Arabs Studying Yiddish?

I'll have more later today but have a lot of pressing business first, so I'll start your day with this piece about Arabs studying Yiddish from Al-Monitor, translated from a Hebrew original at Yediot Aharanot.

Not Hebrew, mind you, Yiddish, long frowned upon by many Israelis as the language of the European ghetto and long ago eclipsed by Hebrew. The story is at the link, but there's also an irony in that the Arab (need I say he's an Israeli Arab?) discussed first is studying Hebrew literature at Bar-Ilan University, originally founded to combine Jewish religious studies with a secular curriculum at a time when the religious current in Israel was much less strong than it is today.