Beginner Yiddish

10 sessions, Thursdays: February 20, 27; March 5, 12, 19, 26; April 2, 23, 30; May 14 Tuition: $325 YIVO members: $250** Students: $150 (Must register with valid university email address) Registration is closed. Sign up for YIVO's email list to receive announcements of upcoming classes.

Instructor: Josh Price

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

Course Materials:
It is recommended, but optional, that students in this course purchase the textbook Yiddish: An Introduction to the Language, Literature & Culture, Volume I, by Sheva Zucker. The book and accompanying answer key will be available for purchase on the first day of class.

Joshua Price is a lector in Yiddish at Yale and a Ph.D. candidate in Yiddish Studies at Columbia, writing 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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