The Yiddish Book Center's Decade of Discovery 2023

The Decade of Discovery is the Yiddish Book Center’s initiative designed to foster a deeper understanding of Yiddish culture. Launched in 2020 to celebrate the Center’s 40th anniversary, the Center selects a theme each year around which we curate and share content from our collections, present public programs, host special events, develop educational programs, and launch exhibits. The theme for the Yiddish Book Center’s 2023 Decade of Discovery is Yiddish Around the World.

Yiddish Around the World will illuminate the vibrant and cosmopolitan world of Yiddish literature, theater, art, and music and its interaction with the modern world. While Yiddish culture is sometimes viewed as a marginal phenomenon, Yiddish Around the World will reframe it as a transnational civilization at the heart of many of the key events and debates of the modern era. It will showcase the importance of migration and exile as formative experiences for both writers and readers and illuminate Yiddish culture by highlighting the breadth of its creators and consumers.

Yiddish Around the World is also the inspiration for our major new core exhibition, Yiddish: A Global Culture, which opens October 15, 2023. This will be the world’s only permanent exhibition focusing exclusively on modern Yiddish culture and will highlight the extraordinary range of literature, theater, and music created in Yiddish since the late 19th century.

The Yiddish Book Center’s Decade of Discovery is made possible in part by a grant from the Leona and Ralph W. Kern Foundation.