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.

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.

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.