From the Pages of Yedies

Aug 8, 2014

by ROBERTA NEWMAN

The June 1967 issue of Yedies reported on the untimely death of Uriel Weinreich, noted linguist and lexicographer, in whose name YIVO established its intensive summer Yiddish immersion program. Forty-seven years later, his legacy continues in other ways, too: in the Yiddish-English English-Yiddish dictionary that saw publication a year after he died; in his textbook, College Yiddish, first published in 1949, and still in use today; and in a number of scholarly works on linguistics considered to be fundamental to the field as a whole, including Language in Contact, first published in 1953 and recently reissued in a new edition in 2011.

Uriel Weinreich's papers are in the YIVO Archives as RG 552. In 2007, YIVO held a day-long symposium to mark the 40th anniversary of his death, "Uriel Weinreich: The Father of Yiddish Scholarship in America."