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.
Yiddish's Vanishing Act from a Family's Oral Landscape
Watch now:
Joan Rudd, sculptor and Yiddish activist, speaks about how the trauma of World War II prompted her family to use French or Russian instead of Yiddish, and how she later found out that the French she'd inherited from her parents was heavily inflected by Yiddish syntax and style.
This is an excerpt from an oral history with Joan Rudd.
This excerpt is in English.
Joan Rudd was born in New York, New York in 1948.
This interview is part of the Yiddish and the Arts: musicians, actors, and artists series.
