Beginner Yiddish (Thursdays)

Instructor: Joshua Price

This course is for students who are new to the Yiddish language or would like a review. It covers the alphabet and the basics of conversation, reading, and writing. It will also serve as an informal introduction to Yiddishland in all of its riches: labor anthems, folktales, (ir)reverent liturgies, and everything in between.

Course Materials:
The instructor will provide course materials digitally to students throughout the class. While neither of these two textbooks is required, students will find each of them useful for supplemental weekly homework and study if they choose to purchase them:

(1) Yiddish: An Introduction to the Language, Literature & Culture, Volume I, by Sheva Zucker (Purchase)

(2) In eynem: The New Yiddish Textbook, Vol I & II by Asya Vaisman Schulman, Jordan Brown, Mikhl Yashinsky (Purchase)

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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