The question that most people have asked after I told them what I did this summer, following “Are you fluent?” is “Did you make friends?” My answer is yes, but not in the way you might think. Of the five Naomi Fellows from this past summer, four, including myself, were in the same class. The four of us were the youngest in the class by a significant margin. Going in, I had expected swathes of college age kids to be taking the program but most of the students were actually in the 30-50 age range.

At first, I felt a little intimidated and even slightly disappointed. During the daily half hour coffee break, I gravitated towards the younger, college age kids. As time went on though, bonds began to grow within my class. As with all classes, we began to get more comfortable with each other and even grew conspiratorial. Despite the fact that many of my classmates had been through the army and their first language was Hebrew, a certain common language was developed through simple body language; eye contact when a teacher went on past the scheduled class time, encouraging smiles when someone froze after being called on, the mouthing of a page number, and the raucous clapping and cheering after someone recited a poem they had memorized.

I was surprised at the level of comfort I eventually felt in class. The only real common thread binding everyone in the class together was an interest in Yiddish, which seems fairly precarious but ended up being quite strong. On the last day of the program, we went out for lunch as a class and as she was leaving to go babysit her grandson in Jerusalem, one of my classmates told me that she already knew two of the other students in our class from a leftist political organizing group. Another student was from Georgia and wasn’t Jewish but he remembered the Yiddish songs his Jewish nanny used to sing to him. One student was a new mother who was getting her Master’s in Jewish Studies and invited me and two other fellows to a poetry reading and wine tasting at the bookstore she worked at.

In my first blog post I contemplated what the future of academic/secular Yiddishism will look like and I think it will be exactly like this. Wildly unexpected relationships built on the shockingly strong foundation of mutual interest and the various break-off interests that stem from the primary one. Yiddish means leftism and literature and otherness and heritage and nostalgia for me, and that leads to countless potential bonds with others, no matter how wildly different all other aspects of our lives are from each other.