Yakob Basner may be 93 years-old, but that doesn’t stop him from doing a job he loves: teaching Yiddish. Since immigrating to Southern California from the former Soviet Union in 1980, Basner has taught the
mame-loshn to over 2,000 people.
“If you want to understand the history of the Jewish people, you need to understand Yiddish because for many of them, this was their language,” he said.
The pandemic has, oddly enough, breathed new life into the old language. In Southern California, where people live dispersed over wide areas and where traffic makes a five-mile trip into an overnight, Zoom has been a godsend. His beginners classes at the Workers Circle have attracted even more students than before.