Sponsored by the Joyce Z. and Jacob Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago
Farbindungen / פֿאַרבינדונגען is a virtual Yiddish Studies Conference which highlights the work of graduate students, undergraduates, and early career professionals.
The virtual 2026 Farbindungen Yiddish Studies Conference, ייִדיש בײַ דער ארבעט / Yiddish at Work, has concluded! Thank you to all who submitted a proposal for papers and workshops for this year's conference, thanks to our faculty moderators, and many thanks to our engaged and thoughtful audience members.
The 2026 keynote address will available on our YouTube page. Recordings of select 2026 conference presentations will be made public!
We would love to keep in touch. Join the Conference email list to hear about upcoming events, schedule, registration, and keynote announcements, and opportunities to join the Farbindungen Yiddish Conference Committee!
Miriam Udel is associate professor of German Studies and Judith London Evans Director of the Tam Institute of Jewish Studies at Emory University. She holds an AB in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and a PhD in Comparative Literature, both from Harvard University and was ordained in 2019 at Yeshivat Maharat. Udel is the author of Never Better!: The Modern Jewish Picaresque (University of Michigan Press) and Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children's Literature (Princeton UP, 2025) and editor and translator of Honey on the Page: A Treasury of Yiddish Children's Literature (NYU Press, 2020). Her research looks to children's literature and culture as a powerful force for political formation and a resource for the intergenerational transmission of culture, values, and ideology.
Caroline Luce is a Project Director with the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment's Memory Work initiative. She previously served as the Chief Curator of Mapping Jewish LA, a project of the UCLA Leve Center for Jewish Studies and is also chair of the Communications Committee of UC-AFT, representing librarians and non-tenured faculty at the University of California. Her research specialty is immigration, labor and working-class culture in the American west and her book, Yiddish in the Land of Sunshine: Race, Labor and Jewish Radicalism in Los Angeles will be published by NYU Press in 2026.
Farbindungen Program.pdfPast Conferences
You can watch past keynote panels from all past conferences and select presentations from our 2024 Shtumer alef: Beginnings, Silences, Partnerships and 2025 Bad Yiddish / בעד ייִדיש conferences on our YouTube page.