Ot Azoy! Yiddish Language and Culture
Crash Course
Summer Course 2011
Sunday 14 August – Friday 19 August
SOAS University of London
A very inspiring week with outrageously good teachers and a great variety of good people participating.
Stressful, overwhelming, difficult, challenging, emotional, fun, exciting, interesting, absorbing, enjoyable, friendly, culturally grounded, intense, rewarding and fulfilling.
Very emotional and enriching. A link into the language and culture of my father and of the last/ destroyed culture. Finding spiritual responses to the music that I didn’t know I had.
I am not at all educated in Judaism. I was even very separated from it. As a first generation child re the war where my parents were murdered. Yet practising seriously Buddhism for 25 years opened my heart paradoxically to return to Yiddishkeit!
To register for Ot Azoy!, please download and use the 2011 registration form
Read what Murray Glickman felt about Ot Azoy! 2010
'I had attended Ot Azoy twice before and enjoyed it immensely both times. However, I didn’t make it to last year’s course and it was with some trepidation that I booked my place this year. For one thing, I hadn’t spoken, read or even heard any Yiddish worthy of note for at least eighteen months. It felt as if whatever Yiddish knowledge I might still have retained was shut away inside a tightly sealed box somewhere in my brain. Secondly, I certainly did remember, vividly, the frenetic pace of the courses I had attended, and I seriously wondered how well my constitution, now that bit older, would stand up to the strains of the week ...'
Ot
Azoy is an unbelieveable opportunity to begin reading and speaking Yiddish
in just one week, opening the doors to a great culture. By the end of
the week you will even find yourself dreaming in Yiddish! Whether you
are a complete beginner or already an advanced Yiddish student, Ot Azoy!,
as well as being hugely enjoyable, will give you the tools to make a solid
start and also to progress rapidly.
Our specially chosen teachers (pictured above) led by Helen Khayele Beer (Course Director: University College London) with Yiddish diva Shura Lipovsky (Amsterdam) Heather Valencia (Scotland), Lily Kahn and Sonia Pinkusowitz (Belgium) ( not pictured) will help you learn not only with superb language tuition but also through song, film, conversation classes and drama workshops.
Book early. (Daily 9.30 - 6.00). To register for Ot Azoy!, please download and use the 2011 registration form
It is with great saddness that we mourn the loss of our dear Pesakh Fiszman, who has been a stalwart of the faculty of Ot Azoy since its inception, who died in January 2009.
Structure of the day
9:30am - 1pm Yiddish language classes - four levels
2:15pm - 6:00pm Conversation, writing, song, films drama
Helen Khayele Beer (Oxford) Ot Azoy! Course Director
Helen Khayele Beer taught Yiddish at the Oxford
Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and is a veteran of Yiddish Intensive
Summer Courses in Oxford, Brussels, Paris and is the Course Director of
Ot Azoy! London. She is the William Margulies Lecturer in Yiddish, Department
of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, University College London. She produces
an annual Yiddish Purim Shpil with students at UCL and produced a full
length Yiddish play in 2002. She is the Director of Yiddish Studies for
the JMI International Forum for Yiddish Culture.
Shura Lipovsky (Amsterdam: Yiddish song)
This is Shura's fourth year as Director of Yiddish song school. She has
a an incredible folk voice and when she sings you just cant help smiling
- she is very magnetic. Shura is a great 
teacher,
passing on the Yiddish song tradition aurally giving her students a deep
insight into Eastern European Jewish song traditions.
Shura Lipovsky is one of the best-known singers of Yiddish song in Europe. She has performed and taught also in Russia, the USA and Canada. She studied singing at the Rotterdam conservatory and she had a folk dance education, after which she specialised in Judaic mysticism and dance. She is widely appreciated for her teaching of the Yiddish song repertoire combined with contextual study of the history and background of the composers and poets. She conducts masterclasses for singers and workshops in Chasidic dances, songs and stories.
Heather Valencia, formerly a lecturer in German, is now an Honorary
Research Fellow at the University of Stirling . She bega
n
studying Yiddish in the mid 1980s and in 1991 completed a doctoral thesis
on the poetry of Abraham Sutzkever. She has taught on Yiddish summer programmes
in Oxford , Germany and Sweden , and has regular classes in Glasgow and
Edinburgh. She has published on Abraham Sutzkever, Yiddish writers in
WeimarGermany, and Yiddish writing in London . She edited a bilingual
edition of the London Yiddish play The King of Lampedusa and has
produced an anthology of Yiddish literature for students entitled Mit
groys fargenign / With Great Pleasure. Her English translation of
Esther Singer Kreitman's novel Diamonds appeared in 2009.
Click here for further details.
Sonia Pinkusowitz (Belgium) is a much loved Ot Azoy! teacher
and is one of the most sought after and popular teachers of Yiddish in
Europe. A mainstay of Ot Azoy! her teaching is enjoyed by young and old
who find her methods extremely engaging and effective.
Lily Kahn has become a regular Ot Azoy! Faculty member, known for her clarity and
her ability to make learning 
Yiddish a lot of fun.
She teaches Yiddish at the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, University College London. She participated in the Yiddish Educator Seminar at Vilnius University in 2005 and has recently taught on the Medem Bibliotek's intensive 3-week Yiddish summer course in Paris.
In 2002 she appeared in Khayele Beer's production of the Yiddish play Jacob Jacobson and in 2006 she co-produced the UCL Purimshpil. She has over eight years' language teaching experience including a post at the British Foreign Office. She is currently completing her PhD research at UCL on the language of Eastern European Jewish fiction.
modified December 6, 2010
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