[1] He has held visiting appointments at several universities, including the Universität Heidelberg (guest professor, Seminar für die lateinische Philologie des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit, 1987), the Freie Universität Berlin (visiting faculty, Institut für Judaistik, 1997-1998), Columbia University (guest professor, Department of Germanic Languages, 2004), and the Universitetas Vilniaus (summer faculty in the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, 1999-2003 & 2014).
Frakes’s published research spans numerous fields of study, especially the medieval literatures of German, English, Yiddish, Norse, and Latin, and includes monographic studies, text editions, collections of essays, and translations (from French, German, Latin, Yiddish, Norse, Hebrew and Ottoman).
future historical works on Yiddish will certainly have to be seen in light of Frakes’s criticism.
This makes his study, with its conclusiveness of argumentation, an indispensable tool for the historian of every language, and not only those interested in Yiddish.”[3] Since 1989, Frakes’s scholarship has been recognized through numerous research fellowships and prizes, among them: the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung (1993 & 1997-1998), the National Endowment for the Humanities (2001-2002), the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2013-2014),[4] and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (2013).
The MLA citation reads: “In ‘Early Yiddish Epic,’ Jerold C. Frakes uses his vast and precise historical and philological knowledge of Old Yiddish to render the great epic texts written in that language into lucid, vivid, and compelling English prose….