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Yiddish has been used by Ashkenazic Jews since at least the thirteenth century. It is the language that made them modern in Europe as well as a language of literature and music, philosophical debates, and political change. And it is the language of the immigration of American Jews, used to describe the new world in vivid, lasting ways. Drawing on How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish, a monumental anthology published in partnership with the Yiddish Book Center that mines their rich archives of Yiddish American life, this class explores how Yiddish inserted itself into English and how it transformed America—not only the United States but the other Americas, too—through fiction, cuisine, love, and tragedy.

This program will take place live online with an opportunity to interact with the speaker. It will be recorded and made available to patrons for later viewing as well. Purchase How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish.

When: Thursday, January 28 at 6:30 pm ET
Where: The Great Thinkers series at 92Y (New York, NY)

Ilan Stavans is the Publisher of Restless Books and the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities, Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. His books include How Yiddish Changed American and How America Changed Yiddish, On Borrowed Words, Spanglish, Dictionary Days, The Disappearance, and A Critic’s Journey. He has edited The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, the three-volume set Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, among dozens of other volumes. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Chile’s Presidential Medal, the International Latino Book Award, and the Jewish Book Award. Stavans’s work, translated into twenty languages, has been adapted to the stage and screen. A cofounder of the Great Books Summer Program at Amherst, Stanford, Chicago, Oxford, and Dublin, he is the host of the NPR podcast In Contrast.

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