2023-2024 Events & Programs

Yiddish: Biography of a Language

Shandler Book.jpg

Date: Monday, April 12, 2021

Time: 04:30pm - 

~ Virtual Book Talk ~ 

Watch Recording


Professor Jeffrey Shandler
(Rutgers University) discusses his new book Yiddish: Biography of a Language (Oxford University Press, 2020).

Shandler Book CoverJeffrey Shandler’s new book, Yiddish: Biography of a Language, engages with the Yiddish language in the unusual form of a biographical profile. In conversation with literary scholar, Joshua Lambert (Wellesley College), Shandler will discuss how this approach to telling the story of Yiddish offers revealing insights into the language’s dynamic relationship with its speakers and their culture. Together, Shandler and Lambert will explore the wide range of symbolic values that Yiddish speakers and others have invested in the language over the centuries.


ShandlerJeffrey Shandler is Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University. His publications include Shtetl: A Vernacular Intellectual History (2014); Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age: Survivors' Stories and New Media Practices (2017); Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (2005); among many others, and editor of Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust (2002) and translator of Emil and Karl, a Holocaust novel for young readers by Yankev Glatshteyn (2006).

Lambert Credit Lisa AbitbolJosh Lambert is the Sophia Moses Robison Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and English, and Director of the Jewish Studies Program, at Wellesley College. He's the author of American Jewish Fiction: A JPS Guide and Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture, and co-editor of How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish.

* Lambert image credit - Lisa Abitbol


New Jersey Jewish News article, "Who's your mamaloshen?" - April 7, 2021