CFA: Yiddish Summer School in Berlin

American Jewish History, 2019

Camp Boiberik, founded in 1923, and Camp Hemshekh, founded in 1959, both had goals of creating Yiddish atmospheres, employing the language throughout the lived experience of camp. Pushing against challenging sociolinguistic trends, their efforts did not come without challenges. However, their attendees’ struggles with and negotiations surrounding Yiddish and Yiddishism led to new understandings of what the language and its associated movement could mean for new generations of American Jews raised in increased comfort, social mobility, and affluence. Considering changing engagements with Yiddish at two Yiddish-focused summer camps, this article describes how these camps came to reimagine and repurposed Yiddishism as a tool towards the transformation and identity-building of American Jewish youth. Considering these camps within the wider history of Jewish camping and the Yiddishist movement from its foundation onward, the author also shows how these camps’ renewed visions of Yiddishism remained pertinent and influential in the decades after these camps closed in 1979 and 1980. Rather than conforming to narratives of death or revival, Hemshekh and Boiberik help depict a more complex story of Yiddish and Yiddishism in postwar America.

University of Florida, Jewish Studies Department, 2023

Although leading scholars in the world of Yiddish studies and pedagogy have written a plethora of case studies and historiographies on the most influential camps and organizations in the Yiddish summer camp world of the 20th century, this work attempts to combine them all into a cohesive overview of the factors determining the rise and fall of the major Yiddish summer camps in the United States.

andererseits, 2018

Few, if any, educational opportunities possess the intrinsic potency of study abroad: the chance to immerse in a subject in its own context and original language, where every chance encounter constitutes a potential »teachable moment« and the textbook is not a text at all, but a cityscape rich with foreground, background, and subtext. The intellectual and personal benefits of immersive study in a foreign context is increasingly recognized and forming a standardized part of the undergraduate educational experience; while year-long programs including language immersion remain the gold-standard of study abroad, for many students shorter, intensive single-semester and summer programs may be the most realistic opportunity to gain cross-cultural experience. 1 Many academics in fields with an international component-cultural studies, world languages, comparative literature, and area studies, to name a few-benefit from the opportunity to teach in study abroad programs, and may well have entered our chosen fields in part because of positive international experiences of during our own educations. The challenges of teaching effectively abroad, however, are numerous, intricate, and highly dependent on subject matter as well as familiarity with the location where the international course is taught. Here I offer insights gained from my experiences teaching »Jewish Berlin« as part of a six-week long immersive summer program offered by Duke and Rutgers in Berlin. The Duke/Rutgers program in Berlin has offered a course on »Jewish Berlin« on an occasional basis since its founding in 1988 (a very different Berlin from that of today!), most recently during the summer programs in 2012, 2013, and 2014. In this course, one of two courses students take as part of 1 | A substantial secondary literature on study abroad exists, and much of this derives from the area of German Studies. Among the studies I consulted in preparation for teaching »

In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies, 2020

A review of Adam Zachary Newton's "Jewish Studies: A Counterlife," including a proposal for rethinking the place of Yiddish studies in the acadmey.

2016

History of Education, 2013

Dr. Adina Bar-El Book review Abstract Passionate Pioneers: The Story of Yiddish Secular Education in North America, 1910 – 1960, by Fradle Pomerantz Freidenreich, Canada 2010 Some 1000 secular Yiddish schools and some 40 summer camps in 160 Jewish communities in America and Canada, for the 50-year period between 1910 and 1960 - are reviewed in the book by Pomerantz Freidenreich. The curricula in both the schools and summer camps conducted in Yiddish had programs relating to Hebrew too, and they tried to instill the Jewish values, customs and traditions of the holidays and of daily life. The book contains an introduction presenting historical and social background, records data – names of communities, schools and summer camps, the establishers with their philosophy, names of sponsors, social leaders and teachers. The index at the back of the book is very detailed, and makes the tremendous amount of data in the book accessible.

Judaica librarianship, 1986

Secularization and Sacralization, Frankel Institute Annual (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press) 25-27 , 2016

The prospectus of a forthcoming book.

This publication appears under the auspices ofthe chair for yiddish language and cultu¡e in thc Netherlands at the university ôf,{rnstc'dam, establishcd by the Mcnassch ben Israel Institute forJewish social and culn¡ml studies. Funding for the chair is provided þ rhe stichting collccticve Marorgdden Nedcrland and dc stichtingvrienden van hetJuda palache Instin¡ur The Men¿sseh bcn Israd Institute is an academic collaboration berween the university of Amsterdam and theJewish Historical Museum, Amste¡dam. ';: ilhe scries Amsterdam Yìddish Symposium are edited by Shlomo Berger.