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.

Speaking Hebrew in My Sleep

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Michel Araten, banking/operations researcher by profession, discusses the Zionist youth programming he participated in as a child and recalls one instance at summer camp in which he was rewarded for speaking Hebrew while fast asleep.

This is an excerpt from an oral history with Michel Araten.

This excerpt is in English.

Michel Araten was born in Casablanca, Morocco in 1940.

Other video highlights from this oral history

They Spoke What I Swore was German: Growing Up in a Multilingual Home

1 min 29 sec

"Michalina, Daughter of Israel": My Great-Aunt's Abduction by the Catholic Church

10 min 42 sec

Fleeing the Vichy Government in Morocco to Manhattan: My Father, the "Undocumented Alien"

2 min 20 sec

Explaining Baseball to an Egyptian General, and Other Encounters From My Travels in the Middle East in 1947

1 min 54 sec

Witnessing the Aliyah of Soviet Jewry

1 min 46 sec

More information about this oral history excerpt

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