PROGRAMEN (PROGRAMS)
Program Season
Yiddishkayt presents a mini-season of diverse, cultural small-scale events celebrating the wealth of Yiddish language, culture and history. Programming ranges from concerts and lectures to annual events such as our participation in the L.A. Times Festival of Books and the L.A. Jewish Film Festival. With our events, we strive to work with artists, writers, filmmakers, musicians and academics, who are pushing the boundaries of contemporary Yiddish culture. The program season proves to be one of our best ways to meet new people and spread the word about Yiddishkayt, helping to foster an active Yiddish community in Los Angeles.
View our calendar to see upcoming events. Or learn about past events.
Events take place at venues citywide, from downtown to the San Fernando Valley, Hollywood to the Westside, drawing an audience from all parts of L.A. As the majority of our events are free to the public, we are able to reach a wide income range. We have partnered with countless organizations to creatively produce our events, including the National Yiddish Book Center, the Nextbook Festival (now Tablet Magazine, NY), Arbeter Ring (Workmen’s Circle), Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, California Institute for Yiddish Culture & Language, the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies, UCLAlive, the UCLA Hammer Museum, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Skirball Cultural Center, Progressive Jewish Alliance, the Jewish Artists Initiative, the Israel Festival, REDCAT, American Jewish University, Grand Performances and various Jewish community centers.
Language Education
Our Language Education Program strives to demonstrate the value of Yiddish in Jewish education, to innovate new curricular techniques, and to nurture a core of young leaders who will advocate for Yiddish in the future. Currently, Yiddishkayt is spearheading a Yiddish language program for elementary and high school students.
Contemporary Jewish youth are being taught a sadly truncated version of their history, which largely skips from Biblical times straight to the holocaust and the subsequent establishment of the State of Israel. Lost in this narrative are the profound developments and contributions of a thousand years of Jewish civilization—its world-class literature, its music and song, its history of social struggle and modernization. As a result, Jews seeking knowledge about their identity, particularly young Jews, are left with a wholly inadequate sense of their own heritage and a broken historical link to their ancestors. Less than seventy years ago, over seventy-five percent of the world’s Jews spoke Yiddish as their first or only language. As with every language, it embodies the collective experience of the life and history of its people—in this case, the Jewish people. It’s incumbent that we offer our youth the opportunity to explore this essential aspect of their heritage, and thereby serve a greater historical community: the generations of Ashkenazi Jews who, for a millennium, lived, created and struggled in Yiddish.
In 2005, with major funding from the Righteous Persons Foundation, we embarked on a three-year pilot program to reintroduce, for the first time in a half-century, Yiddish language and culture as a systematic course of instruction in American Jewish Day Schools. Our high school curriculum, now in its fifth year at New Community Jewish High School in West Hills, CA, has been approved by the University of California Admissions Board as fulfilling the “Language Other Than English” requirement for university admission.
Our Education Director in Tel-Aviv has begun teaching Yiddish language to over fifty elementary school students. Her uniquely created Yiddish classes have been featured on two Israeli TV channels as well as on Arte, the highly regarded European documentary station. We’ve recently secured, through an anonymous donor, the funding necessary to transform her instructional materials into a publishable modern textbook with original illustrations, including audio CDs, teacher’s guide, and lesson plans. The new textbook is halfway completed, and is being developed in close collaboration and partnership with the Bureau of Jewish Education.
Yiddishkayt Folks-Grupe: Cultural Fellowship
There is limited time and opportunity to bridge the gap in Yiddish knowledge between the oldest generation and the younger generation to assist in the transmission of culture across the division of time. For Jews with Yiddish heritage, understanding the riches and history of Yiddish culture leads to a deep and strong Jewish identity based in the achievements of a thousand years of Jewish civilization. Once ubiquitous, this pathway to Jewish identity is now revolutionary, an alternative to the narrative provided by the present-day mainstream Jewish community. Folks-Grupe: The Yiddishkayt Fellowship offers this singular journey to its applicants.
hoyz, an inter-generational, virtual house of Yiddish culture, where young adults, roughly between the ages of 22 and 32, who need not speak Yiddish, receive the opportunity to gain Yiddish cultural literacy in an engaging, experiential format. Over three months (Oct.-Dec.), the Fellows will be surrounded by Yiddish culture, learning from both scholars and an older generation of native speakers, providing a sense of perspective and a contextual understanding of Yiddish. Fellows will meet for nine sessions to explore the Ashkenazi experience as seen in Yiddish literature, theater, music, film, food and humor. Though the entire Fellowship is conducted in English (and all materials will be in translation) each session will include a brief lesson on Yiddish language.Folks-Grupe: The Yiddishkayt Fellowship is a three-month program dedicated to Yiddish cultural literacy for young adults. The Fellowship seeks to create a Yiddish
Learn more about the Yiddishkayt Folks-Grupe.
Citywide Festivals (1995-2004)
In October 2004, Yiddishkayt Los Angeles produced its fifth citywide festival of Yiddish culture since 1995. These community-based festivals attract thousands and are the largest festivals of their kind in the United States. They have become the hallmark of Yiddishkayt Los Angeles as well as the national model for celebrating Yiddish culture within the framework of contemporary multi-culturalism.