Source: Tablet
Yiddish attracts a wide range of Jews and non-Jews alike, and for a variety of reasons—religion (it’s still the spoken language for most frum Ashkenazim), politics (a language and culture that affirms Ashkenazi Jews’ rootedness in Europe and the diaspora, rather than in Israel), culture and history (despite the past half-century’s renaissance in Yiddish scholarship, there’s still so, so much more left to study and explore), and much more. And although I didn’t know it when I applied to YIVO’s summer program, there’s a similarly wide a range of Yiddish programs in existence today for the nascent Yiddishist.
Last week, Sarah Ellen Zarrow, managing editor of In Geveb, an online journal of Yiddish studies launched in 2015, posted a comprehensive list of summer Yiddish programs. What follows are some of the most interesting programs from that list, with additional information to help potential attendees decide which program might suit them well.
- Naomi Prawer Kadar International Yiddish Summer Program at Tel Aviv University (Tel Aviv, Israel), June 26 through July 21, 2016
- Steiner Summer Yiddish Program, Yiddish Book Center (Amherst, MA), June 5 through July 22, 2016
- Yiddish Summer Weimar (Weimar, Germany), July 10 through 30, 2016
- Ot Azoy Yiddish Summer School (London, UK), August 7 through August 12, 2016
- Memory-Place-Presence (Lublin, Poland), June 23 through July 3, 2016
- Program in Yiddish Language and Literature, Vilnius Yiddish Institute (Vilnius, Lithuania), July 17 through August 12, 2016
- Yiddish Farm (Goshen, NY), June 20 through August 6, 2016
Click here for In Geveb’s round-up of Yiddish summer programs.