Yidish in ale lender: Yiddish around the World, with Christa P. Whitney
Join us on Zoom | Thursday, February 6, 2025 @ 7:00 p.m. ET
Yiddish represents an international diasporic culture, found in many unexpected corners of the globe. In this presentation, Christa P. Whitney, director of the Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project, will explore the local influences of Yiddish culture based on her work capturing oral histories over the past fifteen years.
Christa’s talk will feature videos of Yiddish speakers from Vilna to Toronto, Melbourne to Birobidzhan, with several stops in between. These interviews reveal the global nature of Yiddish culture and how it adapts to its local context, illuminating the similarities among diverse communities of Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews across the globe.
Christa P. Whitney is the director of the Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project. Originally from Northern California, Christa discovered Yiddish while studying comparative literature, Jewish studies, and dance at Smith College. She has studied Yiddish at the Yiddish Book Center, Vilnius Yiddish Institute, and the Workers Circle. Through working at the Yiddish Book Center since 2009, she has traveled near and far in search of Yiddish stories, gained expertise in digital video archival processes, and produced several documentary films about Yiddish luminaries. Christa was named on the 2020 Forward 50 list of “people we needed in a year we definitely didn’t.” Her personal research focuses on Yiddish cultural transmission among descendants of Yiddish writers and Jewish history in the Samogitia region of Lithuania. Among other things, she is currently working toward an MBA from the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst.