Yona Sabar

Yona Sabar is a Kurdistani Jewish scholar, linguist and researcher. He is professor emeritus of Hebrew at the University of [California, Los Angeles]. He is a native speaker of Northeastern Neo-Aramaic and has published more than 90 research articles about Jewish Neo-Aramaic and the folklore of the Jews of Kurdistan.
Sabar was born in the town of Zakho in northern Iraq. His family moved to Israel in 1951. He received a B.A. in Hebrew and Arabic from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1963 and a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures from Yale University in 1970.
His immigrant journey from the hills of Kurdistan to the highways of Los Angeles is the subject of an award-winning memoir by his son, Ariel Sabar, an American author and journalist. Ariel Sabar's book won the 2008 National Book [Critics Circle Award] for autobiography.

Works

The Folk Literature of the Kurdistani Jews: An Anthology, Yale University Press, 232 pp., 1982.