In the fall semester of 2015, the University of Michigan ran one undergraduate Yiddish class. It had eleven students, six of whom were graduate students from the Slavic department auditing for fun. In the fall of 2025, the same department ran four undergraduate Yiddish classes plus a graduate seminar on Yiddish modernist poetry. Enrollment across the slate: 137.
That arc — call it the “Michigan curve” — has repeated, with local variation, at four other American universities: Indiana, Rutgers, Maryland, and Wisconsin–Madison. Columbia has a slightly different version of it; the University of Texas at Austin started a Yiddish minor in 2024 that filled in its first registration window.
What’s interesting is the composition of the students.
Roughly a quarter are heritage students — kids whose grandparents spoke Yiddish at home, who arrived at university wanting to recover something they remember from childhood. That number has been roughly constant.
The growth is in the other three quarters. About a third are students of literature or theatre coming to Yiddish through Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Bashevis Singer, or the contemporary translations that have come out of the Yiddish Book Center’s translation fellowship program. Another fifteen percent are linguistics majors interested in Yiddish as a case study in a stateless language with a fascinating syntactic borrow-pattern. And the remainder are, broadly, students who took one class because the description was interesting and re-enrolled because the cohort was tight.
Faculty across the five programs report the same thing: the language is being learned more for reading than for speaking. The students want to read Singer in the original. They want to read the Yiddish-language press coverage of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire. They want to read the contemporary Yiddish-language daily out of Jerusalem.
The fluency question is, accordingly, more open than the enrollment numbers suggest. Yiddish reading proficiency is rising. Spoken fluency outside the Hasidic world is, as it has been for fifty years, a separate conversation — and one that the academic programs are mostly choosing to leave to the immersion-camp circuit.
What the academic programs are providing is something the community hasn’t had in a generation: a generation of young adults outside the Hasidic mainstream who can read the literature in the language it was written in. The implications for translation, for archive work, and for cultural transmission are quietly enormous and will take another decade to fully read.