2022–23 Yiddish Pedagogy Fellows


Alona Bach is a PhD student in MIT's Program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society, where she studies the interwar intersections of electricity and Yiddish. This year she will be a lecturer in Yiddish at Brandeis University, as well as a 2022-23 Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellow, translating Jane Rose’s 1918 one-act drama Nit mit alemen. Outside of the classroom and archive, she moonlights as a theater-maker and an illustrator.

Annabel Cohen is a second-year PhD student in modern Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Her focus is on the Yiddish-speaking Jewish left, and specifically on Jewish volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. She has been teaching Yiddish since 2019 with the London-based language school Babel’s Blessing. Last summer she taught on the Yiddish Summer Weimar language program, and this year she will be teaching an online beginners language workshop as a Freed Fellow at KlezKanada.

Lucas Fiszman is a Yiddishist and a lover of Yiddish, which he started learning in 2007 when he was 26 years old. A few years later, he had to start teaching due to lack of teachers. Since then he has had the opportunity to learn in different programs around the world, with wonderful teachers whom he tries to imitate in his own lessons when he teaches in Buenos Aires and Montevideo. As a linguist, he is interested in the fields of language contact and language policy.

Eve Jochnowitz was a fellow at the Frankel Institute of Advanced Jewish Studies at the University of Michigan and currently teaches Yiddish at the YIVO institute and the Workers Circle. She worked for several years as a cook and baker in New York and received her PhD on Jewish culinary ethnography in the department of performance studies from New York University. She has lectured on the physical world in Jewish tradition, religion, and ritual and the body in Yiddish performance and popular culture. Dr Jochnowitz is the Chocolate Lady.

Katerina Kuznetsova is a Berlin-based teacher of Yiddish language and literature. She holds an MA in Yiddish studies from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Apart from teaching, she organizes Yiddish cultural events in Berlin as a member of the Yiddish.Berlin group, and regularly writes about Yiddish life in Berlin for In geveb. Besides Yiddish, Katerina speaks Russian, Hebrew, Polish, English, German, and Spanish.

Miriam Schwartz is a PhD student in the department for Germanic languages and literatures, and in the collaborative program with the Anne Tanenbaum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on Yiddish and Hebrew literature at the beginning of the 20th century. Before coming to Toronto, she earned her BA in literature and MA in Yiddish literature, both at Tel Aviv University.

Oksana Sikorska is a teacher of the Yiddish language in Lviv at Ukrainian Catholic University. She teaches online courses for beginners. She graduated from Ukrainian Catholic University with an MA in history. Her research topic was Ukrainian-Jewish relations in Galicia in the first half of the 20th century.

Adrien Smith Alentseva holds a PhD in Slavic languages and literatures from Stanford University. Her research looks at Yiddish speech style in Russian literature and performance in the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as at Soviet science fiction. She has taught Russian and Yiddish languages and literatures at Stanford, where she also leads the Yiddish reading group. She earned her BA from Wellesley College and MPhil from Cambridge University. In 2021, she participated in the Yiddish Book Center's Yiddish Pedagogy Practicum and taught beginners at the Steiner Summer Yiddish Program. She also teaches in the Yiddish Book Center's online In eynem course. As a 2021-2022 Translation Fellow at the Yiddish Book Center, Adrien translated a selection of short works of fiction by emerging Yiddish writers, including Aleksandra Polyan, Etl Niborski, Shiri Shapira, Raphael Halff, and Emil Kalin.

Marianne (Mirl) Tatom teaches Yiddish to adults online through several organizations (Congregation Beth Shalom in Seattle; Edlavitch JCC in Washington, DC; and Northern California Workers Circle). She was inspired to learn Yiddish after meeting a beloved aunt in Antwerp and loves connecting with other Yiddishists worldwide. She lives in Seattle, WA, with her miniature long-haired dachshund, Menachem Mendel, who frequently makes an appearance in her classes. She has a PhD in music theory (and a book on Radiohead) and is also a freelance academic editor.

Tetyana (Tanya) Yakovleva is vice president and a Yiddish lecturer of the Yiddish Arts and Academics Association of North America (YAAANA) and a literature lecturer at YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. She studied comparative literature, classical, Slavic, Jewish, and media studies at the Universities of Kharkiv, Regensburg, Bari, and San Diego and received her PhD in Slavic and Jewish studies from the University of Regensburg in 2019. Tanya is currently writing a book about Odessa 1905 in Russian Jewish literature and is developing a new project about Kharkiv as a center of Russian, Ukrainian, and Yiddish Modernism in the 1920s-30s.