On Wednesday, November 28, select faculty members of SAR High School were treated to a presentation by Lesley Yalen, the education program manager of the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts. During this lively and engaging discussion, Yalen introduced the staff to a number of the programs the center runs, whetting their appetites for what many hope will ultimately become a lasting relationship between the school and this admirable organization. The Yiddish Book Center is a nonprofit organization working to recover, regenerate and celebrate Yiddish and modern Jewish literature and culture.

The center runs both week long, college level summer programs for high school students, as well as more intensive month long seminars for teachers looking to bring the areas of study in which the center specializes into their classrooms. These exciting programs, offered free of charge in keeping with the center’s idealistic orientation, offer a dive into a world of learning of deep significance to the Jewish community. Additionally, in recent years, the center has worked to develop a website with educational resources for interested teachers, with modules ranging from specific seminal texts of Jewish literature, to important authors, to central themes. This web site has the potential to redefine the role Jewish literature plays in high school education. SAR’s time with Yalen was informative and inspiring and the school hopes to make extensive use of the materials which she introduced in the SAR classrooms for years to come.