Bio:
Rakhmiel Peltz is the founding Director of the Judaic Studies Program and Professor Emeritus of Sociolinguistics in the Department of Communication of Drexel University. His current research specialization is the social history of Yiddish language and culture. He holds two doctorates, one in Biological Sciences from the University of Pennsylvania and the second in Yiddish Studies and Linguistics from Columbia University, and he has published extensively in both fields.
Currently he is working on two book projects. The first (Who Cares About Standards?) focuses on the motivations of standardizers in society and their devotion to social change, looking at standardizers in biomedical research and in Yiddish language usage. The second book (The Language and Culture of Jews in Eastern Europe) puts together and analyzes the Yiddish research publications of Uriel Weinreich, to ensure the centrality of his work for future generations of students and researchers.
Dr. Peltz’s specialty in biological sciences is cell and molecular biology. His research focused on gene action and the control of differentiation during early embryogenesis and the cell cycle. After receiving his doctorate, he did post-doctoral work at the Institute for Cancer Research in Fox Chase, Philadelphia, and the McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research of the University of Wisconsin in Madison. A recipient of many grants, he served as principal investigator of grants from the National Institutes of Health. For several years, he served as Director of Cell Biology at the Wills Eye Research Institute and Assistant Research Professor at Thomas Jefferson University. In addition, he taught Developmental Biology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and was the Instructor-in-Charge of summer sessions and honors courses in Cell and Molecular Biology at the University of Pennsylvania.
Turning to Yiddish Studies, Dr. Peltz was motivated by a life-long devotion to the survival of the culture that the Nazis attempted to destroy. His training at Columbia and as a Fellow of the Max Weinreich Center for Advanced Jewish Studies at the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research focused on the social history of Yiddish language and culture in Eastern Europe. He has published on language and culture planning in the Soviet Union, Yiddish cultural expression of immigrants, language and identity over the lifespan, and urban neighborhood life. For more than twenty-five years, he has been researching aging and ethnicity, and has developed an expertise in designing and carrying out intergenerational ethnic educational programs. He is an accomplished researcher, who uses both historical research and ethnographic methods. His research currently focuses on pre-World War II Jewish family life in Eastern Europe as experienced by Holocaust survivors and on ways of educating survivors of groups that are victims of genocide about their history and culture.
His book, From Immigrant to Ethnic Culture: American Yiddish in South Philadelphia (Stanford University Press, 1998) is the first book on spoken Yiddish in America. Written after doing ten years of ethnographic research on elderly children of immigrants in small New England cities, this account provides a fresh look at ethnic culture in the USA and the changing role of ethnic language over the life cycle of children of immigrants.
More recently, he was co-author of Language Loyalty, Continuity and Change (Multilingual Matters, 2006), and served as project director and producer of the film, Toby’s Sunshine: The Life and Art of Holocaust Survivor Toby Knobel Fluek (2008). In 2019, he launched a website, Alive! Educational Restitution After Genocide, www.alivetobyssunshine.com , representing ten years of his research together with individual Drexel students and colleagues, developments growing out of his course, Reconstructing History After Genocide, as well as collaborations in a global seminar with colleagues and students in Lublin, Poland.
A popular speaker for academic and popular audiences, Dr. Peltz lectures on the history of Yiddish language and literature, Jewish life in Eastern Europe, and aging and ethnic identity. In addition, he facilitates Yiddish discussion groups and intergenerational programs on life history.
Arriving at Drexel in 1998, he had previously served as an Assistant Professor of Modern Foreign Languages at Boston University (1989-1991), where he also taught in the Anthropology Department, Ph.D. Program in Applied Linguistics, and Center for Aging. From 1990-98, he was Director of Yiddish Studies at Columbia University, overseeing the Ph.D. Program, undergraduate instruction, and the intensive summer program in Yiddish. He was Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages at Columbia, and he has also served as a visiting professor at Gratz College (Jewish Literature), Mt. Holyoke College (Anthropology), the New School (Jewish History), the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (Linguistics), the University of Pennsylvania (Sociology), and Wesleyan University (Religion and Anthropology).
His work has been supported by a variety of funding agencies, including the American Council of Learned Societies, the Littauer Foundation, and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. He was the Miles Lerman Fellow at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Research, US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Dr. Emanuel Patt – Workmen’s Circle Center Fellow at the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research, as well as a Fellow at the Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He has served on the editorial board of Contemporary Jewry, the International Journal of the Sociology of Language, Yiddish, and Yivo-bleter, and on the Board of Directors of the Society for the Social Scientific Study of Jewry, HIAS Immigration Service of Pennsylvania, and Hillel of Greater Philadelphia.