As part of its theme year on “Yiddish Matters,” the Frankel Institute is presenting a wide variety of events in the coming academic year that will explore different facets of the history and culture of Yiddish. The Head Fellow in the fall semester will be Julian Levinson; he will be joined in this role in the winter by Justin Cammy from Smith College.

The year will kick off with a concert by Daniel Kahn, Yeva Lapsker, and Jake Shulman-Ment.  In collaboration with the School of Music, the Frankel Institute will host the free concert September 26, 7:30 pm at Britton Recital Hall in the Earle V. Moore Building. Detroit-born, Berlin-based singer, songwriter, translator, and U-M alumnus Daniel Kahn will return to Ann Arbor for an intimate polyglot program in Yiddish, English, Russian, German, and French. Featuring images and surtitles designed and projected by co-translator and partner Yeva Lapsker and acclaimed violinist Jamie Shulman-Ment, Kahn’s songscape traverses the borders of language, culture, history, and politics and draws on Kahn’s own original songs and translations of Yiddish folk songs.

The Institute has also planned a series of lectures and panels that will showcase the fellows’ research and cover diverse aspects of contemporary Yiddish studies. U-M professors Geneviève Zubrzycki and Benjamin Paloff will join fellow Karolina Szymaniak November 19 to discuss the revival of Yiddish culture and language in contemporary Poland in a panel titled “Yiddish in Poland: Past, Present, and Future.” Head fellow Julian Levinson will be a part of a panel discussion on Yiddish and trauma, together with Harriet Murav and Hannah Pollin-Galay, on March 12.

On December 5, 4:00 pm in Room 2022 of the Thayer Building, there will be a panel entitled “Translating from Yiddish: New Approaches in Theory and Practice.” The panel will address the unique challenges of translating Yiddish into other languages and how translations are affected by phenomena such as the rise of Zionism, the Holocaust, and changing relations between American Jews and the immigrant experience. It will feature Frankel Institute fellows Anita Norich, Yaakov Herskovits, and Julian Levinson. Norich and Herskovitz will both be returning to Ann Arbor to participate in the Institute Theme Year after retiring and graduating from U-M, respectively.

The theme year will also include two larger symposia. On October 29, in addition to guest scholar Sunny Yudkoff of University of Wisconsin-Madison, fellows Justin Cammy, Eve Jochnowitz, Saul Zaritt, and U-M professor Mikhail Krutikov will discuss the place of contemporary Yiddish in current Jewish culture. On March 16, Jack Kugelmass, Dov-Ber Kerler, Amy Kerner, Eli Rosenblatt, and Nick Underwood will discuss the global role of Yiddish.

In addition, there will be individual lectures featuring guest scholars. Zohar Weiman-Kelman will be speaking on October 16 in Rackham Graduate School’s East Conference Room at 4 pm. Weiman-Kelman’s lecture, “Queer Expectations: a Genealogy of Jewish Women’s Poetry,” brings together Jewish women’s poetry in English, Yiddish, and Hebrew from the late 19th century through the 1970s to explore how Jewish women writers turned to poetry to write new histories.

Naomi Seidman will give a talk on December 3 and David Roskies will be speaking on January 14, both at 4:00 pm in Room 2022 of the Thayer Building. Seidman is the Chancellor Jackman Professor of the Arts in the Department of Religion and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. Her lecture will explore the role of Yiddish in Freud's writings and in their translational afterlife.

Roskies teaches Yiddish and modern Jewish literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is a cultural historian who has published extensively on modern Yiddish storytelling, Jewish responses to catastrophe, Holocaust literature, and memory. His lecture will focus on how first-generation tellers of tales in Eastern Yiddish learned to message their competing truth claims through dialogical means.

Stay tuned to the Frankel Center’s website, Facebook, and Twitter for more information on upcoming events.