Bossie Dubowick YiddishSchool: Faculty

Language Faculty

Sonia Bloom received her BA from Oberlin College in 2018, with majors in comparative literature, Hispanic studies, and Latin American studies, along with a concentration in literary translation. She has since worked as a museum educator, language teacher, and translator, and has studied Yiddish language and culture through summer intensives and weekly classes at YIVO, Buenos Aires’s IWO, YAAANA, and the Yiddish Book Center. She was a teaching assistant for the YIVO-Weinreich Program in 2021 and the Yiddish Book Center’s Steiner Summer Yiddish Program in 2022. After completing her year as the Center’s Yiddish Education and Translation Initiatives fellow in July, Sonia is staying on staff as a Yiddish Education Specialist, assisting in teacher training, program planning, and activity design.

Asya Vaisman Schulman is the director of the Yiddish Language Institute at the Yiddish Book Center and the author of In eynem, a new Yiddish textbook for beginners that relies on the communicative approach to language learning. Before joining the Center, Schulman taught Yiddish at Indiana University, where she was also the project manager of AHEYM, the Archives of Historical and Ethnographic Yiddish Memories. Schulman has taught both extracurricular and for-credit Yiddish courses at Harvard, Columbia, the New York Workmen’s Circle, and Gann Academy in Waltham, Massachusetts. Schulman holds a BA from Barnard College, Columbia University, and a PhD in Yiddish from Harvard. Schulman's PhD research was on the Yiddish songs and singing practices of contemporary Hasidic women.

Workshop Leaders & Performers

Members of the critically acclaimed klezmer band Mamaliga will be featured in a concert and a dance workshop at YiddishSchool. After the 2021 release of their debut full-length album, Dos Gildn Bletl, Mamaliga has performed at Yiddish New York, KlezKanada, Yiddish Summer Weimar, The Boston Festival of New Jewish Music, and KlezCummington and was awarded best original klezmer composition at the 2021 Bubbe Awards in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Mamaliga debuted their full-length original score of the recently restored silent film Broken Barriers (1919) at the 2022 Toronto Jewish Film Festival.

Performing original music composed by Mamaliga will be Adah Hetko (vocals), Mattias Kaufmann (accordion), Rebecca Mac (violin), and Giulia Haible (cello). A Yiddish dance workshop led by Asya Vaisman Schulman will feature Rachel Leader on fiddle and Ariel Shapiro on accordion.

David Mazower is the chief curator and writer of the Center’s landmark permanent exhibition, Yiddish: A Global Culture. Prior to joining the Center, he was a senior staff journalist with BBC World News in London and deputy curator of the Jewish Museum London. He writes for the Digital Yiddish Theatre Project and is the author of Yiddish Theatre in London. His dozens of published articles include several on his great-grandfather, Yiddish writer Sholem Asch, as well as explorations of Yiddish theater and popular culture, British Jewish history, Jewish art, and the Yiddish salon of Bronx poet Bertha Kling. He graduated in history from Cambridge University and has a postgraduate diploma in Russian. David will lead a workshop about Yiddish: A Global Culture at YiddishSchool.