Adult Education
There are many ways to learn at BWC – We offer Yiddish classes, adult education courses (listed below), as well as learning opportunities from our social justice committees.
Adult Education Courses
Our adult education courses are geared toward exploring the meaning of Jewish history, ritual, and thought from a secular perspective. Together, we grapple with questions of historical experience, values, and identity that challenge our thinking. Our courses usually run between 3-6 sessions and the cost of high-quality teachers is covered by class tuition, a sliding scale.
A foundation of Jewish and progressive literacy keeps our community strong. Come learn with us! (see the courses listed below)
| $70-110 | $90-130 |
Yiddish Culture and The Jewish Labor Movement: 1880s-1960s
fall 2023
4 sessions | October 23, 30, November 6, 13
mondays 6:00-7:30 PM ET | ONLINE
In this course we will explore the history of Jewish labor activism in the United States and its relationship to Yiddish culture. We will engage questions such as: How did Jewish Socialists and Communists relate to their Jewish identity? How did they think about Americanization and assimilation? What role did Yiddish culture play in Socialist and Communist organizing? How did Jewish identity and Yiddish culture interact with broader efforts toward anti-racism and multiculturalism? And how does this history help us navigate the present of Jewish and Anti-Racist organizing work? Beginning with the early Jewish labor movement in the 1880s and ending with New Left activism of the 1960s, this four session course will take us through the salient turning points of Jewish labor history in the United States and how Jews navigated these pressing questions of identity, community, and social justice at different historical moments.
Course sessions:
- Session #1: 1880s-1905 - Yiddish culture and its place in the Socialist movement
- Session #2: 1905-1920 - “Linke versus rekhte”: the changing dynamics of the Jewish left in the wake of the Russian Revolution
- Session #3: 1920s-1930s - Anti-racist organizing on the Jewish Left and the issue of “white chauvinism”
- Session #4: Session 4: 1940s-1960s - Generational change and the challenge of Americanization
All sessions will be recorded and made available to registrants. The course is conducted in English; no Yiddish language skills are necessary.
Course Instructor
Dylan Kaufman-Obstler, PhD
Today, Dylan lives in the Eastern Sierra of California, where she teaches U.S. History and Government at Cerro Coso Community College as well as serves as an Adult Education teacher for the Inyo County Office of Education. Dylan looks forward to seeing old and new faces at BWC and engaging in a course that touches something personal in all of us regarding Jewish history, activism, and identity.
Circle Book Group
The Circle Book Group meets monthly (except during July & August) at BWC on Sunday mornings to discuss fiction and nonfiction books by Jewish authors and/or with Jewish themes. This is an open group that welcomes all readers interested in expanding their understanding of the wide variety of Jewish experiences throughout history and across the world. Previously discussed books are listed below. Book selections are chosen by participates at least one month in advance of meetings. Ideally there are 8 or more Minuteman Library Network copies available.
To be added to Book Group email list and for more information, contact bookgroup@circleboston.org.
NEXT MEETING:
Date: Sunday, October 8, 10:15 am
Location: Hybrid - In-person at the BWC building and over Zoom
Book: Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword, Hereville: How Mirka Caught a Meteorite, and Hereville: How Mirka Got her Sword by Barry Deutsch.
Mirka, the star of this unusual graphic novel, is an 11-year-old Orthodox Jewish girl who wants to fight dragons, not take knitting lessons from her stepmother. In their town of Hereville, which sometimes feels like a old world shtetl and sometime feels quite modern, Mirka and her siblings go to school, help around the house, and occasionally bicker, activities with which most young readers will easily identify. An encounter with an angry pig takes Mirka underwater, where she experiences a vision of her late mother and meets a witch who tells her how to find a hidden sword. She meets a troll in the woods, and he challenges her to a knitting contest. As Mirka has not paid much attention to her knitting lessons,she is pleased that she is able to knit the required sweater, though it requires some fast thinking on her part to justify the extra sleeve she knitted. The troll declares her the winner of the contest, and she returns home with the sword in hand, ready to knit more while she awaits her next adventure. The illustrations are fun, ably enhancing the text. Footnotes define the Hebrew and Yiddish terms to make this charming book accessible to a wider audience. Deutsch’s uses the graphic novel format to tell a unique story that will appeal to fans of the genre, and make new ones, too.
Circle Book Group Calendar
Past Circle Book Group reading selections have included:
East West Street by Philippe Sands
Smahtguy: The Life and Times of Barney Frank by Eric Orner
The Convert by Stefan Hertmans
I Was Better Last Night by Harvey Fierstein
The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman
Becoming Eve: My journey from ultra-orthodox rabbi to transgender woman by Abby Stein
More than I Love My Life by David Grossman
People Love Dead Jews by Dara Horn
Florence Adler Swims Forever by Rachel Beanland
Can We Talk About Israel? by Daniel Sokatch
Journey to the End of the Millennium by A.B. Yehoshua
Concealed by Esther Amini
Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart
Ghetto Brother: Warrior to Peacemaker by Julian Volaj & Claudia Ahlering
Second Person Singular by Sayed Kashua
The Last Kings of Shanghai by Jonathan Kaufman
Apeirogon by Colum McCann
1947: Where Now Begins by Elisabeth Asbrink
The Hilltop by Assaf Gavron
Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots by Deborah Feldman
The Tunnel by A.B. Yehoshua
Insomniac City: New York, Oliver Sacks, and Me by Bill Hayes
Tell Me A Riddle by Tillie Olsen
Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes by Adam Hochschild
Dinner at the Center of the Earth by Nathan Englander
Learning From the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil by Susan Neiman
Ecclesiastes
Adolofo Kaminsky: A Forger's Life by Sarah Kaminsky
The Jew Store by Stella Suberman
The Yid by Paul Goldberg
The Art of Leaving by Ayelet Tsabari
The Best Place on Earth: Stories by Ayelet Tsabari
My Promised Land by Ari Shavit
The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish
Kaddish.com by Nathan Englander
Dear Zealots: Letters from a Divided Land by Amos Oz, translated by Jessica Cohen
The Book of Daniel, a novel by E. L. Doctorow
The Death of an American Jewish Community, by Hillel Levine and Lawrence Harmon
The Marriage of Opposites by Alice Hoffman
Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean: How a Generation of Swashbuckling Jews Carved Out an Empire in the New World in Their Quest for Treasure, Religious Freedom--and Revenge by Edward Kritzler
Green by Sam Graham-Felesn
The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis
Moonglow by Michael Chabon
(((Semitism))) Being Jewish in America in the Age of Trump, by Jonathan Weisman
Women in the Castle by Jessica Shattuck
The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund De Wall
Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods by Michael Wex
The Museum of Extraordinary Things by Alice Hoffman
You Say to Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn by Wendy Lesser
Here I Am, by Jonathan Safran Foer
How About Never—Is Never Good for You?: My Life in Cartoons by Bob Mankoff
Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper by Laurel Leff
Those Who Save Us, by Jenna Blum
Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number by Jacobo Timerman
The Paris Architect by Charles Belfoure
Great House by Nicole Krauss
The Aleppo Codex by Matti Friedman
The Spinoza Problem by Irvin D. Yalom
The Nazis Next Door: How America Became A Safe Haven for Hitler's Men by Eric Lichtblau.
Enemies: A Love Story by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik
Tevye's Daughters by Sholem Aleichem
Frank by Barney Frank
An Officer and A Spy by Robert Harris
On the Move by Oliver Sacks
Boogaloo on 2nd Avenue: A Novel of Pastry, Guilt, and Music by Mark Kurlansky
The Family: three journeys into the heart of the twentieth century
The Jew in the lotus : a poet’s rediscovery of Jewish identity in Buddhist India by Rodger Kamenetz
Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
Scenes From Village Life by Amos Oz
The Bookie’s Son by Andrew Goldstein
Bech, a Book by John Updike
Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson
Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me by Harvey Pekar and JT Waldman; epilogue written by Joyce Brabner; lettering by Charles Pritchett
Amerika : The Missing Person : a new translation, based on the restored text by Franz Kafka; translated and with a preface by Mark Hofmann, 2002
Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood
The Difficult Saint by Sharan Newman
In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin by Eric Larson
The Cross and the Pear Tree: A Sephardic Journey by Victor Perera
The Sacrifice of Isaac by Noah Gordon
The Adventures of Mottel: The Cantor’s Son by Sholem Aleichem
My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq by Ariel Sabar
The End of the Jews: A Novel by Adam Mansbach
The Story of Yiddish: How a Mish-Mosh of Languages Saved the Jews by Neal Karlen
Beyond the Pale: A novel by Elana Dykewomon (also known as Nachman/Dykewomon)
The Merchant of Venice: modern version side-by-side with full original text, edited and rendered into modern English by Alan Durband
Escape to Shanghai: a Jewish Community in China by James R. Ross
The Assistant by Bernard Malamud
Scoundrel Time by Lillian Hellman
Heading South, Looking North by Ariel Dorfman
The Invisible Wall: A Love Story That Broke Barriers by Harry Bernstein
He, She and It by Marge Piercy
Loyalties: A Son’s Memoir by Carl Bernstein
Seize the Day by Saul Bellow
Foreskin’s Lament by Shalom Auslander
The Harlot by the Side of the Road by Jonathan Kirsch
Rashi’s Daughters, Book I: Joheved by Maggie Anton
The life of Glückel of Hameln, 1646-1724, written by herself / Translated from the original Yiddish
A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz
Septembers of Shiraz by Dalia Sofer
Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of The Cairo Geniza by Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole
Peony by Pearl Buck
World's Fair by E.L. Doctorow
Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast
Florence Gordon by Brian Morton
The Girl from Human Street by Roger Cohen
Farthing (Small Change) by Jo Walton
The Lion Seeker by Kenneth Bonert
At Home in Exile: Why Diaspora is Good for the Jews by Alan Wolfe
Little Failure: A Memoir by Gary Shteyngart
I Married a Communist by Philip Roth
A Bisl
We also offer a series member-to-member learning series we call A Bisl.
What is A Bisl? - In Yiddish, it means “a little bit.” For Boston Workers Circle members, it means a chance to learn and share a little bit about a topic that excites you.
In this time of isolated virtual reality, we're hearing from members that folks want places to connect. So, in collaboration with the Adult Education Committee, BWC is opening up this virtual member to member learning exchange series, A Bisl.
Past topics for A Bisl include:
Bringing Music to Our Shabes Rituals: Exploring Melodies for Our Yiddish Blessings, led by Adah Hetko and Meira Soloff
Haiku Now, led by Jeanne Martin
Like Leafless Branches Coming Back to Life: A Sukkes Willow Workshop, led by Ayelet Yonah Adelman and Liz Krushnic
Making Meaning at Home during COVID 19, led by Rosa Blumenfeld
Zing Mit Mir, Sing with Me, led by Pauli Katz
Letters That You Will Not Get: Women’s Voice from the Great War, led by Susan Werbe
Parenting Through Covid: Support for Families with Young Children, led by Sandy Sachs
Drawing 101!, led by Megan Smith
Self-Organized Learning: A Community Experience, led by Daniel Nahum
Basic Spanish Conversation, led by Susan Langus
Resisting Anti-Muslim Racism in a Pandemic, a Discussion with Fatema Ahmad, ED of Muslim Justice League
Klezmer Spiel: Learn a Tune!, led by Uri Schreter
Simon Dzigan: a Yiddish Comedian in WWII Soviet Union, led by Miriam Isaacs
Pronouns 101 and Practice, led by Sam Slate
Reparations 101, led by Nakhie Faynshteyn and Lynne Layton
Queer Futures Workshop, led by Jacey Eve
Feeling inspired? Click here to lead your own session.
Questions about A Bisl? Email zohar@circleboston.org.