Closed for Rosh Hashanah
We close at noon on Wednesday, October 2 for Rosh Hashanah. We will re-open on Sunday, October 6.
Yiddish Book Center
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פֿרישע נײַעס Now
Tsukunft: The Future | Our 50th Anniversary Campaign
On View | Yiddish: A Global Culture
Bronx Bohemians Blog
Film Screening and Director Talkback | The Last New Yorker, with Harvey Wang | Sunday, October 20, @ 2:00 p.m. at the Yiddish Book Center
The Shmooze: Yiddish: A Global Culture live on Bloomberg Connects
Donor Profile: Helen Pollack
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Focus On The Zeitlin Family Legacy
Yiddish literature can often seem like a family affair. Literary parents give rise to literary offspring. Writerly siblings vie with one another for prominence. While there are numerous examples to draw on—the most famous of these, the Singers, I’ve written about before—one of my favorite families of Yiddish writers is the Zeitlins. Hillel Zeitlin (1871–1942) was a prominent prewar Yiddish journalist, writer, and editor who made a name for himself popularizing, and in some ways reinventing, Hasidism in the twentieth century. His son Arn—sometimes spelled Aaron—Zeitlin (1898–1973) became a celebrated Yiddish poet, both before and after the Holocaust. And though less famous than his father or brother, Elkhonen Zeitlin (1902–1941) was also an accomplished writer and editor and a mainstay of Warsaw Yiddish journalism. Let’s take a look at this illustrious family.
אויסגעקליבן Handpicked Randi Silnutzer
Each month, the Yiddish Book Center asks a member of our staff or a friend to select favorite stories, books, interviews, or articles from our online collections. This month, we’re excited to share with you picks by Randi Silnutzer, the director of operations at the Yiddish Book Center.
Adrienne Cooper: Song-teaching in the Former Soviet Union
In this excerpt from the Center’s Wexler Oral History Project, legendary Yiddish singer Adrienne Cooper z”l talks about the experience of teaching Yiddish music and culture in the former Soviet Union. She speaks about how the participants had just a “fine thread” that connected them to their history, describes how thirsty they were for learning more, and notes that “had our families not emigrated, we would have been these people.”
Collecting Yiddish Zines
The Center’s new permanent exhibition, Yiddish: A Global Culture, not only looks at the geographic range of Yiddish but also at its expression across time periods and genres. The curators were very intentional in including a collection of Yiddish “zines”—contemporary, often self-published booklets of literature and art. In this article, former Yiddish Book Center fellow Maya Gonzalez explores the variety of themes in Yiddish zines. It’s a perfect example—with striking visuals—of Yiddish creative expression continuing to adapt and thrive in the present day.
Socalled Demo (Yidstock video)
I happened to be in attendance at this workshop in 2008, where Josh Dolgin (aka Socalled) talked about his early interest in hip-hop music and how he began to discover and incorporate old recordings of Yiddish theater and klezmer music. Right there on the stage, he showed us how he took samples from different recordings and looped them in with a hip-hop beat and his own singing to create something that was both wildly new and historically resonant.
Reading the Readers
In the Center’s membership department, we regularly receive calls from long-time supporters who want to make sure we know they’ve been “a member since the very beginning.” Many of them have also donated their own Yiddish books or the contents of their parents’ or grandparents’ libraries. This “From the Vault” article takes a look at the stories behind the books in our collection and provides a visceral feel for how deeply personal they truly are.
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