Yiddish Lectures at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy

On March 9, 2023, during his visit to Ukraine, the Israeli poet and literary critic Dr. Velvl Chernin delivered lectures on the history of Yiddish literature and on renowned Jewish writers and poets associated with Ukraine. The lectures took part an the Kiev Center for the Studies of History and Culture of East European Jewry, which operates within the structure of the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. A particular attention was paid to the problems of translating literature from Yiddish into Ukrainian.

Training specialists in this field is one of the center’s areas of activity. Thanks to these efforts, a number of literary translations from Yiddish into Ukrainian have appeared in recent years. That includes books published by the Kiev publishing house Duh i Litera. Yiddish to Ukrainian translations have also been published in the literary magazine Yehupetz.

New Book: Yiddish Lives On

The McGill–Queen’s University Press, a Canadian joint venture between McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, and Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, has published Dr. Rebecca Margolis’ book “Yiddish Lives On”. The author, formerly an associate professor at the University of Ottawa, is a professor and Pratt Foundation Chair of Jewish Civilisation at the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation at Monash University, Melbourne.

The new book discusses possible strategies of transmitting Yiddish as a living spoken language to the young generation in the modern world. Margolis examines the historical ideologies of Canadian Yiddishists, the difficulties of language transmission within Yiddish-speaking families from the 1950s to the present day, and the role of theater, literature, music and cinema in the development of Yiddish culture. The last chapter of the book is dedicated to modern film production, video channels and Internet projects. The researcher concludes that online popularization is necessary for successful further transmission of the language.