Isaac L. Bleaman
Associate Professor, Linguistics and Jewish Studies
University of California, Berkeley
bleaman@berkeley.edu
Office: 1216 Dwinelle Hall
About
I am an Associate Professor of Linguistics and Jewish Studies and the Herman P. and Sophia Taubman Professor of Jewish Studies at UC Berkeley. I also serve as a faculty director of the Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley and organize the Yiddish Forum.
My research explores how languages vary and change, especially in minority communities that are committed to the long-term continuity of their languages. Many of my projects focus on contemporary Yiddish and the factors that affect the use of grammatical and phonetic variables. I am also interested in computational methods for sociolinguistic and dialectological research, including the use of digital corpora.
Within Jewish Studies, I am especially active in the interdisciplinary field of Yiddish Studies and train students to produce scholarship not just about the language, but in it. I have been engaged in many community-oriented projects and developed a number of digital tools for Yiddish (see Resources).
What’s New?
- January 2026: Released v2.0 of Yiddish Klal, a standard Yiddish keyboard layout for macOS
- January 2026: Appointed to the Herman P. and Sophia Taubman Chair in Jewish Studies
- November 2025: Visited Lund University in Sweden to give two talks about my research on Holocaust testimonies in Yiddish
- July 2025: Quoted in a Forward article on Katz’s Deli
- July 2025: Promoted to Associate Professor with tenure!
- March 2025: Interviewed about the Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe by Michelle Margolis for In geveb
Featured Projects
Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe
A large corpus of transcribed Yiddish from Holocaust testimony interviews, with applications in sociolinguistics, dialectology, and language pedagogy and revitalization, funded by a National Science Foundation CAREER Award.
A computational approach to detecting the envelope of variation
A project to fine-tune and evaluate language models to identify tokens of sociolinguistic variables (lexical and morphosyntactic) in raw text
REYD: Reading Electronic Yiddish Documents
The first Yiddish text-to-speech system, enabling natural-sounding speech synthesis for a historically underserved language. The project resulted in two articles, a public data set, and an interactive demo.
yiddish
A Python library for processing Yiddish text, including functions to respell, transliterate, and handle encoding inconsistencies.
Employment & Education
Employment
- Herman P. and Sophia Taubman Professor of Jewish Studies, Center for Jewish Studies, UC Berkeley, 2026–
- Associate Professor, Center for Jewish Studies, UC Berkeley, 2026–
- Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics, UC Berkeley, 2025–
- Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics, UC Berkeley, 2019–2025
- Language Engineer, Amazon Alexa, Applied Modeling & Data Science, 2018–2019
Education
- PhD Linguistics, New York University, 2018
- MA Linguistics, New York University, 2016
- MSt Yiddish Studies, University of Oxford, 2013
- BA Linguistics & Comparative Literature, Stanford University, 2012
Follow Me
This website is the best way to keep up with my research. You can also find me on: