By Jerome A. Cohen
I enjoyed this recent article on the teaching of Yiddish at Peking University. I am surprised, however, that it fails to mention the teaching of Hebrew at Peking University. A few years before China and Israel established diplomatic relations a law professor who was serving as a university vice president telephoned to ask my help in establishing the university’s first course in Hebrew. He not only wanted me to find an appropriate teacher who was not an Israeli citizen but also asked me to find the money to support this project for two years.
I came up with the funding through the good offices of Lawrence Tisch, who was eager to promote normalization of Sino-Israeli relations. I found an excellent teacher named Miriam R. L. Petruck among the recent PhD recipients in Hebraic studies at the University of California at Berkeley through the help of their mentor Professor Zev Brinner. There were eight students in her first class, and they were soon posted to Israel in a variety of occupations, such as a New China News Agency journalist, during the period before normalization was achieved.