Faculty
Faculty of 2025
Dr. Yaad Biran
Yaad Biran received his Ph. D. from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His research examines the travels of Yiddish writers to Palestine in the first half of the twentieth century. He teaches Yiddish language and literature in Haifa University and in Beth Shalom Aleichem in Tel Aviv.
Biran is a writer and a screenwriter. His short stories collection "Laughing with Lizards" (Hebrew) was published by Zmora- Bitan in 2017. He composes the programs for "Esther's Cabaret" - A Yiddish cabaret born in Beth Shalom Aleichem that plays on different stages in Israel.
Biran is also a licensed tour-guide and the creator of the tours project "Yiddish in the Streets" in which he guides tours in the footsteps of Yiddish culture in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
Professor Justin Cammy – Smith College
Justin Cammy holds a Ph.D. in Yiddish Studies from Harvard University.
Cammy has offered lectures on Yiddish literature and culture at our summer program since 2007, and is also a regular faculty member at the Steiner Summer Yiddish Program at the Yiddish Book Center. His translation of Avrom Sutzkever’s memoir of the Vilna Ghetto appeared won the Leviant Prize in Yiddish Studies from the Modern Language Association.
Mr. Eliezer Niborski- University of Lund
Eliezer Niborski was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and grew up in Paris, France, in a Yiddish speaking family. He studied Mathematics as an undergraduate and a graduate student and spent several years teaching Math in high schools in France. Since 2004, he has lived in Jerusalem, where he takes part in a bibliographical project lead by Beth Shalom Aleichem in conjunction with the National Library of Israel: the Index to Yiddish Periodicals. During the last fifteen years he has regularly participated as a Yiddish teacher in intensive summer programs for Yiddish language and literature, in Tel Aviv, New York , Vilna and Berlin.
Dr. Miriam Trinh - Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Dr. Miriam Trinh was born in Poland, grew up in Germany and immigrated to Israel at the age of 19. She completed her undergraduate studies in Philosophy and Yiddish at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, obtained her Master's degree in Yiddish literature at the Universities of Paris-Sorbonne and Strasbourg (France) and her Ph.D. at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
She has taught Yiddish language and literature at different levels in Paris, Vilna, Strassbourg, Oxford, New York and in Tel Aviv. She held the position of a postdoctoral fellow with the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD in 2014-2015. Her fields of research are Yiddish literature during the Holocaust and the multilingual Jewish literary reaction in Europe to the rise of Nazism. She is currently teaching Yiddish at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is - together with Eliezer Niborski - the founder of YO - Yiddish-Ort, a place for Yiddish and Yiddish Enthusiasts, which is based in Jerusalem and offers worldwide Yiddish online activities.
Prof. Samuel Kassow- Trinity College
Samuel Kassow holds a Ph.D from Princeton and recently retired from Trinity College.
He is widely acknowledged as one of the leading cultural historians of Yiddish-speaking European Jewry in the world
He has published several books on Russian and Polish Jewish history including the award-winning Who Will Write Our History, a study of Emanuel Ringelblum and the Oyneg Shabes archive in the Warsaw ghetto.
Mr. Daniel Birnbaum- Tel-Aviv University
Daniel Birnbaum holds a B.A. in Liberal Arts from Oberlin College and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Birnbaum has been a Yiddish instructor at Tel Aviv University since 2007, teaching both in the framework of the International Summer Program as well as the School of Languages during the academic year. He developed an original Yiddish textbook for first and second year students, as well as an online Yiddish curriculum.
Prof. Marc Caplan- Heinrich Heine University
Marc Caplan received his PhD in comparative literature from New York University.
He is the author of Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin: A Fugitive Modernism and How Strange the Change: Language, Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms.
Mr. Mikhl Yashinsky
Actor, director, and playwright. Has performed off-Broadway and directed operas at large regional houses.
Yashinsky is also a scholar and teacher of Yiddish language, culture, and theatre.
