Classes

Workmen’s Circle Online Classes. These are the smash-hit of the last few years: learn in real time, in visual contact with teachers and students, with the best teachers around:

https://circle.org/what-we-do/yiddish-language/online-yiddish-class-descriptions/

 

Two good sites for beginners and intermediates:

Video lessons with Kolye Borodulin, a leading Yiddish educator – from the beginning: http://www.yiddishnakhes.com

 

Learn Yiddish online via an “immersion” experience with animated characters:

http://www.yiddishpop.com/

 

Dictionaries

Online Dictionary – you can input and get a translation of either English or Yiddish words (both in transliteration and in Yiddish characters).  This one has a large data base which includes several reputable dictionaries, including Stutchkov's thesaurus (Der Oytser fun der Yidisher Shprakh):

http://www.cs.uky.edu/~raphael/yiddish/dictionary.cgi

 

Check out the complete list of online Yiddish resources compiled by .Refoyl Finkel:

http://www.cs.uky.edu/~raphael/yiddish.html

 

Yitskhok Niborski's Yiddish-French Dictionary, now translated into English.

This is the English version of which is the most comprehensive Yiddish-English dictionary we have. It only goes from Yiddish to English, and a small fee monthly fee is required, but like I say, it’s the best: www.verterbukh.org

 

Yiddish-English, English-Yiddish Dictionary by Uriel Weinreich.  This is the best dictionary there is that goes both from Y to E and E to Y: http://www.hebrewbooks.org/43653

 

Yiddish-English-Hebrew Dictionary by Alexander Harkavy.  This one is dated, more than a century old, but the triangulation of Hebrew, Yiddish, and English can be very useful.  Does not go from English to Yiddish, though:

http://www.hebrewbooks.org/43567

 

The Gantseh Megillah - an extensive and very entertaining list of Yiddish words and phrases, written in English, with their definitions: www.pass.to/glossary/Default.htm 

 

“Yidish Verterbukh afn Veb” (Online Yiddish Dictionary):

A popular and easy to use online dictionary – I can’t vouch for its reliability, though: http://yiddishdictionaryonline.com

 

Der Oytser fun der Yidisher Shprakh by Nokhem Stutshkov is a thesaurus which gives you synonyms, whole phrases, and folk sayings for a wide variety of Yiddish words and concepts (all in Yiddish): https://archive.org/details/nybc201134

 

League for Yiddish – in Yiddish, but the links (on the left side of the homepage) include a useful online store for getting Yiddish learning materials such as dictionaries and textbooks: http://www.leagueforyiddish.org/

 

Yiddish Word Lists: http://www.derbay.org/words/index.html

 

Yiddish Rhyming Dictionary: https://archive.org/details/nybc200827

 

Not online but of interest:

Solomon Birnbaum's Yiddish: A Survey and a Grammar (Toronto, 1979). The original is in German: Praktische Grammatik der jiddischen Sprache für den Selbstunterricht (München: Lincom Europa, 2011; a reprint of Wien, 1917). The unique feature of this book is that it's based primarily on the Southern/Central, or "Polish," pronunciation.

 

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Typing in Yiddish

You type Yiddish words in English letters, and this program sounds it out creates a Yiddish text for you:

https://www.cs.uky.edu/~raphael/yiddish/makeyiddish.html

 

http://www.lexilogos.com/keyboard/yiddish.htm

Same idea as the above – there’s also a dictionary.

 

Download a Yiddish keyboard so you can actually type in Yiddish letters.  I use this for class materials, e-mail, and websurfing and think it’s fantastic.

www.shoshke.net/uyip/blitspost.htm

 

Gives you a range of Yiddish word processing options:

http://www.uyip.org/

 

Yiddish typing program created recently, availasble (for free?) from the Google Store :

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/yiddish-typer/higlebidpnhccabnhankdoiiccnnfkko?hl=en

 

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In Yiddish but Fun Even If You Don’t Understand Everything: Spoken Word

Jim Cagney speaks Yiddish in “Taxi” (the old movie not the TV show): http://www.jewishhumorcentral.com/2012/07/tough-guy-actor-james-cagney-spoke.html

 

Ben-Gurion speaking Yiddish: https://youtu.be/UUQrJakOQCU

 

Tour of Jerusalem in Yiddish: https://www.youtube.com/embed/_OcyAV_fTPU

Guy can be e-mailed at: theyiddishwalk@gmail.com

 

A Few Fun Items in English

Contemporary Hasidim sort of rapping (in English):

www.youtube.com/watch?v=sX2rm-jLLFY 

 

Yidlife Crisis – a web (fictional) program about life in New York, partly in Yiddish: http://yidlifecrisis.com/

 

“on the grid” – a webcast about Yiddish in Brooklyn:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dl856...

 

 

Music and Songs In Yiddish

Yiddish Song of the Week - this is just what it sounds like: http://yiddishsong.wordpress.com  

 

songs recorded by Holocaust survivors: www.ctmd.org/stonehill-search.htm  

 

List of Yiddish songs: http://joeschwartz.net/ethnic

 

a song: https://yiddishsong.wordpress.com/2016/10/09/erev-yon-kiper-noent-tsu-kol-nidre-performed-by-sore-kessler/

 

song: “Lebn Zol Kolumbus:” www.classicalarchives.com/work/449923.html 

 

www.zemerl.com a large data base of Jewish songs (texts and audio, Yiddish, Hebrew, and Ladino)

 

https://rsa.fau.edu/judaic: FAU Judaica Sound Archives: contains many audio recordings of Jewish music, including hundreds of Yiddish songs

 

First recordings of Yiddish music ever: Abraham Goldfaden's "Vayzuso," from the composer's 1885 opera kheshverus (or Queen Esther: Biblical Operetta in Five Acts and 15 Scenes): https://mayrentinstitute.wisc.edu/vayzuso/

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Somewhat Academic but of General Interest (in English, in no particular order)

“Anki:” http://ankisrs.net 

         This is a site from Japan where you can plug your own information into the program,  and it produces very fancy

flashcards for you, and the program will calculate which ones you are having the most trouble with so you can concentrate on them.

 

“KehilaLinks” – a directory of places of Jewish settlement in Eastern Europe and beyond: https://kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/

 

JewishGen – a website devoted to Jewish genealogy, with access to many data-bases going back a long way: https://www.jewishgen.org/

 

translations of Yiddish literature written by women:

https://www.nypl.org/blog/2016/08/17/women_translation_yiddish

 

to locate fellow-speakers of all kinds of languages (including Yiddish) on your phone:  https://amikumu.com/en/

 

Cairo “Geniza” (storehouse of ancient Jewish texts discovered in Cairo):

http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/genizah

 

related Friedberg Project (not completed?): www.genizah.org

 

Dead Sea Scrolls:

http://www.deadseascrolls.org.il

 

International Journal for the Sociology of Language:

www.neta”abu”gov.com

 

YIVO Institute for Jewish Research – perhaps the “capitol” of Yiddish in our time, YIVO is a center of Yiddish scholarship and research archives in New York City.  Their website contains lots of interesting information including video of lectures and concerts that take place there: https://www.yivo.org/ 

 

The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, excellent resource: http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/

 

YIVO Digital Archive on Jewish Life in Poland: polishjews.yivoarchives.org

 

National Yiddish Book Center: https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/

 

Center for Jewish History Digital Collections – the umbrella organization which now includes YIVO, on 16th St. in NY:  http://access.cjh.org/

 

“InGeveb:” Online Journal for Yiddish Studies: ingeveb.org

 

RAMBI – an index of articles on Jewish studies at the National Library of Israel: http://web.nli.org.il/sites/NLI/English/infochannels/Catalogs/bibliographic-databases/rambi/Pages/rambi.aspx 

 

 

Yiddish bibliography at the New York Public Library

http://www.nypl.org/collections/nypl-recommendations/guides/yiddish-bibliography

 

Recording of the recent celebration in honor of the release of the complete (Yiddish) poems of Yisroel Shtern (mostly in English): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-jo6ejqmAg

 

Bagnowka - this site is put together and run by Polish non-Jews who want to commemorate the Jewish history of Poland.  Of course,  it's in Polish, but there are many interesting pre-war photographs and videos: www.bagnowka.pl

 

Online Resources in Yiddish

“Forverts” – the New York-based Yiddish weekly, but besides the paper itself, they have an excellent website, with up to date video and multi-media pages. You can click to get hyper-text English translations of the articles as you go, and you can also use their search tool to look up words in the most recent Comprehensive Yiddish-English Dictionary (2013): http://yiddish.forward.com/

 

Does Yidishe Kol/The Yiddish Voice – A venerable website and collection of audio recordings from a Boston-based Yiddish-language radio show, with an excellent page of links: http://www.yv.org/

 

Yugntruf – a NY-based organization for activism on behalf of Yiddish: https://yugntruf.org/?lang=en

 

Yiddish Radio Project – as the name would indicate, fun recordings from the days when radio programs in Yiddish were common:

http://www.yiddishradioproject.org/

 

National Yiddish Book Center Digital Yiddish Library – scanned texts of many Yiddish books easily available either online or as free downloads: https://archive.org/details/nationalyiddishbookcenter  

 

National Yiddish Book Center Digital Audio Yiddish Library – you can listen to (and download) hundreds of hours of Yiddish audio recordings, including talks by such Yiddish writers as Itzik Manger, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Chaim Grade, and hundreds of others: https://archive.org/details/nationalyiddishbookcenteraudio

 

National Yiddish Book Center’s Library of Recorded Yiddish Books – includes novels, short stories, and poetry, narrated by native Yiddish speakers in Montreal in the 1980s and 1990s: https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/collections/yiddish-audiobooks

 

Yizkor Books Online - Over 650 “Yizkor” Books are available.  These are “memorial” books compiled by the

 survivors of WWII in which they record as much as they can remember about their destroyed communities – fantastic sources of info., history, culture.  Most are in Yiddish and Hebrew but some articles are sometimes in English: www.nypl.org/research/chss/jws/yizkorbooks_intro.cfm

 

HebrewBooks.org is an important source for scans of mostly religious books in Hebrew but also has some Yiddish: http://hebrewbooks.org/

 

“Di Velt fun Yidish”/The World of Yiddish – includes audio recordings of selections from Yiddish literature, the text of theYiddish translation of the Bible, and a number of Yiddish scholarly reference tools: http://yiddish.haifa.ac.il/contents.htm

 

Searchable OCR of the works of Shloyme Nokhumovitsh Rabinovitsh (Sholem Aleykhem): http://www.cs.uky.edu/~raphael/yiddish/searchSholem.cgi

 

To help with the above project:
http://www.cs.uky.edu/~raphael/yiddish/sholemAleykhem/contents.html
(Pick a favorite story, and click on "leyent". From there you can click on
"redagirt di zayt". Try editing, moving back and forth between the "hilfike
eytse" and the original text, making your corrections on the right-hand
column. You can "derfrish di eytses" multiple times to account for the
changes you have made. The only thing you can't do (until you are
registered as an editor) is save the changes. Once you have tried a few
pages like this, "shikt a bakoshe tsu vern a redaktor".)

 

contemporary Yiddish writer Mikhoel Feldzenbaum’s blog:

http://blogs.yiddish.forward.com/michael/felsenbaum/175924

 

Yiddishwit – a fun website with Yiddish sayings, illustrated with cartoons: http://yiddishwit.com/index.html

 

remarkable recordings of Herts Grosbard, a popular reciter of Yiddish poetry back in the day: http://www.grosbardproject.com/Grosbard_Project/Home.html  

 

Last issue of “Lebens Fragn,” distinguished Socialist publication in Israel:

https://lebnsfragn.com/index.html

Editor: I. Luden luden@netvision.net.il

Correspondence address: Arbeter Ring Israel
e-mail: brtavoda@netvision.net.il

 

National Institution for Yiddish in Israel:

http://www.yiddish-rashutleumit.co.il/yi

 

Yiddish OCR program: http://www.tichnut.de/jewish/yiddishocr.html

 

For Yiddish blogs – the easiest thing is to consult the list on the Forverts’ website: http://blogs.yiddish.forward.com/

 

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Yiddish Summer Programs

Steiner Summer Program at the NYBC – great for college students.  Five weeks long, top-quality Yiddish education – and free for those accepted into the program! https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/educational-programs/steiner-summer-yiddish-program/about-steiner-summer-yiddish-program

 

The Naomi Prawer Kadar International Yiddish Summer Program at Tel Aviv University – yours truly’s personal pic: four weeks long, students and teachers of the highest caliber, with students of all ages: http://www.naomiyiddish.tau.ac.il/

 

La Maison de la Culture Yiddish/Bibliotheque Medem (Paris): They run “Yiddish on the Continent,” a two week program that alternates between Paris, Brussels, and London.  Top-quality students (many post-college) and teachers.  Do I get two personal pics?  If so, this is one of them.  Unfortunately, there’s no single website for the program, and you have to watch for their updates when spring rolls around on the website the follows, on facebook, and on the website for the Free University of Brussels (L’universite libre de Bruxelles): https://www.yiddishweb.com/

 

The Uriel Weinreich Program in Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture at YIVO (New York) – also excellent for college students, six weeks long, with the best teachers around, expensive but worth it if you have the money: https://www.yivo.org/summer-program

 

I personally haven’t been to the following, but all are leaders in the Yiddish education field:  

 

Vilnius (Vilna) Yiddish Institute and Summer Program in Yiddish – haven’t been, but my spies tell me the cultural experience can’t be beat.  I’ve heard some questions about the seriousness of the academic program : http://judaicvilnius.com/

Yiddish Farm, an organic farm in upstate New York that hosts Yiddish educational programs in winter and summer: https://yiddishfarm.org/

 

Yiddish Summer Weimar (Strasbourg) – one week, with an emphasis on theater, music, and performing arts: http://yiddishsummer.eu/

 

“Yiddish Vokh,” a Yiddish-only summer retreat in upstate New York: http://yugntruf.org/yiddish-vokh/?lang=en

 

Warsaw Summer Yiddish Program: http://jidyszland.pl/en/letnie-seminarium/

 

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More In-Depth and Specialized Research

WorldCat.org: search thousands of libraries worldwide at once

 

Index to Yiddish Periodicals at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

 

Classic Inter-War, Warsaw Literary Publication, “Literarishe Bleter,” Online:

http://yiddish-periodicals.huji.ac.il

 

Haynt and Der moment: scans of thousands of issues of Warsaw's two largest Yiddish newspapers. You can go a specific issue by adjusting the date part of the URL (for instance, replace 1921/08/30 with 1924/04/01 to go from August 30, 1921 to April 1, 1924).

 

Stanford Librarian Zachary Baker’s Guides to Research

https://ingeveb.org/pedagogy/resources-in-yiddish-studiesyiddish-literature-and-culture

 

https://ingeveb.org/pedagogy/resources-in-yiddish-studies-part-one

 

https://ingeveb.org/pedagogy/resources-in-yiddish-studies-the-holocaust

 

https://ingeveb.org/pedagogy/resources-in-yiddish-studies-digital-collections

 

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Yiddish Theaters

Der Folksbiene – located in NY , the last Yiddish theater in the U.S., and they do plays in English too: www.folksbiene.com

 

The New Yiddish Rep -- Yiddish theater with a “downtown” spirit; in recent years they’ve done Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco, as well as more middle-of-the-road stuff: http://www.newyiddishrep.org/

 

Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts – located in Montreal, they do one play in Yiddish every season:  http://www.segalcentre.org/

 

Yiddishpiel – located in Tel-Aviv: www.yiddishpiel.co.il/eng_default.asp

 

YungYiddish – Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv: www.yiddish.co.il/html/main.htm

 

Lufteater – located in Strasbourg: http://lufteater.free.fr/

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Going to New York?  Check these sites for a Yiddish event:

Der Folksbiene: www.folksbiene.com

 

The New Yiddish Rep: http://www.newyiddishrep.org/

 

YIVO Institute for Jewish Research: https://www.yivo.org/ 

 

The Workmen’s Circle, Manhattan: https://circle.org/

 

The 92nd St. Y (yes they have a lot of Yiddish-themed events): https://www.92y.org/