Due to family illness, we are sorry to announce that Sebastien Schulman’s lecture, “Yiddish for The Rest of Us: Towards a Jewish History of Esperanto” (April 5) will be cancelled. The event will be rescheduled for a later date this Fall, details to be announced.

The lecture presented by Sebastien Schulman (Executive Director of KlezKanada) will look at how Esperanto emerged in eastern Europe in 1887. It will resituate the history of Esperanto within the context of Jewish language politics, eastern European nationalism, utopian ideas, and internationalist movements, with a particular emphasis on Zamenhof's “Hillelism” and the changes wrought by the Second World War. It will also consider Esperanto today and will argue that Esperanto can be best understood as a vehicle for alternative, potentially subversive discourse, a space for resistance against cultural or political trends.