Estraikh Gennady. Intensive Yiddish: with grammar sections based on Dovid Katz's Grammar of the Yiddish language

Oxford: Oksforder Yidish Press, 1996. — 255 p.A remarkable and useful textbook, but not for beginners. The vocabulary of "Intensive Yiddish" from the very beginning would be impossibly daunting for a true beginner. Everything about this book shows that it was written by a real linguist and a native speaker of Soviet Yiddish, i.e., not someone who grew up in an overwhelmingly English-speaking environment. It's contemporary in tone and emphasis, treating Yiddish as a living and evolving spoken and written language, not just a tool for access to the Jewish culture of the past. The grammar sections (drawn from Dovid Katz's grammar, which is available free online: https://dovidkatz.net/dovid/PDFLinguistics/2-1987-Grammar-Yiddish.pdf) are particularly good, but again you must come to it already understanding what a nominative, dative and accusative are.