Each year, the Frankel Institute for advanced Judaic Studies invites a dozen scholars to Ann Arbor to pursue research projects on a general theme. They meet regularly with each other to discuss their work, interact with faculty and students, and enrich the intellectual life of the community. The theme year for 2010-11 is Jewish languages.

Scholars from history, literature and religious studies departments in Israel and North America will consider how the questions and implications of Jewish dialects motivate approaches to narrative and literary form, biblical and Talmudic studies, literary modernism, multilingualism and translation, and more.

This semester’s group joins head fellows Joshua L. Miller (“Jewish Language Politics and Multilingual Literary Idioms”) and Anita Norich (“Yiddish-English Translation”), both from U-M. Miller is an associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literature and Norich is a professor of English language and literature and Judaic studies in the Department of English Language and Literature.

The new fellows are:

• David Aaron, Hebrew Union College, “Language, Holiness, and Identity: The Concept of l’shon haqodesh [the Holy Tongue] from the Late Biblical Era through the Closing of Talmudic Era Literatures”

• Andrew “Marc” Caplan, Johns Hopkins University, “The Weight of an Epoch: Yiddish Literature and German Culture in the Interwar Era”

• Benjamin Hary, Emory University, “The History of Judeo-Arabic”

• Richard Kalmin, Jewish Theological Seminary, “Aramaic Targumim in Jewish and Christian Mesopotamia”

• Avraham Novershtern, Hebrew University, “The Image of Yiddish in the American Yiddish Discourse”