A landmark moment came in 1952, when the Atran Foundation endowed a professorship in Yiddish, enabling the appointment of the eminent scholar and linguist Uriel Weinreich as Atran Professor of Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture. This was not only a transformative moment for Columbia’s Jewish Studies but a turning point in the landscape of Yiddish Studies in the United States.

Weinreich came to Columbia with an ambitious vision for Yiddish scholarship. By 1958 Weinreich had organized an international conference on Yiddish together with YIVO, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and City College of New York. One of Weinreich’s major contributions to Yiddish was his Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry. Trained as a linguist, he set out to map the dialectal diversity of Yiddish as it had existed across pre-Holocaust Ashkenazi Europe. Weinreich interviewed some 1,600 native Yiddish speakers, building a foundational linguistic atlas, preserving subtle regional variations of the language that might have otherwise been lost. The project was one of the first to use the brand new computing capacity at Columbia; there is evidence as early as 1960 that Weinreich was using computers to record the data from his linguistic project. Weinreich also authored College Yiddish,: the textbook which has become the standard for the teaching of academic Yiddish.

The Yiddish program at Columbia, launched under Weinreich’s leadership, became the first in the United States to offer a doctoral degree in the field. It continues to attract a cohort of graduate students and has become an essential part of the IIJS. Though Weinreich’s career was tragically cut short by his death in 1967, his impact on the field and on Columbia endured. Because of Weinreich’s contributions, Columbia continues to be a leader in Yiddish Studies.