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Shared language(s)? In Search of Critical Identities in Hebrew, Judeo-Spanish, and Yiddish Pedagogy

Tue, December 21, 1:15 to 2:45pm, Sheraton Grand Chicago Ballroom V

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Session Sponsor: In Geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies

Abstract

This roundtable will address the current role of critical identities and pedagogies in Jewish language classrooms. Dwindling institutional support for language study in the United States and the COVID-19 Pandemic have exacerbated the already-existing challenges for less-commonly-taught languages. Nevertheless, Hebrew, Judeo-Spanish, and Yiddish classrooms are sites of rapidly evolving language usage, due in part to the inevitable connection between language production and contemporary politics. As virtual spaces of learning have also proliferated in recent years, and have become global sites of negotiating meaning of, and in, multiple languages, broader community support of Jewish languages has also led to more diverse classroom spaces that extend beyond the physical university. In addition to discussing these developments in their courses, participants will also highlight any current challenges, namely how structural, political, and cultural impediments remain when navigating old and new forms of language.

Some operative questions we will consider for the roundtable include:

- How do Jewish languages embrace non-gendered alternatives to gendered forms?
- How do students and instructors develop and create new lexicons in endangered yet living Jewish languages?
- How do course “sites” become necessary repositories for relevant terms and texts, as it relates to students’ political engagement in the target language?
- How are broader discussions in critical race studies, feminist studies, queer studies, etc. shaping the learning of Jewish languages today?
- What subfields, geographies, etc. have emerged (or have continued to remain obscure) in language classrooms as online access to coursework increases?

SARA FELDMAN is Preceptor in Yiddish at Harvard University. She was previously the Hebrew and Yiddish Lecturer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a Frankel Fellow at the University of Michigan. Feldman holds a doctorate in Near Eastern Studies (also) from the University of Michigan. She will speak to the representation of queer, trans, Hasidic, Jews of Color, (frum) Litvish, and non-Jewish identities in the Yiddish curriculum, and how language pedagogy must adapt to students’ own politics without lagging behind. In doing so, she will also point to the tools students need to describe the world they inhabit, and to the purpose and limits of representation in the inevitably political space of the classroom.

BRYAN KIRSCHEN is an Assistant professor of Spanish and Linguistics at Binghamton University, where he specializes in Judeo-Spanish and Sociolinguistics and co-directs the Ladino Collaboratory. Kirschen also serves as the director of the Israeli National Authority of Ladino's international delegation of representatives, known as the Shadarim. He will highlight the resurgence of interest and offerings in Judeo-Spanish, especially during the pandemic, and focus on how instructors and students alike deal with the role of dialectical variation in (virtual) classroom settings. In so doing, he will speak to how speakers negotiate identity and deference to others in Judeo-Spanish, balancing the old and the new when it comes to the development of the language and creation of new lexicon.

MEYER WEINSHEL (moderator) works for the University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and is a PhD Candidate in Germanic Studies. In addition to teaching German/Jewish studies coursework at the University of Minnesota, he has also been a lecturer of Yiddish Studies at the Ohio State University, the TA for the Yiddish Book Center’s Steiner Yiddish Summer Program, and community Yiddish instructor with Minneapolis-based Jewish Community Action. He will speak to the ongoing challenges to “place” Jewish languages within larger area studies departments and curricula that are likewise in a state of flux, and how community education becomes an additional (and contested) site for negotiating Jewish languages and cultures.

ORIAN ZAKAI is an Assistant Professor of Hebrew/Israeli Literature and Culture at the George Washington University, where she specializes in women and gender in Modern Hebrew literature, interrelations between Hebrew literature and nationalism, and the intersections of gender, nationality and ethnicity in Israeli culture. She will speak on the question of introducing nonbinary Hebrew into the Hebrew language classroom considering, on the one hand, the pedagogic challenges involved in including revisions of the langage that presently have more currency in the US than in Israel, and that some students reject for religious and/or ideological reasons, while on the other hand: promote not only inclusivity and diversity but also deep thinking about the structure and history of language.

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