Intermediate I Yiddish

Tuition: $480 | YIVO members: $375**
Students: $240 (Must register with valid university email address)

Register

This is a live, online course held weekly on Zoom. Enrollment will be capped at about 15 students. All course details (Zoom link, syllabus, handouts, assignments, etc.) will be posted to Google Classroom. Students will be granted access to the class on Google Classroom after registering for the class here on the YIVO website. This class will be conducted in Yiddish and English.

Instructor: Malena Chinski

Who should take this course?
This course is appropriate for those who have completed Beginner IV Yiddish or equivalent coursework.

What topics will this class cover?
This class will build on and consolidate the language background acquired in Beginner I-IV Yiddish. Throughout the forthcoming Intermediate I-IV courses, we will work with Sheva Zucker’s Yiddish: Introduction to the Language, Literature & Culture, Vol. II. This semester, we will cover chapters 12A and 12B. These will be complemented with the supplementary chapter of In eynem, selected readings from Der yidisher tam-tam, dialogues for listening practice, and songs.

New communication goals and vocabulary will include the body and health, daily life and routines, institutions, and professional life. We will review Beginner-level grammar and engage with new topics, including expressions with the dative case, subordinate clauses, the comparative and superlative forms of adjectives, and complemented verbs in the past and future tenses.

The class will also approach Jewish holidays that fall during the semester and the Jewish calendar more broadly.

Is knowledge of the Yiddish alphabet required?
Yes, knowledge of the Yiddish alphabet is required.

Course Materials:
This course will use the textbook Yiddish: An Introduction to Language, Literature & Culture, Volume II by Sheva Zucker (Purchase).

Malena Chinski is PhD in Social Sciences from the National University of General Sarmiento, in Argentina. Her doctoral dissertation addressed Shoah commemoration within the Jewish community of Buenos Aires during the first postwar decade. She completed a postdoctoral stay in France at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales with support from the Fondation pour la mémoire de la Shoah. Her current research addresses the reconstruction of Yiddish culture in Paris in the immediate postwar period, the itineraries of surviving Yiddish writers and scholars from Eastern Europe, and memories of the Shoah in the Parisian Yiddish press. She has published research articles in various specialized journals and collective volumes and co-edited with Alan Astro the collective volume Splendor, Decline, and Rediscovery of Yiddish in Latin America (Leiden, Brill, 2018).

Malena learned Yiddish at the IWO Foundation of Buenos Aires with Ester Szwarc and Avrom Lichtenbaum. She has taught beginner and intermediate classes at the University Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV) and in the Summer Program for Yiddish Language and Literature in Berlin and Paris. Currently, she teaches regular Yiddish classes within the virtual programs of YIVO and in-person classes at the Maison de la culture yiddish.

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