A century on, celebrating the first Yiddish-language college course

One century ago, the University of Wisconsin became the first institution of higher education in the Americas — and perhaps the world — to teach Yiddish, the language of the eastern European Jews. Louis Bernard Wolfenson, a La Crosse native and UW alumnus, started teaching the classes in the semester that began Sept. 20, 1916, in the Department of Semitics and Hellenistic Greek.