Who’s learning Yiddish?
Maybe it’s surprising, but young people are
Many people see Yiddish as mainly a portal into unearned nostalgia, an easy look back into an imaginary, troublefree time when the shtetl was full of milkmen’s carts pulled by wisecracking Zero Mostels; when grandparents and great-grandparents went to the theater on Second Avenue and then went home in talked in what might as well have been tongues, to keep their kids from hearing their stories.
The blithe dismissal of Yiddish — and of the real world of hard living and poverty and uncertainty and hate-filled neighbors — might have reached its zenith (or its nadir, depending on how you look at it) with Leo Rosten’s “The Joys of Yiddish.”
Leo Rosten was a humorist! He wrote jokes! His 1968 best-seller was meant to be funny, David Braun of Leonia said. But that jokey work is now found alongside serious dictionaries in bookstores.
Yiddish, to be clear, often is misunderstood.
Mr. Braun is the academic adviser for the Max Weinreich Center for Advanced Jewish Studies at YIVO, specializing in Yiddish language, pedagogy, and linguistics. Among the responsibilities conferred by the long title is directing the institute’s Summer Program.
The Summer Program is packed with generations of students studying Yiddish for a range of reasons — because it’s a wonderful focus for academics, its history rich with connections to the life, history, and culture all around it, because it’s inherently beautiful to ears open to hear its beauty, because it’s inherently stirring to people whose hearts are open to it.
Mr. Braun’s own fascination with Yiddish began when he was a young child, and he’s made it his life’s work. So now, he gets to oversee students as drawn to Yiddish as he is as they undertake a course of study that is serious — it includes grammar — and fun — it is not confined to grammar. Students go to museums, plays, and restaurants; they take walking tours and share the occasional happy hour.
“We are multigenerational,” Mr. Braun said. “This year, the students ranged from 16 to 84 years old. It’s international. It’s very beautiful, and so very gratifying. You don’t get a mix like that anyplace else. You know that you will be interacting with people from all walks of life, who you can teach — and who can teach you.”
The program is 57 years old and “it has peregrinated a bit,” Mr. Braun said; it began at Columbia. This year, it was at YIVO’s headquarters in downtown Manhattan, at the Center for Jewish History at 15 West 16th Street. It’s affiliated with Bard College, which offers college credits to its students.
After a covid summer online, the program has become bimodal, Mr. Braun said. It offers a complete course both online and in person. But it is not hybrid — students are in either one program or the other, because, he said, it’s not possible to teach equally effectively to both groups at the same time. That means that students from elsewhere — from across the country and even around the world — can come to New York for six weeks, and immerse themselves in both Yiddish and the city, or they can learn Yiddish while not having to try to figure out how to put the rest of the lives on hold for that time.
“Our students are from everywhere this year — we always seem to have between 70 and 80 students — and this is a typical year,” Mr. Braun continued. “We’re used to it. They come from 25 United States — from the East Coast — many from New York and New Jersey is well represented as well — and from California, and from 12 countries, including China, England, and India — although that student is studying in North Carolina during the year.”
He talked about some of his students.
Mark Gaysinskiy of Chatham was 16 in 2022, when we wrote about him in this paper. He was the youngest student in the program then. He started in the advanced beginner class — he’s studied on his own to reach that level — and then went back the next year, after having learned enough on his own to be in the advanced class, and graduated not just from the class but from the program. This summer, as a rising freshman at Brandeis, he answered a job application from the program and became a teaching assistant, which allowed him to audit the advanced class too.
“He was an inspiration,” Mr. Braun said. “People said so behind his back.”
One of the people who talked about the inspiration and joy she found in Mr. Gaysinskiy was “an emeritus professor in Spanish and Portuguese, who had started taking our courses online during the year and was so good that when she came for the program in person, her first stop was our advanced class.”
This professor, Judith Liskin-Gasparro, is Jewish; she taught at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. Because she is such an experienced teacher and has been on many oversight boards examining foreign-language pedagogy, Mr. Braun and Ben Kaplan, YIVO’s education director, talked to her about the program once she’d completed it. Her feedback included her impression of “Mark, who she said was an unbelievable inspiration,” Mr. Braun said.
“Here we are, some of us college students, some of us graduate students, some of us, like me, at the other end of our careers, and here we see a kid who started this at 16. It was fantastic for our morale.”
Like many of the summer students who come from away, Dr. Liskin-Gasparro spent the six weeks of the program living in NYU’s dorms — the program isn’t connected with NYU, Mr. Braun said, but the school’s dorms are underoccupied during the summer, and it’s close to YIVO. Another of the students living there was a middle-aged woman who was native to Poland but has lived most of her life in Paris, Mr. Braun said.
The 16-year-old at the program this summer comes from the Belz community in Brooklyn; as a result of a family split she doesn’t live in the chasidic community any more. She would like to learn Yiddish not only colloquially but more academically, he said.
Similarly, Seth Vizel, whose first name originally was Shloyme, is the son of Frieda Vizel, who grew up Satmar in Kiryas Joel, left the chasidic world, and now offers tours of chasidic Williamsburg. (We wrote about Ms. Vizel in this paper in 2022.) Now, Mr. Vizel, a teenager who spoke Yiddish until he was 5 but has lost it since then, wants to reclaim it. “He says that now, in order to speak to his grandparents, he needs an interpreter,” Mr. Braun said. He started in the beginner class; words have started coming back to him, “but he wants to learn it methodically, not helter-skelter.”
YIVO students come from across the Jewish world, but from outside it as well. Mr. Braun doesn’t know how many of the students are Jewish, he said; he assumes most but knows not all of them are.
YIVO’s summer institute offers two weekly online lectures that are open to everyone on its YouTube channel. (Just google YIVO and YouTube to find them.) One is in English, the other is in Yiddish, and both are online. “We have a huge range of topics,” Mr. Braun said.
Tal Scheinberg is a 19-year-old rising junior at Smith College, where she’s majoring in linguistics. She’s from Hoboken, the youngest of the three daughters of United Synagogue of Hoboken’s Rabbi Robert Scheinberg and Rabbi Naomi Kalish, the director of the Center for Pastoral Education at the Jewish Theological Seminary.
She also just finished her third summer at YIVO.
As the daughter of two rabbis and the graduate of 12 years of Jewish day school education, Ms. Scheinberg is fluent in Hebrew, but she didn’t know much more than random bits of Yiddish. “In the second half of my junior year, I heard that Duolingo was adding a Yiddish course, and I got excited about it,” she said. “I was curious about Yiddish. It was my grandmother’s first language.
“My dad took a course in Yiddish in rabbinical school, and I remember getting excited about it a few years before, and he taught me how to read it phonetically. But I didn’t remember much about it.”
When Duolingo offered Yiddish, she jumped on it. It was during covid, so she could devote a lot of attention to it. “I did the lessons, but I was frustrated because it didn’t tell me the rules,” she said. “I really wanted some other source.
“And then I found my dad’s textbook from the Yiddish class he took. It was by Uriel Weinreich, a basic textbook from the 1940s.” (And it happened to be published first by YIVO.)
“So I learned the grammar rules from the book. I have always liked grammar. I think it’s cool to learn how languages work, and I am so interested in the Yiddish language, and in the culture.
“But I didn’t have anyone to practice with, and I didn’t have a class to go to. I was doing this all by myself.
“It wasn’t until later, on a college visit, when my parents and I went to Smith, that we went to the Yiddish Book Center. It’s on the Hampshire College campus, close to Smith. I got some Yiddish books there — real Yiddish books — and I would try to read them. My dad has a Yiddish-English dictionary that I used. I did a lot of self-study at home my senior year.”
That summer, her mother’s mother, Esther Kalish, died. “When I first started learning Yiddish I knew that it was her first language but I never thought to talk to her about it,” Ms. Scheinberg said. Her mother’s parents lived in California, and her grandmother’s death was unexpected. She’d missed her chance for that connection.
“But my parents thought that it would be meaningful for me to read something in Yiddish at the funeral. My grandmother had a book of Yiddish poetry. I read a little of a poem in Yiddish, and then the whole thing in translation, and I said that I was reading it in Yiddish because it had been her first language.”
There is no course in Yiddish at Smith, but “my first-year seminar was Philosophy, Humor, and Laughter,” Ms. Scheinberg said. “We had a final project and we could write about pretty much anything, so of course I chose Yiddish humor to research and write about.
“I found the Yiddish section of the library in Smith, where they have books about Yiddish and books in translation from Yiddish and some books in Yiddish. It really was great to find it. So I checked out some books to read in Yiddish, and some books to read about Yiddish grammar. It was fun, but I was doing it alone. I keep Shabbes, and I like to read, so that’s when I read a lot of it.
“But I still wanted a Yiddish class, so I applied to the YIVO. And I got in. And it was such a great experience.”
The first year, Ms. Scheinberg was the youngest student in the program; she’s still among the youngest. “At first, I didn’t know how to feel about having classmates who were my grandparents’ age, but we got pretty close in that class — there were about 12 of us — and the age differences became much less relevant.”
She appreciated the many ways to learn not only Yiddish language but also Yiddish culture — really, the wide range of Yiddish cultures — that the summer program provides. She talked about the shmues class — “that’s where the word schmooze comes from,” she said. “It’s from the Yiddish word for chat. Shmues.” In that class, people just talked, although it includes a teacher to steer and bolster it. “The teacher sometimes brought Yiddish games for us to play,” she said. “They are mostly from the chasidic world — that’s who’s producing card games in Yiddish.
“There was one about who is most likely to do X, and everyone in the class voted for someone else. The actions on the cards were very often very religious things, like ‘Who is likely to start Shabbes early?’ And we ended up skipping ‘Who is likely to daven three times a day?’”
She doesn’t know what she will do when she graduates from college, but “I want to continue with Yiddish, and I want to reach higher fluency,” she said. “I mostly understand the grammar now, but speaking and being able to function in Yiddish requires a lot more than just grammar.
“I want to keep learning, and I hope — no, I’m sure — that I will stay involved in the Yiddish-speaking world.”
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