College Park, MD – Budget woes forced the University of Maryland officials to announce elimination of Yiddish instruction.
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Maryland’s Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies has collected enough money to pay its long-time Yiddish instructor through the next academic year, but likely couldn’t garner enough funding after that to dedicate a full-time faculty member to the language, The Baltimore Sun reported Monday.
“U-Maryland has had the biggest commitment to Yiddish as a language anywhere in a hundred-mile radius,” Harvey Spiro, president of Yiddish of Greater Washington, said. “We’re not a particularly political organization, but this kicked us in the gut.”
The group has organized a letter-writing campaign to try to save the language program.
Center Director Hayim Lapin said the eventual elimination of the 1,000-year-old language is a bottom-line decision.
“This is not about Yiddish,” Lapin said. “What this is about is responding to the budget crisis and actually cutting back on just about all of our visiting faculty and programming. So we have less Bible than we had. We have less history than we had. We have less or no Yiddish.”
Lapin said Yiddish has fallen victim to falling returns on the endowments funding the center and a limited student interest, the Sun reported.
While the center probably won’t have the money for a full-time instructor after next year, Lapin said he hoped to offer language instruction on a per-course basis, as driven by student demand.
The Sun reported Harvard and Columbia are among the handful of schools that consistently offer Yiddish instruction in the Germanic tongue.
I had the pleasure of having Professor Miriam Issacs for Yiddish while at UMD. She is an excellent professor.
I am sure that they would not drop Afro-American Studies or Arabic Studies. Liberal academia at its worst.
It’s not really that big a deal. The yiddish that is most under study is the dead secular yiddish. Few new things are produced, and the few things that are tend to be produced by the same scholars who know the language. Eventually, yiddish studies will either go the way of Ladino, or it will have to finally refocus on to living yiddish and the culture around it. Either way, in the meantime they should redirect their funds to more useful features of the Jewish studies program.
yiddish is the language of ashkenazi jewish culture, so yes it is very important. modern hebrew is based on yiddish and the only reason jew in the secular world have limited interest in it, is because the israeli tradition of hating yiddish spread. not to mention israeli culture replaced actual “jewish” culture. yiddish comedies, plays, movies and music, referenced Torah, as well as traditional shtelel culture and jewish life.it is a shame that modern jewish singers use hebrew instead of yiddish. it also a shame that only chosidic institutions teach it, while modern “zionist” orthodox learn hebrew.
the mama loshan should be kept alive because although few rabbincal texts were written in it, all of jewish life was.