U. Maryland Yiddish courses face budget axe - Associated Press

"U- Maryland has had the biggest commitment to Yiddish as a language anywhere in a hundred-mile radius," said Harvey Spiro, president of Yiddish of Greater Washington, which organized a letter-writing campaign. "We're not a particularly political organization, but this kicked us in the gut." The center has funding to pay its longtime instructor through the next academic year, but after that it is unlikely to continue funding a full-time faculty member dedicated to the language, said Hayim Lapin, director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Maryland. "This is not about Yiddish," Lapin said. "What this is about is responding to the budget crisis and actually cutting back on just about all of our visiting faculty and programming, so we have less Bible than we had. We have less history than we had. We have less or no Yiddish."