Columbia's Yiddish Studies Program is directed by Jeremy Dauber, an Associate Professor of Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture. Professor Dauber received his doctorate in modern Jewish studies from the University of Oxford in 1999, where he wrote his dissertation on the usage of Biblical and rabbinic texts by the Hebrew and Yiddish writers of the Haskala, or the Jewish Enlightenment. His research interests include the Haskala, the origins of modern Jewish literature, and the development of the Yiddish theater. He is the author of Antonio's Devils: Writers of the Jewish Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern Jewish Literature (Stanford University Press, 2004) and is currently collaborating with Professor Joel Berkowitz of SUNY-Albany on a series of translations of modern Yiddish plays.

Miriam Hoffman is the full-time lecturer in Yiddish, with responsibility for most undergraduate instruction in Yiddish language and culture. Born in the Soviet Union in the years before World War II when her parents fled Poland, she possesses first-hand knowledge of east European Jewish culture. Educated in the Yiddish secular high school of New York and the Jewish Teachers Seminary, she received an M.A. in Yiddish Studies at Columbia. An experienced teacher of Yiddish from the introductory to the advanced level, she brings to Columbia unique materials and methods for teaching university students. An active playwright, director, and producer of theater in Yiddish and English, Miriam Hoffman is also director of the Joseph Papp Yiddish Theater and a weekly columnist for the Yiddish newspaper Forverts.

The Interdepartmental Committee on Yiddish Studies

Michael Stanislawski (chair), Nathan Miller Professor of East European Jewish History

Jeremy Dauber, Associate Professor and Director of Yiddish Studies, Department of Germanic Languages

David Weiss-Halivni, Lucius Littauer Professor of Religion

Marvin I. Herzog, Atran Professor Emeritus of Yiddish Studies (ex officio)

Andreas Huyssen, Villard Professor of Germanic Languages and Comparative Literature

Dan Miron, Leonard B. Kaye Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature

Yosef H. Yerushalmi, Salo Wittmayer Baron Professor of Jewish History, Culture, and Society

Yiddish Studies Advisory Council

Elie Wiesel, Honorary Chairman
Molly Freedman
Robert Freedman
David Gildin
Melvin Gold
Sherry Gold
Bel Kaufman
Laurence Newman
Harold Ostroff
Robert Pollack
I. Bernard Weinstein