Jordan Kutzik (Chair) started learning Yiddish when he was about 16 in order to research the Holocaust from the perspective of Jewish survivor’s accounts and memorial books. After beginning to learn the language, however, he found that he was far more interested in the role of Yiddish in Jewish life and in the wealth of cultural and religious information, both through people and the written word, made available through it. Since discovering that the language, despite what he had grown up believing, is far from dead, he has dedicated much of his spare time to aiding networking among young Yiddish speakers. He is particularly interested in spreading resources to aid Yiddish speakers in raising Yiddish speaking children and is in the beginning stages of creating a multilingual website to that end. He joined Yugntruf in 2007 after being contacted by Arele Viswanath and became a board member in early 2008. He is a graduate of Rutgers University who majored in Spanish translation and Jewish studies and completed his undergraduate thesis on contemporary Yiddish language children’s pedagogical materials in the Hasidic World. He worked for two years as a fellow at the Yiddish Book Center working on its audio collections. He is currently a staff writer at the Yiddish Forward.
