Ber Kotlerman: 2019

Ber Kotlerman: 2019

Ber Kotlerman: 2019 854 853 Michael King Writers Centre

Currently a professor of literature and Jewish culture at Bar Ilan University, Israel, Ber Kotlerman  belongs to the new generation of authors involved in revival of Yiddish, the language of the Jewish people in Europe and European diasporas since the Middle Ages.  He spent his childhood in Birobidzhan, the Jewish Autonomous Region in the Russian Far East, where his family emigrated after the Holocaust. In the late 1990s to the early 2000s he served as director for the Association of Yiddish Writers and Journalists in Israel and as the Israeli representative of the New York Yiddish newspaper “Forverts” (“The Jewish Forward”). Since 1999 he has been a contributor to a variety of Yiddish periodicals in the USA, Israel, Poland, and France. In 2017 he published his first book of stories.  He was invited to lecture in a variety of academic and non-academic frameworks, such as the Dresden Week of Yiddish Culture (2006), The Jewish Theological Seminary in New York (2011), Rikkyo University in Tokyo (2012), Potsdam University (2013), Institute for Oriental Languages in Paris (2017), University of Southern California in Los Angeles (2018), University of Bern (2019), and recently The Holocaust Centre of New Zealand in Wellington.

Ber is currently working on looking at the South Pacific through Yiddish Eyes (a monograph on Yiddish travel writers before WW2).