Columbia's reputed "traditional" core curriculum was one of the things that drew me to the school. Throughout Lit Hum and CC, I fully appreciated that we were engaging with texts that were at the base of our culture. I believe it was this solid foundation in classic areas that lead me to create and complete a new, non-traditional major at Columbia College: Yiddish Studies. Knowing that I had background in mainstream Western thinking gave me the freedom to devote time to such a specific, non-mainstream area.

I now direct a program to teach children the Yiddish language. The core curriculum and the serious dialogues about traditional texts that we had at Columbia have contributed enormously to my methodology in designing curricula and teaching Yiddish. It is the first time in the last fifty years that children have been exposed to this language and culture. The groundbreaking, totally new work I am involved in now would not be possible without the training in Homer, Aristotle, and Plato that I got at Columbia College.