Robert Adler-Peckerar

Cultural and Communicative Competence in Yiddish:
Strategies for Teaching a Non-Territorial Language

The position of non-territorial languages in the
academy is a complicated one. An ever-diminishing
population of native speakers available to
students, a lack of contemporary cultural
materials, and an abundance of outdated teaching
materials make the situation of Yiddish even more
problematic. My project is an attempt to devise
new approaches to developing Yiddish
communicative competence, with an emphasis on
interactive and new media to teach a language
that was once the vernacular of the majority of
Jews in the world but, in the aftermath of
genocide, has come to be taught as a written (and
not a spoken) language.

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