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.

“I Have to Tell You, Your Yiddish is Very Strange”: Speaking Yiddish with Hassidim

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Miriam Udel, assistant professor of German Studies and Jewish Studies at Emory University, shares her experiences trying to speak to her "fossilized, caught-in-amber YIVO (standardized, academic) Yiddish" with native Yiddish speakers in Brooklyn and the Borscht Belt.

This is an excerpt from an oral history with Miriam Udel.

This excerpt is in English and Yiddish.

Miriam Udel was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts in 1976.