Dr Helen Beer
Ben Zion Margulies Lecturer in Yiddish
Tel: 020 7679 3586
Biography
Dr Beer is a native Yiddish speaker born in Melbourne, Australia. Her first degree from Monash University was in English Literature and Musicology followed by a Diploma of Education. She completed a Yiddish Teachers’ Seminar in Melbourne and has taught Yiddish Language and Literature since the age of 17.
As there was no university level Yiddish available in Australia, she attended the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Masters Degree Programme in Yiddish. She completed her D.Phil. at the University of Oxford on the subject of the Ballads of Itsik Manger.
Helen Beer is Lecturer in Yiddish at UCL and Departmental Tutor. She is also Tutor in Yiddish at Oxford University Department of Continuing Education. She teaches and lectures extensively in Britain and Europe and has participated in numerous Yiddish summer programmes in Oxford, Brussels, Paris.
Her main research interests are modern Yiddish literature and Yiddish folklore, Yiddish literature in Poland between the wars, Romanian Yiddish literature.
She is currently working on a biography of Itsik Manger. She translated ‘Translations into and from Yiddish’ by M. Litvine published by the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies (1991). She wrote on Itsik Manger’s earliest ballads for Oxforder Yidish 3,(1995) and has several entries in the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Jewish Writers (Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001). She also works as a translator from Yiddish to English and from English to Yiddish.
Visit Dr Helen Beer’s full profile for additional information, publications, and achievements.