After a Year of Pandemic, Online Yiddish Learning is Here to Stay

YIVO unites a global community through online Yiddish courses

(New York, NY) – This coming Friday, July 30, 2021, nearly 100 students will graduate from The Uriel Weinreich Summer Program in Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture, the world’s longest-running Yiddish summer program. In response to the global pandemic, the program has run online these past two summers and seen its largest enrollments in its over 50-year history.

The program will complete its second summer online, which brought together students (from 17 to 85 years old) and nearly two dozen instructors from 14 countries. Students will have completed six weeks of intensive study of Yiddish language, literature, and culture, including over 180 course hours, and are eligible to receive college credit through Bard College.

YIVO has seen unprecedented growth in its digital offerings since the beginning of the pandemic, including over 19,000 registrants for its Shine online series of self-paced online classes. This past spring, enrollments for YIVO’s online Yiddish courses increased 443%from last year. YIVO’s YouTube channel, with recordings of its diverse array of public programs, has seen over 600,000 views and 100,000 hours of view time since spring 2020. To keep up with continued demand, YIVO will launch 30 new online courses this coming fall, including classes in Yiddish, literature, history, and more.

“I think we are seeing an unprecedented and seismic shift in Jewish and Yiddish education right now,” said Ben Kaplan, YIVO’s Director of Education. “Students are joining us from all walks of life, all ages and levels of experience, and from all around the world. The online format and improved technologies have facilitated a level of accessibility and ease which was never possible before,” he added. “I think we will look back at this moment as a turning point for Jewish and Yiddish studies.”

“The Yiddish language, spoken across so much territory over its thousand years of existence, now comes to an even broader array of locations thanks to the summer program's going online,” said Dovid Braun, the Summer Program’s Academic Director. “The YIVO Institute, nearing a century of its existence, has demonstrated just how useful it can be to the public by reaching learners in their own homes across the globe.”

After reimagining the program last year, YIVO’s staff and faculty have refined the program structure even further to serve the needs of virtual classrooms and to ensure a rich experience for students. For the first time in its history, the program added a sixth level for advanced students – the most advanced level YIVO has ever offered. Lesson times accommodate students across five different time zones. Tools such as Canvas, a learning management system, and Zoom create a dynamic, interactive, socially connected classroom. Teachers hold virtual office hours and answer student questions before and after classes.

“Despite the limitations of remote learning, the program succeeded in facilitating a sense of community and fostering lively discussions about Yiddish culture,” said Marina Mayorski, a PhD student in comparative literature at the University of Michigan. “From barely being able to put together a sentence, I now catch myself thinking in Yiddish.”

The program’s offerings this year include workshops from singing and acting in Yiddish to making pickles and bagels. The program also included a ten-lecture series called “Yiddish Civilization” covering broad topics from immigrant history and women writers to Yiddish folksong and the Ashkenazi Jews of Mexico.

To help students connect outside the classroom and practice their conversational Yiddish, YIVO also hosted groups called krayzlekh (“circles” or “social groups” in Yiddish). These are Zoom meetings around personal and professional in

Established in 1968, the Summer Program has become a symbol of Yiddish cultural resilience and continuity. The first and longest-running program of its kind, YIVO’s Summer Program has trained generations of scholars, teachers, and students to embrace the richness, complexity, and beauty of the Yiddish language and Yiddish culture. Alumni from the Summer Program have gone on to careers as leading academics and scholars, world-renowned musicians and artists, archivists, librarians, teachers, and individuals from all professions and walks of life who draw inspiration from Yiddish culture.

For any media inquiries please contact:
Ben Kaplan
Director of Education

YIVO

The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is dedicated to the preservation and study of the history and culture of East European Jewry worldwide. For nearly a century, YIVO has pioneered new forms of Jewish scholarship, research, education, and cultural expression. Our public programs and exhibitions, as well as online and on-site courses, extend our outreach to a global community. The YIVO Archives contains 24 million unique items and YIVO’s Library has over 400,000 volumes—the single largest resource for the study of East European Jewish life in the world. yivo.org / yivo.org/the-whole-story