Yiddish Book Center - Home

Montreal Trip

Jordan Kutzik Jan 11, 2012

On Monday, December 12, I set off for Montreal with Christa Whitney, the director of the Wexler Oral History Project, and Sara Israel, one of my co-fellows, in order to pick up roughly 1,000 reel-to-reel tapes and 300 cassettes from the Jewish Public Library of Montreal so that they could be digitized as part of the Frances Brandt Online Yiddish Audio Library....

On the Spot: An Oral History with Ilene Gelbaum

Emma Morgenstern Dec 08, 2010

I didn’t know anything about Ilene Gelbaum except that she was visiting the Book Center from California with her husband, and she wanted to tell her story for the Wexler Oral History Project. Ilene turned out to be a gifted storyteller with many stories to share. She talked about everything from meeting her husband in high school in Brooklyn, to her stint in the Peace Corps in Sri Lanka, to the five thousand (!) babies she delivered in her 40-year career as a midwife.

A Living Connection: An-sky and the Yiddish Book Center

Hillary Ossip Dec 06, 2010

Since I first learned about him while studying his iconic play The Dybbuk, S. An-sky has served as an eye opener into shtetl life and lore for me. At the turn of the century, An-sky believed that the pressures of modernity were altering “authentic” Jewish life in the shtetl. In 1912, he set out on his first journey to collect stories, folklore, cultural and religious objects, music, and photographs from what he believed was a vanishing world.