01:563:245
(cross-listed as 01:470:280:01)
Did you know
• There were once 11 million Yiddish speakers worldwide?
• There are neighborhoods in Brooklyn where the ATMs offer a Yiddish option?
• There are 300-year-old alternate prayers especially for women written in Yiddish?
• There was a Jewish Autonomous Region, with Yiddish as its official language, established in the Soviet Union
in the 1930s?
• There are more than a dozen different words for “Christmas” in Yiddish?
• You can visit an organic farm in upstate New York where only Yiddish is spoken?
• You can watch online videos in Yiddish produced in New York, Montreal, and Stockholm?
Explore the thousand-year history of Yiddish, key to centuries of Jewish folklore and politics, great works of modern literature and traditional spirituality. Learn how a language thrives in diaspora and endures a genocide, and how it has enriched the lives of fundamentalists, revolutionaries, avant-garde performers, and others—including many people who aren’t Jewish—around the world.
This course fulfills Core requirement AHq.
No prerequisites. All readings are in English.
No prior knowledge of Yiddish or other languages required.
