Please join us on Monday, February 2, at 12:00 p.m. ET on Zoom for the 2026 Naomi Prawer Kadar Memorial Lecture, “Snow and Herring: The Work of Modern Yiddish Culture,” featuring Dr. Jordan Finkin.
In its millennium-long history, Yiddish has appeared in many guises, which have only proliferated in the modern world. With its fabric torn in the middle of the twentieth century, the field of Yiddish today confronts the perturbations of rupture and renewal. The stuff of Yiddish today is culture work. What does that work look like? How do contemporary practitioners navigate the tensions between the work of cultural preservation and creative reinvention? What visions for the future emerge from such efforts?
Dr. Jordan Finkin is the Library Director and Rare Book and Manuscript Librarian at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. A scholar of modern Yiddish literature, Dr. Finkin is the author of several scholarly monographs as well as numerous academic essays and articles. A productive literary translator from Yiddish, German, and French, Dr. Finkin is also the founder and director of Naydus Press, a non-profit publisher of Yiddish literature in English translation.
Supported by the generosity of the Naomi Foundation.
The Naomi Prawer Kadar Annual Memorial Lecture provides an opportunity for the public to explore topics of Yiddish language and linguistics, the history of Yiddish, Yiddish children’s literature and education. The lecture is supported by the Naomi Prawer Kadar Foundation, Inc., which is dedicated to reimagining education. The Naomi Foundation champions Yiddish, Naomi’s lifelong passion, as a vibrant, rich, and contemporary language. The Naomi Foundation advances the teaching and learning of Yiddish, particularly in academic and scholarly settings.