C o l u m b i a U n i v e r s i t y RECORD September 12, 2003 3

Yiddish Studies Program Thrives at Columbia After More than Fifty Years

Two weeks after the endof World War II, MiriamHoffman—then nine-

years-old—fled Siberia with herparents and went to a displacedpersons camp in Germany run bythe American army. The childrenshe met there all spoke differentlanguages—Polish, Hungarian,Russian, German—and manygrew frustrated at being unableto share their experiences of hor-ror and endurance. The over-whelming desire to trade storiesand make friends inspired thechildren to find some way tocommunicate.

“Suddenly, one day, we allbegan speaking in Yiddish and itmade us feel so free,” says Hoff-man, the full-time languageinstructor in Columbia’s YiddishStudies Program, who notes thateven though many knew little ofthe tongue, most picked it upalmost immediately.

The language Hoffman dis-covered in that camp came outof necessity, but soon becameher passion. Arriving in NewYork City four years later, sheenrolled in a Yiddish-speakingmiddle school in Manhattan andwas enchanted by the rich Yid-dish culture and history she wastaught. She found the wealth ofdrama, literature and musicmore fulfilling than the “Coca-cola and blue jeans” culture herother friends were preoccupiedwith. She went on to study atJewish Teachers Seminary andlater received an M.A. in Yid-dish Studies from Columbia.

More than 50 years later,

A news stand, above, in the center of the Jewish quarter in Vilna,Lithuania. The Yiddish signs at top note that they carry the Germanarmy newspaper and Yiddish newspapers from all over the world.

Hoffman maintains such a lovefor Yiddish that she admits, “Idance into the classroom, Idon’t walk in.” And Columbiastudents certainly respond to herstyle. Not only are all three lev-els of her language classes con-sistently filled, but the studentsenrolled are more diverse thanever.

“They come searching forsomething,” says Hoffman ofthe reform Jews, orthodox Jews,non-religious Jews, grandchil-dren of Holocaust survivors,and many non-Jews she hastaught in recent years. “Theyfind a very warm atmosphere,like family. And they find thatthe language is flexible, full ofwit, full of wisdom, full of poet-ry, full of music…it sings.”

Hoffman, along with JeremyDauber, Atran Assistant Profes-sor of Yiddish Language, Liter-ature and Cultures and directorof Yiddish programs, make upthe small staff that is working toeducate a new generation of stu-dents. Mark Anderson, chair ofthe Department of GermanicLanguages, notes that there hasbeen a steady, significantincrease in enrollment inColumbia’s Yiddish languageand literature classes over thepast few years. Dauber believesColumbia’s program has under-gone a true re-invigoration andis about to enter a “new, revital-ized stage.”

Started in 1952, the YiddishStudies program at Columbiawas originally located withinthe University’s linguisticsdepartment. When linguisticswas dissolved in the late 1980s,the program was relocated

under the umbrellaof the Department ofGermanic Lan-guages, whichbroadened the scopeof the subject fromfocusing mostly onthe Yiddish languageto offering a morec o m p r e h e n s i v estudy of Yiddish his-tory and culture aswell. Today, Colum-bia’s program is con-sidered one of themost vibrant andthorough in theworld.

Thanks to theefforts of Dauberand Anderson,undergraduate stu-dents are now earn-ing degrees by pur-suing independentstudies in Yiddishand there is opti-mism that a newmajor for YiddishStudies will be creat-ed in the departmentwithin a few years.On the graduatelevel, students canearn a masters anddoctorate in YiddishStudies through anever-growing cross-section of disci-plines. The programis also monitoredand nurtured by anindependent com-mittee headed byMichael Stanislaws-ki, the Nathan J.Miller Professor ofJewish History.

The Yiddish lan-guage grew out of themigrations of Jewsfrom southern Franceand Italy who wereinvited to the Rhineland byCharlemagne in the 9th Centurywith the hope that they wouldhelp spur economic growth.Over the next century or so,these Jews, who settled along theRhine River and rapidly devel-oped the region’s trade, adoptedvarious medieval Germanicdialects and came to mix themwith the original Romance andHebrew/Aramaic languages theyhad spoken. The new language,Yiddish, used the same charac-ters as Hebrew and was alsowritten from right to left.

Over the centuries, an assort-ment of words from other Euro-pean languages made their wayinto the eclectic vocabulary thatevolved from old, to middle, tomodern Yiddish. By 1911, Yid-dish was spoken by an estimated11 million people living in East-ern Europe and the UnitedStates and New York City washome to several daily newspa-pers written in the language.The Holocaust and years ofassimilation into other cultureshas wiped out the majority ofspeakers, but a recent wave ofinterest in ethnic and religiousstudies has seen the numbers ofstudents taking classes in Yid-dish rising again.

“Many of our students havesome sort of Jewish backgroundand they see this as a way ofdeepening that,” says Dauber.“Students are using Yiddish as away of coming to some connec-

tion with their Jewish identity.”But Dauber, who studied Yid-

dish literature at Harvard underRuth Wisse and then at Oxfordas a Rhodes Scholar, also wantsto show students that the lan-guage offers some of history’sgreatest written works. He isintent on teaching students to“hold Yiddish literature up tothe same standards as if theywere studying English andFrench literature” and insiststhat the works be approachedwithout any preconceptions.The stories, Dauber notes, oftenpaint a more complex picturethan some might assume if theyhad only read or seen the filmversion of “Fiddler on theRoof.”

“Some think everybody waspoor but always happy,” saysDauber, noting that life in Yid-dish communities was oftenundermined by vicious attacksand, sometimes, the destructionof entire villages. “Much ofYiddish literature is shot withuncertainty, laced with the pre-carious circumstances manyJews dealt with.”

Dauber is also using othersubjects to help contextualizethe spectrum of Yiddish study,teaching comparative classeslike “Yiddish and Russian Liter-ature’ and “Humor in JewishLiterature,” which explores theentire history of Jewish humorfrom the Bible through Sein-feld. This is done in an effort to

broaden the appeal of Yiddishcourses to students. A large por-tion of students who take oneYiddish class return to the pro-gram to pursue others.

“Very few Yiddish programsin the world have the historyand resources that Columbiadoes,” says Anderson, notingthe importance of Columbia’sNew York City location. In fact,Anderson hopes to help furtherdevelop and expand the pro-gram in the next decade. How-ever, he notes that without addi-tional funding from donors, itwill be nearly impossible toincrease the faculty and courseofferings.

Until then, Dauber and Hoff-man will continue to keep themillennia-old tradition alive atColumbia. Because of fearsgenerated by those who labeledit a dying language in the pastfew decades, Yiddish has actu-ally gotten more attention inrecent years and Dauber says itis “unquestionable” that thereare more Yiddish materialsavailable to the public nowthan there were the early1990s.

Hoffman, a life-long opti-mist, also believes that Yiddishwill endure regardless ofdeclining numbers or the opin-ions of cynics.

“The language is too strong,too much alive,” says Hoffman.“It just refuses to die, like itspeople.”

The staged photo, above, reenacts a scene of an Eastern European child leavinghis family to emigrate to another part of the world. In the top right corner are songlyrics written about the teary farewell, which was a common experience for manyYiddish families in the early twentieth century.

BY JASON HOLLANDER