New Yiddish Textbook Revolutionizes Yiddish-Language Learning

The Yiddish Book Center has announced publication of In eynem: The New Yiddish Textbook, a two-volume, fully illustrated textbook with multimedia resources and an interactive companion website that has been hailed as “revolutionary” by Yiddish professors and students alike.

Interest in Yiddish has grown by leaps and bounds over the past several decades and alongside that opportunities for teaching and learning the Yiddish language. This is what Asya Vaisman Schulman, director of the Yiddish Book Center’s Yiddish Language Institute and the lead author and editor of In eynem, set out to convey when she made the creation of a new, state-of-the-art Yiddish textbook her highest priority.

In eynem is built on the communicative approach to language learning used in most foreign language classes today. “With the ‘communicative approach,’ students use the language first and foremost to converse with classmates about their daily lives, to delve into texts and Yiddish culture, and to express themselves creatively,” says Schulman. “In the natural course of using the language, students end up figuring out the underlying grammatical rules that shape their utterances.” In guiding students through this process, In eynem plays a double role: conveying not just words and grammar but context and culture.

The textbook’s interactive companion website takes advantage of the latest technology and includes a wide variety of multimedia resources, such as film excerpts, oral history interviews with native Yiddish speakers, songs, clips of Yiddish radio shows, high resolution art images, and more—many drawn from the Yiddish Book Center’s digital collections—in addition to fun study tools like virtual clickable flashcards and exercises.

The website is a major game changer for both students and teachers, as is the textbook’s accompanying teacher guide, which provides detailed lesson plans and serves as a teacher training tool. Both of these components enhance and expand upon the myriad ways that users can engage with the material, making the textbook ideal for different types of learners—visual, auditory, kinesthetic—and for use in multiple learning environments.

The textbook, newly released from the Yiddish Book Center’s White Goat Press, is already being used in university and college classrooms across the country, including Harvard University, Columbia University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Toronto, as well as in community classes for adult learners and by individual learners of all ages. While the companion website was always a key component of In eynem, its online integration is well suited to remote teaching and learning, making it that much more of a boon to students and teachers working remotely.

In eynem: The New Yiddish Texbook, coauthored by Asya Vaisman Schulman and Jordan Brown with Mikhl Yashinsky, is available for purchase via shop.yiddishbookcenter.org. More information, including FAQs and user testimonials, can be found on the Center’s website at yiddishbookcenter.org/textbook.