Sara Feldman

Sara Feldman is a Lecturer in Yiddish at Harvard University's Department of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations since 2018. Previously, she held positions as a Hebrew and Yiddish Lecturer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and as a Frankel Institute Fellow at the University of Michigan. She earned her Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan in 2014, with a dissertation titled "Fine Lines: Hebrew and Yiddish Translations of Alexander Pushkin’s Verse Novel Eugene Onegin, 1899-1937".

Her research focuses on the interplay between Yiddish, Russian, and Hebrew languages and literatures within modern, secularizing Jewish culture. She engages with contemporary Jewish cultural forms such as film, theater, and tango, analyzing their connections to queer and gender studies, multilingualism, ex-Orthodoxy, and migration.

As an educator, Feldman teaches Yiddish language courses at all levels and Yiddish film, emphasizing communicative language pedagogy to foster both literacy and spoken fluency. She is based at Vanserg Hall, Harvard University.