Der yidisher hamlet: A Lively Theatrical Salon

Tuition: $240 | YIVO members: $180**
 

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This is a live, online course held twice weekly on Zoom. Enrollment will be capped at about 25 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.

Instructor: Mikhl Yashinsky

In this four-session salon, we will read, interrogate, and be alternately delighted and devastated by Isidore Zolotarevsky’s Der yidisher hamlet, oder, der yeshive-bokher (1897). A hit in its day but little remembered now, this very free adaptation of Shakespeare’s drama moves the action from a Danish castle to a Hasidic rebbe’s court and recasts the tragic prince as a yeshiva student upset by his uncle’s having assumed his late father’s throne at the rebbe’s tish. No acting experience required — we will not be performing the play, but rather assigning roles and reading it aloud as a group, as was once done in Yiddish literary salons. We will work our way through one act of this four-act play per session, and along the way, pick up new words, idioms, and grammatical structures, learn something of late nineteenth-century Yiddish operetta style, and consider the choices involved in fartaytshn and farbesern Shakespeare for a Jewish audience. At least intermediate reading and speaking ability is required, as we will be reading the play, and discussing, in Yiddish. 

Yiddish Level:
This course is appropriate for Yiddish students at the intermediate level and above.

Course Materials:
All course materials will be provided digitally on Google Classroom.

Mikhl Yashinsky is a writer, singer-actor, and teacher in Manhattan. He was born in Detroit and graduated with a degree in modern European history and literature from Harvard. His “Di psure loyt khaim” (The Gospel According to Chaim), put on by New Yiddish Rep in 2024, was hailed as the first new full-length Yiddish-language drama produced professionally in the United States, outside of the Hasidic world, for many decades and “jolted the repertoire with a work that is both traditional and delightfully subversive” (Forward). His Yiddish-language erotic one-act “Vos flist durkhn oder” (Blessing of the New Moon) premièred at 2022’s Lower East Side Play Festival. With National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, he has performed in “Fidler afn dakh” (Fiddler on the Roof) directed by Joel Grey, “Tsvishn falndike vent” (Amid Falling Walls) and “Di kishef-makherin” (The Sorceress), in which Mikhl brought a “keen, if malevolent, psychology” to the title role (New York Times). In 2023, Yashinsky made his Carnegie Hall début, singing the anthem of the Vilna Partisans in the Holocaust memorial concert “We Are Here.” He has taught Yiddish at Columbia, University of Michigan, Tel Aviv University, UMass Amherst, the Yiddish Book Center, YIVO, and The Workers Circle, and co-authored the award-winning textbook “In eynem.” His translations of the memoirs of Ester-Rokhl Kaminska, the “Mama of Yiddish Theatre,” and the detective stories of Max Spitzkopf, the “Yiddish Sherlock Holmes,” were published in 2025 by Bloomsbury and the Yiddish Book Center, respectively. More information on his website: www.yashinsky.com

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