I’ve mentioned Limmud Oz before, it’s a weekend of learning for those interested in Jewish topics. It’s massive, for every lecture I attended there were generally another two or three I would have liked to have seen. Held in alternating years in either Sydney or Melbourne we have some world class speakers and some not so good speakers but the topics are always interesting and exciting. I won’t tantalise you with much of the programme or what I actually did but here are just a couple of things.

For the first time it started on Saturday afternoon with a couple of interesting sessions at the Theodore Herzl club before finalising the Sabbath with a beautiful Havdalah Service, a break where we ran home for dinner and back to Monash University in Caulfield for the normal Saturday evening sessions and the opening night’s concert. After the concert I was introduced to some cousins, and no, I’m not name dropping here. Then back to Monash Uni in Caulfield for 9:30am Sunday and then again 11am Monday for learning. Normally by the end of Monday my brain is dead from all the information but I took time out Monday afternoon to attend a funeral, not someone I knew but in Jewish tradition we need 10 Jews in attendance for various services and I went to help make up the 10.

One of the sessions I attended on Saturday afternoon was about a short story by Sholem Aleichem. You’ve heard of Aleichem, he wrote the original stories that became Fiddler on the Roof. He wrote in Yiddish, I’m thanking translators at this point as it means I’ve been able to read his works, my Yiddish is pretty awful and I’m discovering most of the words I know are actually quite foul so the number of Yiddish words I will use is diminishing rapidly. It’s quite a colourful language and during the session the lecturer had people read out the story paragraph by paragraph, some read in English while some in Yiddish, there was much laughter with the paragraphs in Yiddish.

Other highlights were watching snippets from Orange is the New Black and discovering all the Jewish bits in it. A very gritty programme, it doesn’t pull many punches. Annika Hernroth-Rothstein is a Swedish journalist who managed to get a visa for Iran and spoke about her experiences travelling round and talking to Jews there, she was given a minder, he’s 33 years old, Muslim and single – so much subtext there.

One more story before I leave you drooling for more.

My last session for the day was a fascinating one about reclaiming one of the 330 or so lost Aboriginal languages in Australia. Ghil’ad Zuckermann came from Israel as a linguist to work in Adelaide and looked around to see how he could give something back to Australia. As a linguist he found much information about some of the languages we used to have here and has started studying with people of the Barngarla language to revive it, the results have been fabulous. It was only during the last video he showed that I figured out how I’d known his face before. Last year as part of my English Language classes we were shown parts of Stephen Fry’s Planet Word, during one episode he was driven around Jerusalem by a personable young linguist and they discussed how Hebrew was reclaimed and how it has taken on many words from other languages including English, Zuckermann screened part of that episode…you’ll never guess who that young linguist was. Anyway, I mentioned to Zuckermann how I’d already seen that episode, he was amazed to find his fame spread far and wide. I now await a reply from an email I sent to my teacher from last year, this should be interesting.