2023 Online Course Listings

These classes meet live, online via Zoom.

Jump to Language Classes
Jump to History and Culture Seminars
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Language Classes

Language classes meet Monday through Friday, 9:50am-11:10am (ET) / 11:40am-1:00pm (ET).

BEGINNER YIDDISH GRAMMAR (Online)

Nina Warnke

This course is for students who have a basic familiarity with reading and writing the alphabet and spelling conventions of Yiddish. The course will introduce students to a wide variety of everyday vocabulary (including family, professions, clock, food, clothes, home and leisure time activities). It will cover the foundational grammatical patterns such as cases; present, past, and future tenses; constructions with modal verbs; forms of negation; prepositions; adjective forms in all three cases; word order; and dependent clauses. The course will work with both volumes of In eynem.

Students will engage in extensive speaking, writing, reading and listening activities and are expected to do daily written homework.

MATERIALS FOR THE COURSE:
In eynem, Vols I & II. Additional materials will be made available by the instructor.

DICTIONARIES:
Required: Bochner/Beinfeld, Comprehensive Yiddish-English Dictionary (verterbukh.org) and Schaechter-Viswanath/Glasser, Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary (englishyiddishdictionary.com). (Students will have free digital access to both for the duration of the program.)

BEGINNER YIDDISH LITERATURE (Online)

Vera Szabó

In this course, students will build vocabulary and develop their reading, writing and comprehension skills. They will be introduced to modern Yiddish culture and literature by reading and discussing texts from various genres: readings from school textbooks, folktales, poetry, songs and short stories. Audio and video recordings will enhance the learning process. In addition to the course pack material will be posted in Canvas.

Students are expected to download and print the course pack and all other texts, prepare the readings before class, read out loud and discuss the texts during our sessions. Written homework will also be assigned. Attendance and participation are essential.

MATERIALS FOR THE COURSE:
Course packet, compiled by the instructor (students will have free digital access).

INTERMEDIATE YIDDISH GRAMMAR (Online)

Vera Szabó

In this class, students will review, deepen, and strengthen their knowledge of Yiddish grammar; acquire more complex grammatical structures through various oral and written exercises; and read, listen, speak and write on a variety of topics. We will be using a combination of an analytical and practical approach, as well as address questions of syntax, idiomatic usage and vocabulary.

Readings will include texts from various styles of Yiddish expression such as folklore, journalistic and literary prose, drama, songs and poetry, etc. In addition to the required textbooks, we will be using excerpts from various intermediate and advanced textbooks, including Mordkhe Schaechter’s Yiddish II, David Goldberg’s Yidish af yidish, Hanan Bordin’s Vort bay vort, Mit vort un maysim and others.

MATERIALS FOR THE COURSE:
— Uriel Weinreich, College Yiddish
— Sheva Zucker, Yiddish: An Introduction to the Language, Literature and Culture, Vol. II: Textbook, Answer key, and Audio (available on CDs/memory stick)
— Course packet and handouts provided by the instructor (students will have free digital access).

DICTIONARIES:
— Bochner/Beinfeld, Comprehensive Yiddish-English Dictionary (verterb ukh.org) and Schaechter-Viswanath/Glasser, Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary (englishyiddishdictionary.com). It is highly recommended that students purchase the print version of both dictionaries. Students will have free digital access to them for the duration of the program.
— Yitskhok Niborski, Verterbukh fun loshn-koydesh-shtamike verter in yidish, Paris, 2012. Can be purchased here.

INTERMEDIATE YIDDISH LITERATURE (Online)

Karolina Szymaniak

This course will give students a unique chance to improve their Yiddish speaking, reading, and writing skills. It will focus on the short story and its development as a genre in modern Yiddish literature from the late 19th century until the early 21st century. It will also offer students an opportunity to critically rethink Yiddish literary history, its canons and maps. We will explore different styles and narrative modes from socially engaged realism through the fin de siècle decadent short story, 20th century psychologism, posttraumatic prose and contemporary (post?)surrealism. We will also try to diagnose the state of Yiddish prose today. The final grade will be determined by class participation, short essays and a presentation.

MATERIALS FOR THE COURSE:
— Hert a mayse. Antologye, ed. Velvl Chernin, Dov Ber Kerler, Michael Felsenbaum, Lund 2021.
— Iber der grenets / Crossing the Border. An Anthology of Modern Yiddish Short Stories, edited by Efrat Gal-Ed , Simon Neuberg and Daria Vakhrushova, Düsseldorf 2021.

ADVANCED YIDDISH GRAMMAR (Online)

Sharon Bar-Kochva

This course will cover various grammar topics for the advanced level using Mordkhe Schaechter’s Yidish Tsvey as well as additional materials provided by the instructor. The topics will include themes such as the use of separable and inseparable prefixes, perfective and imperfective verbs and different verbal structures.

MATERIALS FOR THE COURSE:
Schaechter, Mordkhe: Yidish Tsvey. Additional materials will be made available by the instructor.

ADVANCED YIDDISH LITERATURE (Online)

Karolina Szymaniak

This course will offer a unique look into the world of Yiddish reportazh and its diversity: travelogues, war reports and social and political writing. We will read and discuss texts by the classic writers of the genre, such as Sh. L. Shneiderman and Perets Opoczynski, as well as less-known texts that were one-time publications in various Yiddish press outlets. The course syllabus also includes female authors, such as Rachel Auerbach, Dora Teitelbaum, Shira Groshman, and Jean Jaffe, whose contribution to the genre has long been overlooked. To honor the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, one module of the course will be devoted to texts written in the Warsaw ghetto during the Uprising and in the immediate postwar period. The final grade will be determined by class participation, short essays and a presentation.

MATERIALS FOR THE COURSE:
Course pack of readings compiled by the instructor (students will have free digital access).

History and Culture Seminars

JEWISH LIFE IN EASTERN EUROPE (Online)

Aleksandra Jakubczak
Tuesdays & Thursdays | 3:15pm-4:15pm (ET)

This survey course explores East European Jewry’s social, cultural and political history in the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries. We will study the structures that shaped the life of an individual Jew in that period: from state laws regarding Jews and governing economies to Jewish community rules and practices. Students will learn why and how Jewish life transformed throughout this period via reference to intellectual currents of the time, such as the Jewish Enlightenment or Haskalah, Jewish socialism and Zionism, as well as the socio-economic changes of the day, such as urbanization, industrialization and overseas mass migration. All these structures and transformative processes were deeply gendered and class-bound. Acknowledging the importance of intersectionality (of ethnicity, class,and gender) in the Jewish experience in Eastern Europe in that period, this course will reveal how diverse Jewish society was and how different the life of an individual Jewish person was depending on their social status and gender and geographic location (Pale of Settlement versus Galicia, shtetl versus city). This course will pay particular attention to those usually omitted in the master narratives on East European Jewry: women and the laboring poor. Students will analyze historical materials, such as memoirs, letters, statistics, brochures, press and scholarly literature, to grasp this rich and diverse Jewish life in Eastern Europe before World War II. All readings will be provided in English, and advanced Yiddish students will receive additional non-mandatory sources in the Yiddish original.

YIDDISH CULTURE AND THE AFTERLIFE: SPECULATIONS AND SUBVERSIONS IN FOLKLORE, LITERATURE, AND FILM (Online)

Marc Caplan
Tuesdays & Thursdays | 3:15pm-4:15pm (ET)

This course will provide an introduction to East European Jewish culture by focusing on the diversity of unofficial speculations on life after death that have preoccupied and entertained both readers and audiences over the past four centuries. Beginning with folktales and rabbinic legends collected in Yiddish at the beginning of the modern era, we will consider sources such as Hasidic storytelling, Yiddish satires from the nineteenth century, theatrical melodramas, gothic stories and twentieth-century Yiddish film. Authors will include Reb Nakhman of Breslov, Y.L. Peretz, S. An-ski, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Sarah Hamer-Jacklyn, among others. All readings available in English as well as Yiddish.

Electives

RESEARCH METHODS WITH YIVO ARCHIVISTS (Online)

Hallel Yadin & Ruby Landau-Pincus
Wednesdays | 4:30pm-5:30pm (ET) | June 21, 28; July 5

Archival Research at the YIVO Institute (Hallel Yadin)
This session will cover how to effectively navigate the YIVO Archives and Library. We will discuss the scope of the collections, optimizing catalog searches, accessing digitized materials for remote research and the types of research assistance YIVO offers.

Online Tools for Yiddish Research (Ruby Landau-Pincus)
This session will introduce useful research tools, resources and reference sources. The emphasis will be on sources that complement and help to contextualize materials found in the YIVO Archives.

Case Studies in YIVO Archives Research (Hallel Yadin & Ruby Landau-Pincus)
This session will use actual inquiries from YIVO patrons to discuss the research process. Elective participants will be invited to submit their own research questions to be covered during the session.

THE ART OF YIDDISH TRANSLATION: THEORY AND PRACTICE (Online)

Rose Waldman
Wednesdays | 4:30pm-5:30pm (ET) | July 12, 19, 26

What is a translator’s task? How do they make stylistic and connotative decisions? What are particular challenges when translating from Yiddish to English? How important is it to have a thorough understanding of yidishkayt in order to translate from Yiddish? To answer these questions, we will read texts by literary translators and discuss the choices they made and possible reasons behind these choices. You will also practice the art of translation by trying your hand at translating a short text (or texts).

PEYSEKH IN TAMEZ [PASSOVER IN TAMMUZ/JULY] (Online)

Eve Jochnowitz
Mondays | 4:30pm-5:30pm (ET) | July 3, 10, 17

It is hard to imagine as we droop in the wilting heat of summer, but the joyous and beloved holiday of Passover will soon be upon us again. This course, conducted entirely in Yiddish, will concentrate on fresh, original and health-supportive Passover preparations suitable for all diets, with special attention given to gluten-free, dairy-free and vegan. Passover cooking is challenging for everyone, and especially for people with special needs, but you need not rely upon prepared, packaged, industrial products. Learn to make traditional and innovative Peysekh feasts that are vividly flavored and nourishing to the body and soul, with special attention to cooling preparations suitable to the season.

DI VELT DERTSEYLT: THE TRADITION LIVES IN ANECDOTES (Online)

Jonathan Boyarin
Conducted in Yiddish*
Thursdays | 4:30pm-5:30pm (ET) | June 22, 29; July 6, 13, 20, 27

We will read deeply into this 1928 collection of stories about how notable East European Jewish figures—mostly but not all rabbis, mostly but not all devoted to traditional Judaism—engaged with their communities, their families, imperial governments and the threat of secular modernity. They show these figures as quick-witted flesh and blood. Often sharp and funny, the anecdotes are presented in a rich, Litvak-oriented Yiddish, and are fully embedded in the idioms and rhetorics of yidishkayt.

*This elective is only open to Advanced level students

A WORLD OF YIDDISH SONG (Online and In-person)

Lorin Sklamberg and special guests
Fridays | 3:15pm-4:15pm (ET) | June 23, 30; July 7, 14, 21

Join Lorin Sklamberg of YIVO’s renowned Sound Archive and special guest presenters to be immersed in the world of Yiddish song. In addition to traditional material from the collections of folklorist Ruth Rubin and YIVO’s newly digitized Yiddish Folksong Project of the 1970s, the class will explore the rhymes of Jewish folk bards, the ecstasy of Hasidic chant, intimate love poetry, European cabaret and contemporary hymns of protest. Various songs of love and loss, work and struggle, the innocence of childhood and spiritual joy will be illustrated by rare source recordings drawn from YIVO’s Max and Frieda Weinstein Archive of YIVO Sound Recordings. Song texts will be provided in Yiddish, transliteration, English translation as well as musical notation when available.