Mayrent Institute for Yiddish Culture

Public Humanities

Faculty and Graduate Student Outreach

  • This fall, PhD student Ri J. Turner (History) will be teaching Beginner’s Yiddish at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (via Zoom). For more information, check out:  https://yivo.org/FALL2021-Beginner1-Thursday
  • Congratulation to Dr. Chad S.A. Gibbs (History, PhD ‘20) on his appointment as Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies in Yaschik/Arnold Jewish Studies Program and Director of the Zucker/Goldberg Center for Holocaust Studies at the College of Charleston.
  • This past June 19th, PhD student Ri J. Turner (History) presented the first fruits of a project to set little-known Yiddish women’s poetry to music in a (Zoom) concert entitled “Gebeyn fun mayn gebeyn” (“Bone of My Bone”). The title comes from a poem by Yiddish poet Malka Lee (1904-1976). Turner worked together with violinist and arranger Nicolas Dupin and pianist Bastien Hartmann, through the Paris Yiddish Center. For more information, click here.
  • Professor Sunny Yudkoff (Mayrent/UW–Madison) and Professor Saul Zaritt (Harvard University) held a conversation at the National Yiddish Book Center via Zoom on the subject, “Jacob Glatstein and Yiddish Rage.” Experience the conversation here!
  • Interested in the connections between Yiddish and Pennsylvania Dutch? Be sure to read Max Kade Director Professor Mark Louden’s recent essay, “Yiddish and Pennsylvania Dutch Among Hasidim and Amish,” published on anabaptisthistorians.org.
  • Doctoral candidate Erin Faigin (history) and Professor Sunny Yudkoff recently participated in the Mellon Sawyer Seminar “Jewish Multilingualism in the Midwest: Yiddish Translations of Urban Experience,” hosted by the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (February 2021). Read here in Yiddish about their presentations.
  • Professor Sunny Yudkoff joins other literary scholars to recommend readings for our current moment in the roundtable Pandemic and Plague: Literary Encounters. To read Sholem Aleichem’s 1901 monologue “The Pot,” click here for English and here for Yiddish.
  • Graduate student (History) Dylan Kaufman-Obstler presented a paper entitled “Debating a Yiddish Future: The Paradox of Yiddish Communist Education in the United States” at the Biennial Scholars Conference on American Jewish History (June, 2020).
  • Graduate students Matthew Greene (German, Nordic, Slavic) and Chad Gibbs (History) expand the historical record of the survivors of Treblinka : https://ingeveb.org/blog/briv-funem-arkhiv-a-memoir-in-four-acts
  • Graduate student (History) Dylan Kaufman-Obstler published a review for In Geveb of Naomi Prawer Kadar’s new book Raising Secular Jews: Yiddish Schools and Their Periodicals for American Children, 1917-1950 . You can read the review here.