Uriel Weinreich

A pioneering linguist whose life was cut short by leukemia, Uriel Weinreich was born in Vilna (today Vilnius), studied at Columbia University, and followed in his father Max Weinreich’s scholarly footsteps. His crowning achievements in the field of Yiddish were the Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry (started in 1950), College Yiddish (1949), the first such textbook in any language, and his landmark Modern English-to-Yiddish/Yiddish-to-English Dictionary, published in 1968.