Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Yiddish World

Linguist Isaac Bleaman receives National Science Foundation award to study language of Holocaust survivors

The $470,000 grant will support research based on Yiddish-language testimonies from the USC Shoah Foundation.

Isaac Bleaman, an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, has received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation to study the speech of native Yiddish speakers who survived the Holocaust.

The five-year $470,000 grant will support research that documents the Yiddish language as it was spoken by survivors who were interviewed for the Visual History Archive of the USC Shoah Foundation, an organization that was founded by film director Steven Spielberg in 1994.

The goal of Bleaman’s project is to analyze the grammatical and phonetic properties of European Yiddish and to address the impact of the Holocaust on the development of the language. The award will finance the construction of a new digital language corpus containing transcripts, media files, and metadata.

These materials will be made available to researchers, Yiddish language instructors and students, as well as the general public for free online. Currently most of the Yiddish interviews can only be viewed at institutions that subscribe to the full Visual History Archive, and none are available with transcripts.

In a statement about the goals of the project, Bleaman writes that genocide often leads to the endangerment of the languages spoken by the communities targeted for destruction. The Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis — a genocide without precedent — had a catastrophic effect on Yiddish and other minority languages in the region.

Although the testimony interviews of the Holocaust survivors were not collected for linguistic purposes, they can serve as vital data for innovative projects related to language research.

The grant project will also include research training for a postdoctoral scholar in linguistics, Yiddish specialist Chaya Nove; the preparation of lessons for sociolinguistics courses on the use of oral histories as language data; and the compilation of pedagogical materials for intensive language courses, in which students will have an opportunity to listen to native European-born Yiddish speakers.

 

A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.