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

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Focus on Chaim Grade, Newly Digitized Works by the Yiddish Author

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Learn About In eynem: The New Yiddish Textbook

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Simon's Retreat, By Simon Levinson, Translated from the Yiddish and Adapted by Myra Mniewski

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Decade of Discovery 2021: Yiddish and Social Justice

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Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett in Conversation

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

Decade of Discovery Yiddish and Social Justice

The Decade of Discovery is an initiative launched by the Yiddish Book Center with the aim of fostering a deeper understanding of Yiddish and modern Jewish culture. Our focus for 2021 is Yiddish and Social Justice. In celebration of this theme, we're spotlighting a conversation between scholars and translators about race and social justice in Yiddish literature, a podcast interview with contemporary Yiddish singer and social activist Isabel Frey, and two translated Yiddish poems denouncing fascisim through the language of folktale.

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Yiddish Singer and Social Activist Isabel Frey

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"The Brown Dragon Has Flown" and "Once Upon a Time There Was a King," By Leyzer Wolf, Translated by Sarah Ponichtera

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Reading Yiddish Literature in a Time of National Reckoning, A Panel Discussion Moderated by Rachel Rubinstein

אויסגעקליבן

Handpicked Zackary Sholem Berger

Zackary is a medical doctor by profession and a multilingual poet and Yiddish translator who enjoys exploring our digital Yiddish collections. He shares a few of his favorites here.

Stezshkes tsvishn moyern: lider (Footpaths Amid Stone Walls) 

Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman was the first Yiddish poet I met when I moved to New York and someone I looked up to. While well known in Yiddish music circles for her art songs and renditions of folk songs, her poetry is underappreciated: dark, witty, and deliberate chronicles of her peregrinations across continents and her keen painter's eye. 

In Nyu-York (In New York)

As I was first learning Yiddish in my teens and twenties, I read over and over again the searing, cynical work of Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, whose "In New York" lent an immigrant's gaze to the city I ended up moving to. "Benk aheym un has dayn heymland," snarled Halpern: "yearn for home and hate your homeland."

Aaron Glanz-Leyeless Reads from His Work and Is Interviewed by Abraham Tabachnick Part 1

A poet I still need to translate more of is Arn Glants-Leyeles, who I called elsewhere the "virtuoso of loneliness." He was a formalist who believed in high Yiddish culture even as he praised the American prairies and cities and their vernacular. A. Tabachnik's interviews with literary figures are a high point for me of the Yiddish Book Center site. His interview with Glants-Leyeles in 1955 is worth it for the latter's careful, deliberate readings of his own work.