Friday, July 20, 2001

Florida International U. Uses the Internet to Teach Yiddish By SCOTT CARLSON A Jewish cultural center in Florida has turned to the Internet to revive an age-old language: Yiddish. The courses, Yiddish I and, beginning this fall, Yiddish II, are being taught at Florida International University. The courses are sponsored by the Dora Teitelboim Center for Yiddish Culture, which has hired the professors, paid for the equipment, and subsidizes the students' tuition. David Weintraub, the director of the center, says that his organization's Yiddish courses are the first. "There are a couple universities that provide Yiddish education, but even a few universities leaves out most of the world," he says. "When we started the course, we found thousands of people around the world who were interested in something Yiddish in their area, but they had no access to it." The online courses are offered both in a live format and in an archived version. In the live version, students are able to connect to the classroom and, using microphones at their computers, speak Yiddish with one another. The archived version has recordings of Yiddish songs and samples of phonetics. A student can drag a mouse over the Yiddish characters to see their representative character in the English alphabet. The courses use songs as a tool to teach vocabulary and writing. Mr. Weintraub says the songs are also a valuable way to impart knowledge about the values and conventions of Yiddish culture. He says both Jews and non-Jews from around the world have signed up for the courses. One of the most dedicated students, he says, is a non-Jewish man from Norway. Mr. Weintraub says that the center is also planning to set up computers at the homes of older people who speak Yiddish, so they can speak with and teach distant students about the language and the culture. "It's a very powerful experience for both the student and the mentor," Mr. Weintraub says. "The mentor finally has some belief that Yiddish is not going to die in his generation, and the student can learn the language in all of its texture and beauty." The online courses are a way to teach people about a culture and a language that is quickly disappearing. The thousand-year-old language was once pervasive and prevalent in Jewish communities both in Europe and in the United States, and it supported strong intellectual traditions. "Unfortunately in America, people think of shtetl Jews as people who play fiddles on roofs and milk cows," Mr. Weintraub says. "But actually there was a sophisticated culture that existed -- people were translating the great thinkers of all time, like Spinoza and Shakespeare and Copernicus, into Yiddish." Yiddish went through a revival as Jews emigrated to America. Many songs of the labor movements were written in the language. "The first book about the civil-rights movement was written in Yiddish," Mr. Weintraub says. "Klezmer music had a profound influence on swing music." But across the globe the language began to disappear later in the 20th century. World War II, the Holocaust, and the rise of the Soviet Union were devastating blows to European Jewish communities. In America, the threat to Yiddish culture was quieter but just as deleterious: assimilation. Children abandoned the Yiddish language and culture to blend in with American values and tastes. But "in the last few years we've seen a renaissance and interest in all things Yiddish, from Yiddish publishing to theatre and music and dramas," Mr. Weintraub says. "A lot of that has to do with the fact that people are losing their grandparents -- the songs that their grandparents used to sing, all that was valuable in their culture, is dying with them. The young people are realizing that they need to do something to preserve this." Such was the case with Richard Pataki, a doctor living outside of Pittsburgh. His parents and grandparents spoke Yiddish, "but I ignored it," he says. "I realized that I missed a tremendous opportunity." Lately, he's been getting books and tapes about the language, but it has been a lonely study with slow progress. He found out about the online Yiddish course and signed up. "I'd been studying it on my own, using the same book that they did, but I got a new dimension," he says, adding that it brought about some breakthroughs when he was able to interact with other speakers and an instructor. "You can hear different people talk to people and be corrected and criticized." "It wasn't the same as being there," he says, noting that the Web page was occasionally an awkward and slow medium. "But it was better than being alone." Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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