Brandeis University, outside Boston, was established by the Jewish community after World War II. Photo by iStock
During a lull in the middle of a summertime shift at Jersey Mike’s, Ian Jacobs, a rising senior and linguistics major at Brandeis University, stepped into the back room to check his phone and found his Yiddish class WhatsApp group erupting; word had it that the Yiddish program at Brandeis was officially ending.
“I definitely felt my heart drop through the floor, followed immediately by my stomach and other vital organs,” Jacobs told me. “I was just like, ‘Wow, this is godawful.’”
Jacobs and his classmates immediately sprang into action. “We were all like, OK, we’re gonna start emailing parents, texting every Yiddishist that we know, and alumni, et cetera, and see if we can get a campaign going to save the Yiddish program,’” he said.
As of now, their efforts haven’t succeeded. Citing financial stress and low classroom enrollment of approximately eight students per class, Brandeis is set to put its Yiddish program “on hiatus” at the end of next year, when the students already enrolled in Yiddish will graduate, and Ellen Kellman, Brandeis’ sole Yiddish professor for almost 30 years, will likely lose her job.
Kellman, who many students call “Profke,” has helped hatch multiple decades of Brandeis Yiddish students into full-fledged Yiddishists. Under her instruction, students who arrived unable to tell a samekh from a schlos mem have grown into scholars capable of reading the work of Y.L. Peretz and Itzik Manger in the original Yiddish, and discussing it with one another.
“Yiddish overall has kind of changed the trajectory of my life,” said Dina Gorelik, a former student of Kellman’s who graduated last year and now works as a bibliography fellow at the Yiddish Book Center, where many aspiring Yiddishists (including Gorelik and me) have made a pilgrimage for a summer Yiddish internship. “Brandeis was a big piece of that puzzle.”
Students like Gorelik and Jacobs consider themselves the lucky ones. “It very much feels like I caught the last helicopter out, the last lifeboat,” Jacobs told me. “I also had a lot of friends who were very interested in taking Yiddish. They were all planning on doing it next year.”
The Yiddish world is small enough and welcoming enough, according to Sara Feldman, Yiddish preceptor at Harvard (where I studied a full year of Yiddish with her), that any person who plunges into the Yiddish pond is likely to have a ripple effect. Without the program, next year’s would-be Yiddish students at Brandeis will miss out on the Yiddish world, and the Yiddish world will miss out on them.
“The people who come to Yiddish really, really want to engage with it. They use it. They become part of the Yiddish world,” Feldman told me. “They make art, they do scholarship, they teach other people. You get a lot out of every person who studies Yiddish, and it contributes with effects far beyond just the classroom itself. Every student has this domino effect on the world.”
Beyond the loss of some potentially vital members of the Yiddish ecosystem, the end of Yiddish at Brandeis is seen by some students as a betrayal of the core values of the school as a stronghold of Jewish learning and culture. “I’m just really sad, because the reputation that Brandeis has created is that it is a school with such strong Jewish studies,” Gorelik said. “If Yiddish isn’t safe at Brandeis, where is it safe?”
Yiddish, and the people who speak it, have spent almost all of history under threat. To Yiddish educators like Feldman, this puts the responsibility of “preserving and sustaining and advancing areas of knowledge that not everyone has access to outside their walls” in the hands of colleges, especially Jewish ones like Brandeis.
But colleges are not just vaults to store Yiddish, places where the language’s treasures can languish undisturbed for thousands of years like the loot in a pharaoh’s tomb. To Feldman, small-group college classes, which emphasize speaking Yiddish in face-to-face conversations, have the power to revitalize the language as other forms of study never can. “Having the opportunity to sit in a classroom in person on a regular basis is an important avenue for real communicative work that advances the student’s skills in a way which self-study, remote study, and certainly text-only type of work, does not provide that person,” she said.
Though there may be no substitute for live classroom time, Dean of Arts and Sciences Jeffrey Shoulson wrote in an email that the school considers their decision “not a goodbye, but rather a pause to allow us to reconsider the best way forward vis a vis the program.” He wrote that the school is looking into “partnerships with other programs” to cater to the needs of students who remain hungry to learn Yiddish. But what happens next may depend on how many voices speak up for Yiddish, and how loudly.
“The story of Yiddish is similar to the story of the Jewish community as a whole,” Jacobs said. “Despite everything, despite external and internal pressure to stop, despite the institutional pressures, and genocides, and everything, it has managed to survive.”
