Dr. Sheva Zucker
Dr. Sheva Zucker served as the executive director of the League for Yiddish and editor-in-chief of its publication Afn Shvel, from 2005-2020. She edited, with the assistance of Anna Gawenda of Melbourne, Australia, Sholem Aleichem’s Motl Peyse dem khazns — Abridged and Adapted for Students, League for Yiddish/Sholem Aleichem College, 2017. She also initiated and was the producer of the film series “Worlds within Worlds: Conversations with Yiddish Writers” produced by the League for Yiddish.
She is the author of the popular textbooks Yiddish: An Introduction to the Language, Literature and Culture, Vols. I and II, which have been translated into Portuguese and Italian. From 1988 until 2004 she was Lecturer in Yiddish and Jewish Literature at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. She has taught and lectured on Yiddish culture and Jewish literature on five continents, and at major universities, including Columbia, New York University, Bar-Ilan, and Russian State Humanities University. For more than two decades she has taught and continues to teach in the Uriel Weinreich Program in Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture, currently under the auspices of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and Bard College.
She grew up in a Yiddish-speaking home in Winnipeg, Canada, and graduated from the I. L. Peretz Folk School, a Yiddish-Hebrew day school there. She holds an M.A. in Yiddish Language, Literature and Folklore from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature with a specialty in Yiddish literature from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
In addition, Sheva Zucker was, for several years, the Translation Editor of the Pakn Treger, the magazine of the Yiddish Book Center; her scholarly writing and translation work focuses on women in Yiddish literature. She thinks she can safely say that she had the only Yiddish-speaking children in Durham, North Carolina. She considers it a privilege and a gift to have been able to edit a modern, beautiful publication like Afn Shvel. She believes that Yiddish readers have the right to a magazine that is every bit as interesting and pleasing to the eye as something they might read in any other language and is pleased that Afn Shvel is continuing on this path.
