Ber Kotlerman

Ber Kotlerman is a Professor at Bar Ilan University, Israel and Head of the Rena Costa Center for Yiddish Studies. He also holds the Sznajderman Chair in Yiddish Culture and Hasidism. In the late 1990s to the early 2000s he served as director for the Tel Aviv-based Association of Yiddish Writers and Journalists in Israel (Leyvik House) and as the Israeli representative of The Yiddish Daily Forward (Forverts). He has also taught Yiddish language and culture at Kiev, Tokyo, Berlin, Vilnius, and Birobidzhan, where he founded an International Yiddish Summer Program. Ber’s academic activities include numerous publications on Yiddish history and culture, among them monographs about Sholem Aleichem’s and Der Nister’s writings, as well as translations from the Old Yiddish into Russian and Hebrew.