YIVO's Summer Program Teaches and Celebrates Yiddish and Its Civilization Worldwide

On Friday, August 1, 2025, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City celebrated the 58th annual graduation of the YIVO-Bard Uriel Weinreich Summer Program in Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture.

Established in 1968, the YIVO Summer Program is the world's first and longest-standing Yiddish summer program. It has become the major academic program dedicated to preserving, promoting, and deepening the understanding of the Yiddish language and the rich, thousand-year cultural heritage that has emerged alongside it.

For the fourth year in a row, the summer semester featured two tracks running concurrently, one online and one in-person. This made it possible to meet students wherever they were in the world, whether they traveled to New York for the summer or opted to study from home.

With students and faculty from around the world, the YIVO-Bard Summer Program reflects the worldwide cultural reach of Ashkenazi Jewish civilization. There were 74 students from 18 states in the US and from 12 countries: Australia, Canada, Spain, France, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and the US. The faculty hails from eight countries: Argentina, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Moldova, Poland, and the US. The program features a unique intergenerational learning environment, with this year’s students ranging in age from seventeen to seventies. Thanks to the generosity of The Leona Zweig Rosenberg Trust, eight students from five countries were awarded YIVO Centennial Scholarships to support their intensive summer study.

“The Summer Program is a testament to the growing interest in Yiddish culture worldwide,” said Ben Kaplan, YIVO’s Director of Education. “We’re incredibly proud of our Summer Program students, scores of whom have utilized their Yiddish knowledge to have an enormous, positive impact in the field by sharing their passion for Yiddish among broad and diverse communities.”

YIVO’s Summer Program shares with its students the 1,000-year history of Yiddish civilization – its richness, complexity, beauty, and significance to the Jewish people and beyond. Alumni from the Summer Program have gone on to careers as leading academics, scholars, and authors; world-renowned musicians and artists; archivists, librarians, and conservators; educators whose work promotes the continued legacy of Ashkenazi Jewish life. Many of the program’s faculty are graduates of the Summer Program themselves, as are a number of current YIVO staff members.

“The intensive study of Yiddish at a university program is not a typical 'bucket list' item. Yet scores of students of all ages come to YIVO to be taught every summer, and that has been the case for the past 58 years. They come already committed to making the Yiddish language and its cultural heritage a lifelong part of them. Our work at YIVO is exceptionally gratifying during this season,” said Dovid Braun, the Academic Director of the YIVO-Bard Uriel Weinreich Summer Program in Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture.

Participants in the Summer Program spend six to seven weeks immersed in the study of Yiddish language, literature, and culture. With over 180 course hours, students are eligible to receive university credit through Bard College.

Beyond obligatory morning classes, the curriculum included seminars on: Yiddish theater, taught by Shane Baker; the history of Yiddish culture, taught by Prof. Cecile Kuznitz; and Yiddish literature, taught by Prof. Marc Caplan. Electives were offered on Yiddish poetry, Yiddish literature, archival research, Yiddish songs, and vegetable pickling.

The program also featured the annual Yiddish Civilization Lecture Series which presented cutting edge online lectures by today’s foremost researchers of Yiddish civilization in Eastern Europe, New York, and around the world, including Yiddish literature expert Eugene Orenstein, former Forverts editor Boris Sandler, actress and filmmaker Lili Rosen, and lecturer Eliezer Niborski. Half were delivered in English, the other half in Yiddish, the lectures are now available on YIVO’s YouTube channel.

Pre-Shabes gatherings were held every couple of weeks, which allowed students to engage with guest speakers or performers widely known for their contributions to Yiddish arts and culture. Featured this summer were director and filmmaker Lea Kalisch, actress and writer Lili Rosen (also a member of YIVO’s 2025 Summer Program faculty), and Sasha Lurje, a celebrated Yiddish singer.

Off-campus activities included a visit to CYCO, the USA’s only bookstore devoted exclusively to Yiddish titles; a tour of Mount Carmel Cemetery – where many Yiddish writers and personalities are buried – by Prof. Eugene Orenstein; a Yiddish-language tour of The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt, an exhibition at The Jewish Museum, by Adina Cimet; and a historical tour of the Lower East Side by scholars Dr. Elissa Sampson and Prof. Jonathan Boyarin.

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YIVO

The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, now in its Centennial year, is dedicated to the preservation and study of the history and culture of East European Jewry worldwide. For a century, YIVO has pioneered new forms of Jewish scholarship, research, education, and cultural expression. Our public programs and exhibitions, as well as online and on-site courses, extend our outreach to a global community. The YIVO Archives contains 24 million unique items and YIVO’s Library has over 400,000 volumes—the single largest resource for the study of East European Jewish life in the world. yivo.org / yivo.org/the-whole-story