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.

Not Knowing the Language, but Knowing of the Language: Speaking Biblical Hebrew in Israel

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Marcin Wodzinski, Director of the Centre for the Culture and Languages of the Jews at University of Wrocław, on the difficulty of speaking a language learned from Jewish tombstones and the Book of Ruth.

This is an excerpt from an oral history with Marcin Wodzinski.

This excerpt is in English.

Marcin Wodzinski was born in Swidnicy, Poland in 1966.

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This interview is part of the Yiddish in the Academy: scholars, language instructors, and students series.

Other video highlights from this oral history

Covered with Letters You Can't Understand: Censorship of Jewish Topics in Post-1968 Communist Poland

2 min 46 sec

Underground Publishing and Distribution: Academia as a Haven for Jewish Studies Discourse in Communist Poland

1 min 57 sec

Gender, Identity Building, and Culture Wars: Jewish History and Yiddish Studies in Poland

2 min 30 sec

Possible Jewish Origins, "Alternative Christianity" and Identity Building: Why Polish Students Choose Jewish Studies

5 min 34 sec

"Maybe the Only Museum of this Kind in the World": The Museum of the History of the Polish Jews in Warsaw

2 min 52 sec

Finding "Parnose" (a Career) In Jewish Studies in Poland

3 min 4 sec

The Effect of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Nobel Prize on Polish Translations of Yiddish Literature

1 min 3 sec

More information about this oral history excerpt

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