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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.

Working in An Aquarium: Modern Yiddish Culture in the Academy

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Marc Caplan - Professor of Yiddish Literature, Language, and Culture at Johns Hopkins University - describes two modern settings of Yiddish: Haredish communities and academia. He uses poet Avrom Sutzkever's analogy of an aquarium to describe the role of academia in transmitting Yiddish.

This is an excerpt from an oral history with Marc Caplan.

This excerpt is in Yiddish.

Marc Caplan was born in Alexandria, Louisiana in 1967.