Women’s Initiative for Jewish Studies (WIJS) at Young Israel of New Rochelle is proud to present Dr. Chaya Nove on Tuesday, November 18, 2025 @ 8:15 pm (ET) on Zoom. Nove will be the second speaker of the 2025-2026 season in the monthly scholarly programming offered by WIJS at YINR.
Dr. Nove’s lecture is entitled, “Between Tradition and Trend: Popular Culture and language use among American Hasidim.” The past three decades have seen enormous activity in the realm of Hasidic pop culture. Fueled by creative energy and aided by new technologies that have made production cheaper and more efficient, New York Hasidim have produced a robust canon of artifacts and expressions for popular consumption including theatrical performances, lyrical music, literature, comedy, commercial marketing, games, and more—all with Hasidic Yiddish as the medium. In these genres, the tension between traditionalism and modernity is apparent, as mainstream American trends are rendered, refracted, and refitted onto traditional content to form a distinctive Hasidic style.
Dr. Chaya Nove is a sociolinguist focusing on variation and change in Hasidic Yiddish and its ancestral dialects. She is currently a Visiting Research Scholar at Fordham University, where she is developing a social history of New York Hasidic Yiddish. Chaya holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY). Her research has been supported by the Association for Jewish Studies, Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, and American Academy for Jewish Research.
All WIJS programming is open to women and men. Please visit www.yinr.org/wijs to view the complete WIJS 2025-26 schedule. For more information, to be added to the WIJS email list, or for Zoom information, please call 914-636-2215 or email: wijs@yinr.org. Individuals on the WIJS mailing list will automatically receive the Zoom information.
