Deborah Berman

Deborah Berman was born in Manhattan, NYC, and grew up in a home suffused with Yiddish. From the ages of five to twelve she attended Workmen’s Circle shules, where she studied reading, writing, and speaking Yiddish. In her early thirties she returned to Yiddish and began attending KlezKamp in 1987, the third year of its existence. She was a regular attendee of KlezKamp, a student at the YIVO zumer program, and received a scholarship in return for creating a Yiddish Purim Shpil/Puppet Show based on an early nineteenth-century version of the Megiles Ester with the Yiddish actor Zishe Carlow (who hated puppets but had a good time anyway). In more recent years, she has attended KlezKanada. She explains, “Yiddish, the language and the world that it carries, has been a strong presence in my life through all its stages that has grown stronger over the last four decades. My practice as a psychotherapist has been knit together with and flavored by Yiddishland.”