Resources for Before and After Your Visit

Materials to Help You Prepare for Your Visit to the Yiddish Book Center

We look forward to welcoming you and your students to the Yiddish Book Center. Here are some resources to help contextualize the content and themes you’ll encounter during your field trip.

• First, we encourage you to talk with your students about definitions of some terms you’ll hear during your visit:

Jew: a member of the people whose traditional religion is Judaism and who trace their origins back through the ancient Hebrew people of Israel to Abraham. Today, many people who do not practice traditional religious Judaism still consider themselves Jewish and connect to their heritage through things like languages, literature, and celebrations. This is sometimes referred to as “cultural Judaism.”

Ashkenazi Jews: a Jewish diaspora population that became distinct as a community more than a thousand years ago. They settled and established communities in Central and Eastern Europe.

Judaism: the religion of the Jewish people, based on belief in one God. The primary text is the Torah (also known as the Five Books of Moses or the Pentateuch), which is part of the Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible (known in Christianity as the Old Testament).

Yiddish: a Germanic language spoken by Ashkenazi Jews, originally in Central Europe, later mostly in Eastern Europe, and eventually all over the world by the descendants of these Jews. Yiddish contains elements from Hebrew, Aramaic, and Slavic and Romance languages and is written in the Hebrew alphabet.

You can learn more about the terms “Jew” and “Judaism” from articles in the Jewish Encyclopedia. For more about the Yiddish language and its history, visit this YIVO Encyclopedia article.

• Next, watch our orientation film, Bridge of Books, with your students. The film includes some concepts and phrases that may be new to students and could lead to fruitful discussions, such as:
  • What does “portable homeland” mean?
  • What is a penny postcard?
  • What does Aaron Lansky mean when he says that we’re ready to “dredge the harbor”?
     
• After watching the film, you may want to explore Ashkenazi Jewish life and history more deeply. These resources would be particularly helpful for classes focusing on Jewish heritage and cultural preservation or pre- and post-Holocaust Jewish life:
  • For a comprehensive introduction to Jewish history and culture in Eastern Europe, visit the Educational Program on Yiddish Culture. The website is divided into “Lives,” “Places,” and “Culture” and is geared towards students. Don’t forget to check out the excellent maps.
  • The YIVO Encyclopedia has a page for educators with lesson plans and links to relevant articles.
  • The An-ski Expedition helps students understand Jewish cultural life in Eastern Europe in the early 1900s.
  • Shtetl Routes helps students visualize synagogues and towns.
  • The Teach Great Jewish Books resource kit “Kheyder Days” explores Jewish education, particularly in Eastern Europe.
• For classes focusing on immigration, here are some helpful resources:
  • Explore the Ellis Island Immigration Timeline.
  • The YIVO Encyclopedia’s entry on “assimilation” considers the acculturation, integration, emancipation, and secularization of Jews in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
  • Discuss the dilemmas faced by Jews and other immigrants through the Teach Great Jewish Books resource kit for “The Loudest Voice,” Grace Paley’s story about a young Jewish girl who is asked to be the narrator of her school’s Christmas pageant. 
  • In “An Irreplaceable Yiddish Experience,” Judith Elbaum Schumer describes how her father encouraged his children to use Yiddish whenever possible—and why this experience is hard to replicate today.
  • Read this letter, translated from the Bintel Brief (“Bundle of Letters”), an advice column published in the Forward newspaper. What role did immigration play in the young man’s dilemma? What advice would you give him?
     
• If your group is eating lunch here at the Yiddish Book Center, some students may be curious about why we asked that they not bring pork or shellfish. Here’s an introduction to kashrus—Jewish dietary laws—and to which animals are kosher. We can also talk about Jewish dietary traditions during the visit.

Materials for After Your Visit to the Yiddish Book Center

While we covered a lot of ground together during your visit, it was only an introduction to the world of Eastern European Jewry and Yiddish. Here are some resources to help you continue the conversation in your classroom:

• Practice Your Yiddish:
  • Play with YiddishPOP, an online, interactive Yiddish-language learning program featuring a robot.
     
• Listen to Yiddish Music:
  • The blog Yiddish Song of the Week features field recordings of traditional Yiddish folksingers from around the world.
  • The Judaic Collection in the Recorded Sound Archives at Florida Atlantic University is a treasure trove of classical klezmer music and Yiddish songs that you can search by performer, track, or album.
  • The contemporary band Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird has been described as a “mixture of klezmer, radical Yiddish song, political cabaret, and punk folk.”
  • Yiddish Princess sets Yiddish songs to 1980s-style rock music. The lyrics of one of their songs, “Ver vet blaybn,” is a famous poem by Avrom Sutzkever.
  • Josh Dolgin, aka Socalled, is a Canadian rap and hip-hop artist. One of his hits is a remake of an old song, “Baleboste zisinke.”
  • Hans Breuer, an Austrian shepherd, discusses his connection to both Yiddish song and the refugee crisis in Europe in this interview.
     
• Explore Poetry and Prose:
  • Read about the famous Yiddish writer I.L. Peretz and some of his work in this 1947 Yiddish-English bilingual edition of his stories.
  • Learn about author Sholem Aleichem, the creator of “Tevye the Milkman” (the precursor to Fiddler on the Roof), and listen to some of his stories in English translation.
  • Read poetry and prose by the famous Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever.
  • Consider the complexities in Kadia Molodowsky's poem “El khanun” (“God of Mercy”) through this Teach Great Jewish Books resource kit. Molodowsky was a Yiddish poet whose career spanned almost fifty years.
• Delve into Films and Photos:
  • Yiddish films are available for purchase through our bookstore. Please be in touch with Sami Keats, our bookstore manager, at 413-256-4900, ext. 107, or at bookstore@yiddishbookcenter.org. The full version of The Dybbuk (in Yiddish with English subtitles) can be viewed online here. It's a story of spirit possession produced in 1937 that's not to be missed.
  • The Center for Jewish History has pre-World War II films available on its website, while the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research has an online catalogue of photographs. 
     
• Dig into Archival Materials:
  • Find links to websites focused on Jewish life in Poland through the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, and maps, audio, video, photographs, exhibitions, and collections at the YIVO Digital Archive on Jewish Life in Poland. 
  • Yizkor books commemorate communities destroyed in the Holocaust and are an important source of information about interwar Jewish life. Listen to translator Mindle Crystel Gross explain these literary memorials, and access Yizkor books through the New York Public Library's website. JewishGen also has a large collection of Yizkor books in English translation.
     
• Conduct Oral History Interviews:
  • For inspiration, watch excerpts or full-length oral history interviews from the Wexler Oral History Project on the Yiddish Book Center's website.
  • Then use “The Oral Historian's Field Guide” you received on your visit to conduct oral history interviews with friends, family, and community members. Don't forget to take some time to debrief and reflect on the experience afterwards.