Please join us in sending letters. Share this campaign as widely as possible!
Dear friends and community, We are concerned Jewish community members, and need your help to fight for the future of Yiddish language and culture. Harvard’s Yiddish program is under threat, and we need our communities and anyone interested in Yiddish to send this letter demanding that the University change course. With Harvard’s policy of arbitrary term limits or “time caps,” it has cycled through Yiddish instructors for decades and forced them out when they hit their stride, repeatedly destroying the small program along with them. Its Yiddish students periodically endure a full reboot of the program they have come to love and rely on. Harvard shockingly denied tenure to its only Yiddish literature professor last year, and now its “time caps” will force out its two remaining Yiddish faculty: its only Yiddish instructor, and its only Holocaust historian. The recently formed Harvard Academic Workers union has been attempting to negotiate a fair contract and an immediate end to time caps, but the University has chosen instead to stall negotiations, impose austerity, and cut programs. Harvard refused every opportunity to fix these problems before they culminated in the current crisis for Yiddish. This is part of a broader trend in higher education to impose austerity and dismantle programs under the guise of surviving “trying times,” and we must object and say that this is destruction, not survival. If Harvard, the richest university in the world, cannot support Yiddish and other small fields, who will? We must stand up for our friends and colleagues in Yiddish and in every other endangered language, culture, and program at Harvard and across higher education. Please join us in sending our objections to Harvard’s President, Provost, and Deans. Share this campaign as widely as possible in your networks, synagogues, and schools. We hope that every single person concerned about Yiddish and Jewish culture will see this and speak up for ours and every community that is affected.
