Intensive Intermediate I&II Yiddish

Tuition: $850 | YIVO members: $675**
Students: $425 (Must register with valid university email address)

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 Canvas. Students will be granted access to the class on Canvas after registering for the class here on the YIVO website. This class will be conducted in Yiddish and English.

Instructor: Reb Noyekh (Noah Barrera)

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

What topics will this class cover?
Students will acquire intermediate speaking, listening, writing, and reading skills in this Intensive course. They will strengthen the foundation set in their Beginner courses through regular grammatical and conversational exercise. This course will be taught entirely in Yiddish and will make use of David Goldberg’s all-Yiddish workbook Yidish af yidish. We will primarily focus on the Yiddish verb, with particular attention placed on the past tense, being the most useful tense for textual analysis and description. Students will read chapters 3-9 of Dos kluge shnayderl, continuing from the Intensive Beginner III&IV Yiddish course. They are expected to write at least four book reports in which they summarize a chapter and identify examples of the grammar covered in the course. As a class, the students will retell these chapters in their own words “af eyn fus” (“on one foot”), to borrow a phrase from Rabbi Hillel.

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

Course Materials:

• Yidish af yidish by David Goldberg (Yale University Press, 1996) (Purchase)
• The Clever Little Tailor by Solomon Simon (Purchase)

Recommended:

• Colloquial Yiddish by Lily Kahn (Purchase). The audio files for the textbook are available free of charge on the publisher's website.
• Bochner/Beinfeld, Comprehensive Yiddish-English Dictionary (verterbukh.org)

Any additional materials will be provided by the instructor via Canvas.

Reb Noyekh is a Yiddish educator, writer, translator, and content creator. A native of California, he began learning Yiddish more than 10 years ago at UC Santa Cruz where he majored in Jewish Studies. He later studied and taught in the YIVO zumer program for several years and coordinated and taught Yiddish language classes at Der Arbeter Ring in New York. As a writer, his articles and original stories have appeared in the Forverts, Afn Shvel, Yiddish Branzhe, and elsewhere. He is preparing a book of his original short stories titled “Di feygelekh fun honolulu un andere mayses” [The Birds of Honolulu and other Stories]. Reb Noyekh is an accomplished translator. His academic translation, with Nathaniel Deutsch, of The Lost World of Russia’s Jews, was released in 2021 by Indiana University Press. Reb Noyekh is also a prolific content creator on both TikTok and YouTube, and recently launched an all-Yiddish podcast, Mit layb un lebn.

**Become a member today, starting at $54 for one year, and pay the member price for classes! You’ll save on tuition for this course and more on future classes and public programs tickets.