Themes of Warsaw’s Yiddish summer program are health and sports in Jewish history
Several students and teachers of last year’s Warsaw Yiddish summer program Photo by Jidyszland
By Forverts Staff May 17, 2023
This summer, the Warsaw-based Shalom Foundation and the Center for Yiddish Culture is hosting its 21st International Summer Seminar in Yiddish Language and Culture, to take place both in Warsaw and online.
The seminar includes two-week and three-week programs of language study, from beginners to advanced. The classes run 3 1/2 or 4 hours a day.
The deadline to apply for scholarships for the program is May 30.
Each of the advanced courses, to be taught in Yiddish, will have a specific theme. The Yiddish researcher and translator Natalia Krynicka will share Yiddish memoirs, poetry, short stories and proverbs that relate to physical and mental health.
Krynicka will also teach a course about the image and stereotypes of Jewish and non-Jewish women in Yiddish literature.
Yiddish scholar and Forverts writer Philip Schwartz will share memoirs, articles from the prewar Yiddish press and fiction that relate to Jewish children’s games, chess and sports. Among the readings: a piece about Jewish girls playing basketball in Vitebsk in the 1920s and another one about the renowned strongman Zishe Breitbart.
The seminar will also include two talks in English related to sports and masculinity among the Jews of prewar Poland. Piotr Nazaruk, the curator at Poland’s Grodzka Gate-NN Theatre, will give a lecture titled Goal of Goals: The History and Politics Behind Jewish Sports in Pre-War Lublin.
The other talk, presented by Mariusz Kałczewiak, a social and cultural historian of modern Eastern Europe and Latin America, will be Boys Showing Off: Polish-Jewish Strongmen and Boxers and the Changing Notions of Masculinity.
To register for Warsaw’s Yiddish summer program or apply for a scholarship, click here.
A message from Forverts editor Rukhl Schaechter
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forverts' 127-year legacy — and its bright future.
In the past, the goal of the Forverts was to Americanize its readers, to encourage them to learn English well and to acculturate to American society. Today, our goal is the reverse: to acquaint readers — especially those with Eastern European roots — with their Jewish cultural heritage, through the Yiddish language, literature, recipes and songs.
Our daily Yiddish content brings you new and creative ways to engage with this vibrant, living language, including Yiddish Wordle, Word of the Day videos, Yiddish cooking demos, new music, poetry and so much more.
— Rukhl Schaechter, Yiddish Editor
