Course information
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Sholem-aleykhem! Welcome to Yiddish 3!
Learning Yiddish is an opportunity to connect with this rich Eastern European Jewish language and culture with its beautiful music and literature. This is a treasure trove that is just waiting to be discovered!
This Yiddish course is designed for participants, who are at an Advanced Beginners or Lower Intermediate level of Yiddish, having studied Yiddish for at least two semesters. (See more information below under “Prior knowledge”.)
We will start each lesson with some Yiddish conversation, which we will build up more and more as we go along. Then we will revise some of the grammar and vocabulary learned in the previous lesson. After that, we will work with our Yiddish textbook, read the reading material, the dialogues and the jokes there, learn new vocabulary and grammar and do some of the exercises in the book. And we will conclude every lesson with a Yiddish song.
The course is given in collaboration with Paideia – the European Institute for Jewish Studies in Sweden and Jiddischsällskapet i Stockholm.
Paideia folkhögskola also offers the online courses Avrom Sutskever – Yiddish Poetry, Yiddish 7 and Yiddish conversation (in Yiddish/Swedish) during the spring semester of 2026. Please see more information under each course’s webpage.
Course structure
This will be an interactive online Yiddish course, which will include Yiddish conversation, working with a Yiddish textbook, reading, learning new grammar and vocabulary and doing various exercises, as well as some Yiddish songs.
Participants will be expected to spend some time every week to work on their reading and writing, to learn the vocabulary and to revise the grammar covered in each class.
Prior knowledge
The course is given in English.
This is a course designed for participants at an Advanced Beginners or Lower Intermediate level of Yiddish. Participants should be able to form sentences in the present and past tense and to read texts in Yiddish in the Hebrew script.
To apply for this course, you need basic computer skills and knowledge of how to use the digital platform Zoom. The school offers Zoom manuals and a training opportunity before the start of the course.
Course literature
All course literature is not included in the course cost. You need to acquire the following books on your own:
- “Yiddish, Volume 1″ (Sheva Zucker).
- “Yiddish, Volume 2″ (Sheva Zucker).
You will receive more information about the course books that you purchase on your own, if you get accepted to the course.
About the teacher
Dr. Beruriah Wiegand is the Woolf Corob Lector in Yiddish at the University of Oxford. She holds a BA and MA in Hebrew and Jewish Studies from Leo Baeck College, London, and a Ph.D. from University College London, with a thesis on Jewish mystical motifs in the works of Isaac Bashevis Singer. She has lectured on Bashevis’s works and on Yiddish poetry at major conferences around the world.
Beruriah is also a Yiddish poet and translator, who has published two bilingual collections of her poetry (Yiddish/English) with the H.Leyvik-farlag in Tel Aviv, as well as various translations from and into Yiddish.
Photo: The image is of a painting by Jean Hessel.