This was a very enjoyable class and the lightest courseload of any class I've taken. Professor Koral is occasionally dry, but her passion shows! There was an online Yiddish movie and a few readings every week. These movies were surprisingly fun and refreshing to watch for 1930s movies (they had great subtitles and I watched them at 1.5x speed). There were memorable musical numbers and scenes that were just HILARIOUS.

There is also a required cultural event (my friends attended this hour-long concert by a renowned Yiddish composer with lively and varied keyboard and string instruments). Professor Koral also took us to a few talks hosted by the Yiddish department. There were two essays total and a short final exam with straightforward questions. I recommend making a study guide with other students; it's actually quite fun to review the content of the movies and the class together! It's also entirely possible to cram the readings before hand.

This was a fun class! I was very pleasantly surprised by this class as a Computer Science major who likes to optimize for efficiency and gets bored easily. A year after taking it, I look back at it fondly as a memorable class where I learned something. Would recommend to anyone!

Professor Koral is brilliant. Honestly, I took this class because I saw that it wasn't very hard to do well. That isn't because you can do whatever - it's because Professor Koral will sincerely make you passionate about Yiddish cinema.

Definitely take this class if you can. Learning about Yiddish film and cinema from a brilliant woman who takes immense amounts of pride in her religion and culture is fantastic. The films are interesting and an important part of history. You write five papers that she grades very fairly, and you have a take-home final that you can pull from your papers to answer questions.

From my perspective, professor Koral is really underrated here. She's nice, patient, and helpful. The film watching is a major part of this class, and most of the films are black and white talkies from the 1930s. (The quality of subtitles is not very good.) If you don't enjoy this kind of films, you might find it a little boring. However, as long as you have a basic understanding of their plots, which are all really simple to digest, you are good to go.
As for the essays, make sure to proofread before submitting them.
Do take notes because there will be a take-home final which covers some details that you can't just memorize all of them.