The Yiddish Book Center's Decade of Discovery 2023
Decade of Discovery: Yiddish Around the World
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.
Yiddish Around the Word Virtual Programs and Recordings
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Translating the World
Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, translations of world literature carried Yiddish readers to places they had never been.
The Four Corners of the Earth: Yiddish Around the World
A look at Yiddish's global reach, from our Unquiet Pages online exhibit.
From Baltimore to Vilnius: Yiddish Stories from Around the World
Christa Whitney took the Wexler Oral History Project out of the Yiddish Book Center's studio and into the field. Whitney tells us about the interviews she conducted in cities from Baltimore to Vilnius, and why she loves the opportunity to ask important questions.
Sending Yiddish Books around the World
Catherine Madsen, former bibliographer at the Yiddish Book Center, tells how the Yiddish Book Center sends books around the world, to academic institutions and individuals.