Yiddish Book Center

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Support the Conservation of our Yiddish Books–A Glimpse of Collections Items in Need of Repair

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A new translation from White Goat Press–Seeds in the Desert by Mendel Mann, translated by Heather Valencia

Rainy city outside window
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"The Ballad of Old Harlequin" by Itzik Manger, translated by Lawrence Rosenwald

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Supporting a New Generation in Honor of the Old

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New on The Shmooze: Re-Reading Bellow, Roth, Malamud, Ozick, and Other Great Jewish Writers

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Yiddish Dictionaries, Large and Small

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The Yiddish Book Center's Weekend Program: The Plays of Sholem Asch

מכּוח

A Focus On Sholem Asch, Yiddish Literature's First Modern Celebrity

Sometimes referred to as Yiddish literature’s first modern celebrity, Sholem Asch’s prolific output of novels and plays included bestsellers in English translation and smash hits on the Yiddish stages of Warsaw and New York. While he is best-known today for his play Got fun nekome (God of Vengeance), which provided the inspiration for Paula Vogel’s Tony-Award winning production Indecent, Asch wrote over twenty more plays exploring Jewish life, past and present, through themes of interfaith love, the Jewish underworld, Messianic dreams, and class and power in the Jewish world. These pieces from our collections, including an article by Yiddish Book Center Bibliographer, and Sholem Asch's great-grandson, David Mazower, and an interview with Asch translator and actor Caraid O'Brien—both of whom will be speakers at our upcoming weekend program, The Plays of Sholem Asch—illuminate Asch's distinctive personality and vision. 

 

Sholem Asch
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"Tug-of-War: Sholem Asch and His Translators"

Sholem Asch
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The Artistry of Sholem Asch

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Four Questions for Caraid O'Brien

אויסגעקליבן

Handpicked Josh Lambert

The Yiddish Book Center's Academic Director, Josh Lambert is the author of Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture, and American Jewish Fiction: A JPS Guide. His reviews and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Haaretz, the Forward, the Globe and Mail, and many academic journals. Josh is constantly searching our collections for material for his teaching and writing. Here are some of his latest finds. 

Der Yidish-Amerikaner redner

You might not be able to use any of these speeches word-for-word at your next family celebration, but if you’d like to know what people sounded like when they spoke at Jewish weddings, funerals, and bar mitzvahs in the early-20th-century U.S., you could do worse than to browse this extensive trilingual collection.

Di goldene medineh

There are plenty of books containing illustrations and cartoons by William Gropper in the Center’s online collections, but this book—ironically titled to reflect the artist’s sharp political critiques of U.S. politics and culture—is wall-to-wall Gropper, and a delight on every page.

The Artist as Dreamer

Come for the words of welcome in four languages—Yiddish, Hebrew, French, and English—and stay to listen to Cynthia Ozick, talking with characteristic verve and passion about Jacob Wasserman, Osip Mandelshtam, Anton Checkhov, the PLO, and much more. You may not agree with everything Ozick says, but you’ll wish you’d been there, in Montreal, in 1980, to hear her.