Interest in Yiddish is booming among Millennials and Gen Z. What does this resurgence tell us about contemporary Jewish culture—its relationship to the past, its anxieties about the present, and its imagined futures? In this session, we’ll explore these questions through two short poems by Avrom Sutzkever, "Yiddish" and "Set Sail, My Word". These texts will anchor our discussion as we consider how Yiddish, as both a language and a cultural inheritance, opens up space for engaging with alternative visions of Jewish memory and possibility. What does it mean to reclaim or reinvent a language shaped by rupture? And how might Yiddish point us toward unexpected versions of the future?

Justin Cammy is Professor of Comparative Jewish Literature and Associate Dean of Faculty at Smith College in Northampton, MA. In Fall 2025 he is serving as Visiting Professor of Yiddish Literature at Harvard University. Cammy is the co-editor of The Cambridge History of Yiddish Literature, forthcoming in 2027.