Dr. Sara Feldman will be a lecturer in Yiddish Studies at UC Berkeley starting in Fall 2026. She is committed to practicing a communicative language pedagogy that cultivates not only literacy, but also fluency in Yiddish as a spoken language. Her courses explore the diversity of Yiddish culture old and new, traditional and radical, inviting students to contribute to it through their own projects such as “Undzer Mishpokhe: A Queer Yiddish Curriculum Supplement” (In geveb, April 2022).
Feldman previously taught Yiddish at Harvard University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She holds an M.A. in Judaic Studies and a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan, where she also was a postdoctoral fellow at the Frankel Institute. Her primary scholarly focus is on the interplay between Yiddish, Russian, and Hebrew language and literature in modern, secularizing Jewish culture. She is engaged, as a researcher and sometimes a participant, with other forms of contemporary Jewish culture including film and television, theater, and tango, especially as they relate to queer and gender studies, translation, multilingualism, ex-Orthodoxy, race, and migration. Feldman is co-editor of Black, Jewish, and Beautiful: Contemporary Blewish Voices (Syracuse University Press, 2026).
