Israel’s Ben-Gurion University To Establish Yiddish Studies Center

By JTA January 17, 2010

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev is establishing Israel’s newest center for Yiddish studies.

David G. Roskies, professor of Yiddish literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, has been tapped to head the new center, located in Beersheba.

The center will host workshops and colloquia, publish forgotten Yiddish works, and collaborate with Yiddish research centers in Tel Aviv, Paris and Amherst, Mass.

The center, which university officials says is “catering to the increasing interest in Yiddish culture in Israel,” aims to enable a new generation of Yiddish scholars to continue academic studies of the language and its literature into the 21st century.

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