ADVANCED YIDDISH

Course Description and Goals:

This course focuses predominantly on developing reading comprehension skills, as well as on listening,  writing, speaking, and some more advanced grammar. It explores literary and scholarly texts examining the  modern Jewish experience in the context of the twentieth-century history and culture of the Ashkenazi Jews.  Supplementary texts will be selected based on students’ interests and may include historical pedagogical  materials, past and present newspaper articles, polemic, poetry, historical and scholarly articles. We will  also venture outside the classroom to explore the Yiddish world today: through field trips to Yiddish theater,  Yiddish-speaking neighborhoods, Yiddish organizations, such as YIVO, and so on. We will apply our reading  and translating skills to contribute to the Mapping Yiddish New York online project, and will also have  Yiddish-speaking guests. At the end of the semester, you will be able to converse in Yiddish on a variety of  everyday topics and read authentic Yiddish literary and non-literary texts. Welcome back to Yiddishland!