Where is a stateless culture at home? Yiddish is the language of one of the largest and longest-lasting diasporic cultures in the world, often defined by its lack of a homeland. But what if Yiddish speakers, artists, and writers did feel at home in diaspora, whether in a town their family had lived in for generations or a new city they'd just arrived in, an at-homeness with no claim to sovereignty or state? This course explores four spaces of Yiddish life and writing:

• Dos Shtetl (The Town) · Market days and mud, but also railways, factory work, political argument, and people planning their departure. Generally rooftop-fiddler-free
• Di Shtot (The City) · Where millions went, wandering busy streets where technology, politics, economics, and art combined into new and disorienting possibilities
• Der Hoyf (The Courtyard) · The urban courtyard that defined local life across central and eastern Europe, and reappeared as far away as Buenos Aires
• Di Svive (The Natural World) · The forests of Belarus, the steppes of Siberia, the mountains of Quebec and New York,where writers turned their attention from people to landscape

Through close reading, discussion, and weekly writing prompts, the course asks what these spaces can teach about diasporic belonging and the meaning of home without a state.

Who this is for:

• Readers curious about Yiddish literature, Jewish diaspora history, or modern Jewish culture
• Anyone interested in place, migration, and belonging in literature

What you'll leave with:

• A map of Yiddish literature's key imaginative geographies: the shtetl, the city, the courtyard, the natural world
• Firsthand familiarity with major modern Yiddish writers in translation
• Your own short pieces of writing from the course's weekly prompts

Readings include Avrom Karpinowitz, Moyshe Kulbak, Mendel Mann, Anna Margolin, Mimi Pinzon, Fradl Shtok, Avrom Sutzkever, Miriam Ulinover, and more, all in English translation.

No prior knowledge of Yiddish required.

Four Thursdays: October 15, 22, 29 and November 5 at 12–1:15pm Pacific Time

Questions? Our FAQ covers registration, recordings of missed sessions, refunds, and financial assistance.

This two-part illustrated class introduces ancient Egyptian history, religion, and daily life, with special attention to the periods and objects in the de Young Museum’s Treasures of the Pharaohs. We’ll begin with an overview of Egypt’s thirty dynasties, then turn to religious belief and everyday life, ending with the Lost City of Amenhotep III, a special feature of the exhibition. The class works whether or not you’ve seen the show.

Who this is for:

• Anyone planning a visit to the exhibition or who has already been
• Anyone curious about ancient Egypt; no background in Egyptology needed

What you'll leave with:

• Where the exhibition’s objects fit in Egypt’s long history
• What the Lost City of Amenhotep III reveals about life in ancient Egypt

Two Thursdays: October 15 & 22, 6–7:30pm Pacific Time

Questions? Our FAQ covers registration, recordings of missed sessions, refunds, and financial assistance.

What happens when a novelist writes himself into his own novel, then sends a double to impersonate him in Jerusalem? That’s the premise of Philip Roth’s 1993 novel Operation Shylock, set during the First Intifada and the Jerusalem trial of John Demjanjuk. The book brings Jewish powerlessness and Israeli power face to face, and it keeps blurring fiction and fact, memory and history. In this reading circle we’ll look at how Roth uses fiction to get at “the truth,” how the novel has aged, and what it means to read it now.

Who this is for

• Readers of Philip Roth and twentieth-century American Jewish fiction
• Anyone interested in how fiction has handled Israel, the First Intifada, and Holocaust memory
• First-time readers and rereaders alike

What you'll leave with

• A close, discussion-based reading of the novel
• A sense of how Roth uses doubles and unreliable narration to write about Jewish identity

Four Wednesdays: October 28, November 4, 11 and 18, 12:30–1:30pm Pacific Time

Questions? Our FAQ covers registration, recordings of missed sessions, refunds, and financial assistance.

Join New Lehrhaus at Berkeley Repertory Theatre for Liberation, Bess Wohl’s play about feminism, memory, and social change. Set partly in 1970s Ohio, the play follows a group of women who meet in a recreation-center basement to imagine new possibilities for their lives. Decades later, the daughter of one of them returns to that history and its hopes, conflicts, and unanswered questions. The Berkeley Rep production, directed by Whitney White, comes to the Bay Area after an acclaimed Broadway run.

We’ll gather before the performance for a short introduction to the play and its historical context, then again afterward to talk about what we saw.

Who this is for:

• Theatergoers interested in women’s history and the women’s liberation movement
• Anyone who enjoys seeing a play with a group and talking about it afterward

What you'll leave with:

• Historical context for the women’s liberation movement before the curtain goes up
• A post-show conversation with fellow New Lehrhaus participants

Please note: Because this special program includes a discounted ticket to a Berkeley Rep performance, New Lehrhaus members will pay only the discounted cost of the theater ticket. Nonmembers will pay the full program fee of $72.

Tuesday, November 10, 6:30–10pm Pacific Time

Questions? Our FAQ covers registration, recordings of missed sessions, refunds, and financial assistance.

Ladino music records the history of the Sephardic world: melodies that joined medieval Jewish liturgy with the Christian and Muslim music of Iberia, then traveled after 1492 to North Africa, Europe, and above all the Ottoman Empire, taking on new influences along the way. The course gives one session each to the genres at the center of Sephardic life: romansas (narrative ballads), kantikas (lyrical songs), and the historical poems and liturgical hymns known as coplas and piyyutim. Throughout, we’ll look at how oral transmission, community identity, and gender shaped each tradition, from medieval Iberia to today’s revival.

Session 1: The Narrative Tradition (Romansas) Ballads that began with Iberian street minstrels had spread through Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Spain by the fifteenth century. We’ll listen to romansas sung mostly by women and see how Sephardic communities reshaped their themes of loyalty, honor, and exile to reflect Jewish life.

Session 2: Life Cycle and Song (Kantikas) Kantikas, the tradition’s lyrical popular songs, took shape under Mediterranean and Balkan influence from the late nineteenth century on. Sung mostly by women, they cover love, family, weddings, lullabies, and laments, along with songs for the life cycle and the holidays.

Session 3: Faith and Identity (Coplas and Piyyutim) These two genres were performed by men. Coplas, composed by rabbis and scholars across the Ottoman Empire, taught Jewish history and ethics and chronicled real events such as plagues and political upheavals. Sephardic piyyutim, rooted in the Golden Age of medieval Spain, are sung in Hebrew and form the core of synagogue worship.

Who this is for

• Anyone interested in Sephardic history, Jewish music, or the Ladino language and its revival
• Students of Jewish liturgy and poetry curious about Sephardic traditions of coplas and piyyutim
• Readers and singers drawn to the oral and folk traditions of the Mediterranean and Ottoman worlds

What you'll leave with

• A grounding in the history of Ladino music from medieval Iberia through the Ottoman Empire to its modern revival
• Familiarity with the three core genres of Sephardic song
• An understanding of how gender, oral transmission, and community identity shaped this tradition over centuries

Three Wednesdays: November 25, December 2 and 9, 1–2:30pm Pacific Time

Questions? Our FAQ covers registration, recordings of missed sessions, refunds, and financial assistance.

Avot Yeshurun (1904–1992) is one of modern Hebrew literature's most singular and disorienting voices. He was a poet who insisted Hebrew carry what it could barely hold: the diasporic weight of Yiddish and Arabic, and the ongoing presence of the dead among the living. Writing against the grain of the modern Hebrew literary establishment, Yeshurun forged an iconoclastic, idiosyncratic poetics that unsettles any clear border between languages, generations, and homelands.

In this three-session course, we'll enter Yeshurun's work through close attention to key poems in translation, alongside prose selections that illuminate his relationship to language mixing, translation, memory, and catastrophe. No prior familiarity with Yeshurun or Hebrew poetry is required, just a willingness to sit with the difficulty, strangeness, and resonant ghosts that his poetry hosts.

Who this is for:

• Readers curious about modern Hebrew poetry, Israeli literature, or twentieth-century Jewish writing
• Anyone interested in translation, multilingualism, and diaspora in literature
• Students of Hebrew literature, Yiddish studies, or Jewish intellectual history

What you'll leave with:

• Close familiarity with key poems and prose by Avot Yeshurun, in translation
• A framework for reading Yeshurun's hybrid Hebrew-Yiddish-Arabic poetics
• A deeper understanding of how modern Hebrew literature grapples with memory, loss, and catastrophe

Three Wednesdays: December 2, 9, and 16, 6–7:30pm Pacific Time

Questions? Our FAQ covers registration, recordings of missed sessions, refunds, and financial assistance.