The Yiddish Book Center's

Wexler Oral History Project

A growing collection of in-depth interviews with people of all ages and backgrounds, whose stories about the legacy and changing nature of Yiddish language and culture offer a rich and complex chronicle of Jewish identity.

How Would His Parents Would Have Reacted to His Conversion?: Gabriel Weinreich Theorizes

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Gabriel Weinreich - professor emeritus of physics, Episcopal priest, and son of Yiddishist Max Weinreich - reflects on what his parents would have thought about him converting to Christianity and becoming a priest.

This is an excerpt from an oral history with Gabriel Weinreich.

This excerpt is in Yiddish.

Gabriel Weinreich was born in Vilna, Lithuania in 1928.

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This interview is part of the Beyond the Books: Yiddish writers and their descendants series.

Other video highlights from this oral history

Vilna in the 1930s: We Lived in Yiddish

2 min 35 sec

Walking through Vilna in 1996

1 min 52 sec

Gabriel Weinreich Remembers His Grandparents' Farm in Niemez

4 min 30 sec

Visiting Max Weinreich in the YIVO Building in Vilna

1 min 25 sec

The Weinreich's Attitude Toward Judaism and Religious Jews

5 min 44 sec

Max Weinreich and Uriel Weinreich: Two Equal Colleagues

2 min 27 sec

Speaking Yiddish Is Like Being Part of an Extinct Species

5 min 35 sec

More information about this oral history excerpt

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