austin and Vanderbilt University. She has researched and written extensively about the Yiddish theater and is also working as a translator of Yiddish and German texts.

Seminars & Electives

Shane Baker, himself a graduate of the Weinreich Summer Program, is a Yiddish activist, actor and translator. His Yiddish translation of Waiting for Godot for the New Yiddish Rep, in which he also played Vladimir, has played Off-Broadway and internationally to critical acclaim. As director of the Congress for Jewish Culture, Baker has published numerous Yiddish books and journals and produced innumerable Yiddish events. He is pleased to be able to share with upcoming generations of Yidishistn.

Jonathan Boyarin is the Diann G. and Thomas A. Mann Professor of Modern Jewish Studies at Cornell University. His most recent book is Yeshiva Days: Learning on the Lower East Side (Princeton 2020). His translations from the Yiddish include Menashe Unger’s A Fire Burns in Kotsk (Wayne State 2014).

Marc Caplan is a native of Louisiana and a graduate of Yale University. In 2003 he earned his Ph.D. in comparative literature from New York University. Since then he has held professorial appointments at Indiana University, Johns Hopkins University, Yale, the University of Wroclaw (Poland), and Dartmouth College, as well as research fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, the Universität Konstanz (Germany), the Center for Jewish History (New York), and the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor). In 2011 he published How Strange the Change: Language, Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms—a comparison of Yiddish and African literatures—with Stanford University Press. His second book, Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin: A Fugitive Modernism, was published by Indiana University Press in 2021. Currently he is a senior lecturer in Yiddish literature for the Heinrich-Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany.

Aleksandra Jakubczak is a historian specializing in the social and economic history of East European Jewry in the modern period. She is a senior historian at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews and a research fellow at the Historical Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences. She received her Ph.D. in Jewish History at Columbia University in New York in 2023 for her doctoral dissertation, entitled (Sex)Worker, Migrant, Daughter: The Jewish Economics of Sex Work and Mobility, between 1870 and 1939, which looked at Jewish women selling and organizing sex to examine how Eastern European Jews experienced urbanization, industrialization, and mass migrations. Her Polish-language monograph, entitled Poles, Jews and the Myth of Trafficking (2020), was shortlisted for the Schmeruk and Gierowski’s Prize for the best book in Polish Jewish Studies. Her research received support from numerous institutions, including the Center for Jewish History, the American Academy for Jewish Research, the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Israeli Council for Higher Education, and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

Eve Jochnowitz, Yiddish instructor at the YIVO institute and the Workmen’s Circle, is an institute fellow at the Frankel Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. Jochnowitz has been teaching Yiddish language, culture, and literature, as well as Yiddish foodways and dance, for 25 years. She worked for several years as a cook and baker in New York and received her Ph.D. from the department of Performance Studies at New York University. She has lectured both in the United States and abroad on food in Jewish tradition, religion, and ritual, as well as on food in Yiddish performance and popular culture. The Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook (Fania Lewando’s Vegetarish-dietisher kokhbukh) translated, annotated, and adapted for the modern kitchen, was published in 2015.

Lorin Sklamberg is a founding member of the Grammy Award-winning Klezmatics. He has also appeared on recordings and in live shows with Itzhak Perlman, Chava Albersteinand Emmylou Harris, among many others, and teaches Yiddish song from São Paulo to St. Petersburg. Ongoing: Saints and Tzadiks (Irish and Yiddish songs with Susan McKeown), the Semer Ensemble (Jewish music from 1930s Berlin), Alpen Klezmer (Bavarian and Yiddish songs), Drawing Life (multi-media song cycle, JMI, London), Sklamberg and the Shepherds, In the Fiddler’s House and the Nigunim Trio. Lorin serves as YIVO’s Sound Archivist. “One of the premier American singers in any genre.” – Robert Christgau

Jeffrey Yoskowitz is the co-founder of The Gefilteria and co-author of The Gefilte Manifesto: New Recipes for Old World Jewish Foods. Jeffrey speaks to audiences around the world as an entrepreneur, a writer, a cook and a pickler. His writings on food and culture appear in major publications, such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Forward, among others. In 2014, he was invited as a guest chef at the James Beard House kitchen and was named to both Forbes Magazine’s 30 under 30 list for Food and Wine and the Forward 50. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.