Antifascist Yiddish for Beginners

While the Nazis massacred the majority of the world’s Yiddish speakers during the Holocaust, in this course we will focus on learning the decimated yet defiant language through the remarkable stories of Jewish women who rose up to fight back against the fascists. By engaging with primary source materials, including underground call to arms, ghetto songs, and partisan poetry, we will build vocabulary and develop an understanding of grammar. We will also look at the history of progressive Yiddish activism in the United States, foster conversational proficiency to discuss its lingering legacy, and explore literary translation as a feminist intervention.

Jay Saper ‘13 is a Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellow translating the poetry of Vilna partisan Rikle Glezer. Jay has served as artist in residence at the Jewish Museum Frankfurt, creating papercuts of Jewish women in the resistance to the Nazis, which appear in There is Nothing So Whole as a Broken Heart: ending the World as Jewish Anarchists (AK Press 2021)./