Gift from Marjorie and Richard Fond supports new graduate award in Yiddish studies

UCLA College | September 27, 2024

The beauty and power of Yiddish represent an abundance to native Angeleno Richard Fond. Not only because it was his first language — he spoke it at home for his first 18 years because his parents and grandmother spoke it to him — but also because he ended up finding his way back to it later in life.

“There’s been a lot of talk about Yiddish being a dying language, and I want to play my part in ensuring its continuance,” he said. “Every culture and every language make an invaluable contribution to the world.”

Fond and his wife made a generous donation to establish the Marjorie Marks Fond, Ph.D. and Richard Z. Fond, PharmD Graduate Award in Yiddish Studies, an endowment in the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies in the Division of Humanities. This award will provide support for UCLA graduate students who study Yiddish language, literature, history or culture.

“I look at it as a relay race, in which I am passing on the baton to graduate students for the purpose of encouraging and aiding their study of Yiddish,” Fond said. “The Leve Center is a wonderful place and an important resource. We love it and UCLA is in our DNA.”

It’s true — Marji Fond graduated from UCLA with a degree in political science; Richard Fond completed a few years of study at UCLA and even served as a Bruin basketball manager. They have been season ticket holders for more than 35 years.

But as special as the UCLA connection is, closest to Fond’s heart is how this gift dovetails with a topic that has proven to be a lifelong through-line for him. With the death of his grandmother while Fond was in high school, the family ceased speaking Yiddish almost entirely. It was not until some 30 years later that he enrolled in his first formal course in the language.

Ever since then, he has kept his focus on this area, crediting the teaching of Marvin Zuckerman, then-chair of the English department at Los Angeles Valley College, with deepening his interest in, appreciation for and love of Yiddish. His courses were so inspirational that Fond and some of his classmates continued on as a study group for a decade afterward.

Another of Fond’s inspirations is Aaron Lansky, founder and president of the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, whose vision and efforts augmented a Yiddish revival — the Yiddish Book Center has collected more than 1 million books, shipped collections to libraries across the globe and made Yiddish accessible to anyone with a computer, working with partners to digitize nearly the entirety of the language’s literature.

“I have studied Hebrew on and off for most of my life, but it wasn’t until I began studying Yiddish that I realized that I had come home and that it was such an important part of me. It constitutes a large part of my Jewish identity,” Fond said. “Hebrew is a language of the intellect and of the head, whereas Yiddish is more a language of the soul, and that’s where I wish to continue spending my life.”