Mentor relationships are crucial to the retention, success, and wellbeing of scholars throughout their academic careers. Mentoring provides professional support, offers guidance about norms and behaviors that can help newer scholars navigate within the field, and fosters a community across rank that celebrates and encourages emerging scholars and their accomplishments. Mentorship is a crucial component of academic work, requiring time and emotional labor as well as expertise both about the content of the field of academic study and about the community of practice.

This round table considers the work of mentorship in the context of Yiddish Studies. In Yiddish Studies, the transfer of knowledge across the generations bears the weight of the differing relationships scholars may have to the language and to the field, as heritage speakers or speakers of an acquired language, as Jews and non-Jews, Hasidim, ex-Hasidim, and non-Hasidim, and from a variety of gender, socio-economic, and political positionalities. For many Yiddish scholars, the language is a source of identity and community as well as a subject of study. How do, or can, established Yiddish Studies scholars work to help emerging scholars navigate both the field of study and its community? What can they do to connect meaningfully with emerging scholars in service of their goals and aspirations? This conversation will include both a discussion of existing best practices and envisioning future mentorship practices that could benefit the scholarly community as a whole.

Rebecca (Rivke) Margolis, a professor in Monash University’s Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation, will speak to mentorship in the context of international immersive Yiddish summer program as well as strategies to support students in the transition from language learners to graduate students in the field of Yiddish Studies.

Lily Kahn, Professor of Hebrew and Jewish Languages in the University College London, Dept of Hebrew & Jewish Studies, will speak to mentorship in the context of her work in linguistics and endangered language revitilization.

Miriam Udel, associate professor of German Studies and Judith London Evans Director of the Tam Institute of Jewish Studies at Emory University, will speak about mentorship with her undergraduate students and her broader learning community as both a scholar and a Darshanit. She will also discuss the generosity of mentors she has learned from.

Dovid Braun, who has taught all levels of Yiddish language at YIVO's intensive summer program since 1990 at Columbia University and New York University, and has taught Yiddish language, Yiddish linguistics, and/or general linguistics as a faculty member of Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, will talk about his mentorship among Yiddish language students and instructors.

Agnieszka Legutko is the Senior Lecturer in Yiddish and Director of the Yiddish Language Program at Columbia University. She will discuss her interests in content-based foreign language teaching as it relates to her mentorship of students, including graduate students teaching Yiddish language in her program, as well as mentorship in other areas of her scholarship.

Tahneer Oksman (moderator), Associate Professor in the Departments of Writing, Literature, and Language, as well as Communication and Media Arts, at Marymount Manhattan College will lead a discussion grounded in the conversations that have emerged out of the volume she co-edited: Feminists Reclaim Mentorship (2023).