The Yiddish Book Center building remains closed due to COVID-19. While you can’t visit in person, you can explore all that we have to offer online, and we invite you to join us for weekly virtual public programs, follow us on social media, and sign up to receive our new "Weekly Reader" at yiddishbookcenter.org/signup.

Yiddish Book Center

Regenerating Jewish Culture

Celebrating forty years of book rescue, digitization, translation,
educational programs, oral histories, exhibitions

פֿרישע נײַעס

Now

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Yiddish Book Center Presents Free, Weekly Virtual Public Programs—View the Calendar of Events

Learn

Learn About In eynem: The New Yiddish Textbook

Read

Donor Profile: Saul Kurlat

Read

Bertha Kling: Poems

Learn

Decade of Discovery 2021: Yiddish and Social Justice

Listen

Judy Batalion and the Untold Story of Jewish Women Resistance Fighters

Read

Walking in Karlsbad, By Abraham Cahan, Newly Translated by Chana Pollack

Focus On National Poetry Month

In celebration of National Poetry Month, we're spotlighting selections that speak to the beauty, power, and diversity of Yiddish poetry.

Watch

“Six Lines” in Seven Translations: The Craft of Translating Yiddish Poetry (virtual program): Reading, discussion, and musical performance of Aaron Zeitlin’s poem “Zeks shures” (“Six Lines”)

Read

Sibir poeme (Yiddish book), By Avrom Sutzkever, with Illustrations by Marc Chagall

Listen

Translating Experimental Yiddish Poet Celia Dropkin (podcast): Translator Faith Jones talks about her published collection of Celia Dropkin's poems and reads some of the verses

אויסגעקליבן

Handpicked Miriam Borden

Miriam is a Toronto-based doctoral candidate in Yiddish studies and an award-winning collector of Yiddish educational materials. She's a big fan of our collections and was thrilled to share some of her favorites here. 

“Coney Island,” a Sound Poem by Victor Packer, Translated by Henry Sapoznik

This 1940s recording features Packer, a brilliant oddball of the Yiddish radio waves, reading his own wild, zany, visceral, poem. Follow along with a fabulous English translation by Henry Sapoznik.

Leḥaim Yidish! by Solomon (Shloime) Davidman

A short 52-page booklet—more like a scrapbook—containing letters of thanks, in both Yiddish and English, from institutions and individuals who purchased Shloime Davidman’s 1973 collection of essays and poems, “A Song to Yiddish." As you read through them, you can’t help but smile from ear to ear.

Idish amerike: zamlbukh (Yiddish America: Anthology), Noyekh Shteynberg, ed.

This 1929 anthology drips with the extravagance—and promise—of 1920s America. In true modernist style, the book features a rich interplay of image and text: among work by Moyshe Nadir, Moyshe Leyb Halpern, Hey Leyvik, and others, there are amazing art deco-style portraits of the writers, illustrations by Zuni Maud, photographs of work by Marc Chagall, and so much more.