Christa Whitney and Carole Renard will offer a virtual tour of the Wexler Oral History Project’s online collection and explain how to use the new enhanced features to the collection made possible through the 2017-2020 National Endowment for the Humanities grant that was completed in September 2020.

Carole Renard is the Wexler Oral History Project’s Coordinator. She began working with the Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project in 2016 as an intern processing interviews, and joined the full-time team in 2017 as the NEH Project Coordinator. She also conducts oral history interviews for the project. Carole holds a BA from Smith College in Anthropology and Jewish Studies and a MA from University College London in Jewish Studies.

Christa P. Whitney is the director of the Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project, a growing collection of more than 1,000 in-depth video interviews about Yiddish language and culture with people of all ages and backgrounds. Originally from Northern California, she became interested in Yiddish while studying comparative literature at Smith College. She is an alumna of the Yiddish Book Center’s Steiner Summer Yiddish Program and also completed a fellowship at the Center, during which she was instrumental in establishing the Wexler Oral History Project. For the past ten years, she has traveled near and far in search of Yiddish stories, gaining skills in filmmaking, video production, and archival preservation along the way.