Tyler Kliem

Tyler Kliem
Born	2002 (age 21–22) Camden, New Jersey, U.S.
Education	University of Pennsylvania
Years active	2020–present
Movement	Yiddishism Generation Z

Tyler J. Kliem (Yiddish: טײַלער קלײַם; born 2002) is an American Yiddishist, translator, researcher, and graphic designer. He was the first to translate poetry from Rywka Braun-Nyman, a Holocaust survivor, into English.

Early life and education

Born in 2002 in Camden, New Jersey, Kliem was raised in Hamilton Township, New Jersey. He is Ashkenazi Jewish. His mother is of Polish-Jewish descent, and his father is a gentile. He grew up secular.

Kliem attended Nottingham High School and graduated in 2020. He intended to study psychology. Since 2020, he has been enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, majoring in comparative literature and design. He is set to graduate in 2024.

Kliem is a member of Penn's chapter of Alpha Phi Omega. From 2021 to 2022, he was the design editor for The Daily Pennsylvanian. He has worked on the design teams of several other campus publications. In the spring of 2023, he designed artwork for an exhibition hosted by the Philomathean Society, which caught the attention of Cornel West.

Kliem works in the front office of Penn's English department.

University, research, and translation

Kliem began studying Yiddish language and literature during his first year of college to connect with his Jewish identity and, in part, due to Yiddish's similarities with German, which he studied in high school. He has since taken Yiddish courses at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (in partnership with the Yiddish Book Center) and the Oxford School of Rare Jewish Languages at the University of Oxford, in addition to Penn. He has won numerous awards for his Yiddish study at Penn, including a prize from The Workers Circle.

In the summer of 2022, Kliem was a digital librarian intern at the Yiddish Book Center, where he improved digital access for the Yiddish-language labor union journal Gerechtigkeit (Yiddish: גערעכטיגקײט, lit. 'Justice'). He enjoyed seeing Yiddish poetry within the journal's various issues, leading him to translate work from Nachum Yud. While an intern, he also studied Yiddish as an intermediate student of the Steiner Summer Yiddish Program, with financial support from Sam Kellerman’s family. His final project translation of a Morris Rosenfeld poem, “Mayn rue plats” (Yiddish: מײַן רוע פּלאַץ, lit. 'My Resting Place'), was featured in In geveb.

In the spring of 2023, Kliem was the sole student enrolled in a course on Judeo-Spanish at Penn. At this time, Kliem began researching the Yiddish avant-garde under the auspices of the Wolf Humanities Center, with Kathryn Hellerstein as his advisor. In June of the same year, Kliem wrote an article for In geveb about his experiences in the Steiner Summer Yiddish Program, communal living, and Generation Z engagement with Yiddish. His translation of a Mordkhe Perlmuter poem was featured in a publication at the University of California, Berkeley.

With the assistance of the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, Kliem was the first to translate poetry from Holocaust survivor Rywka Braun-Nyman into English, which he designed into a fanzine.

Since the beginning of the summer of 2023, Kliem has been working as a research assistant for the Princeton Geniza Lab. He also conducted an artist-in-residence program at the Jewish Museum in New York City, for which he translated poetry from Malka Locker, which he designed into a fanzine.

At the beginning of his senior year, Kliem became a Jewish Media Fellow for New Voices and Ayin Press.