The world’s first Yiddish museum, the Yiddish Book Center is home to permanent and visiting exhibits; two performance halls with a year-round schedule of public and educational programs; the annual Yidstock: The Festival of New Yiddish Music; an English-language bookstore; and a million Yiddish books. The Yiddish Book Center is a non-profit organization working to tell the whole Jewish story by rescuing, translating, and disseminating Yiddish books and presenting innovative educational programs that broaden understanding of modern Jewish identity.
They Called Me Mayer: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland before the Holocaust with Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett Register for the Zoom talk with Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett Mayer Kirshenblatt was born in 1916 and left Poland for Canada in 1934. He taught himself to paint at age 73 and made it his mission to remember the world […]
Curating Yiddish Culture with David Mazower Register for the Zoom talk with David Mazower Join us for a talk with David Mazower, the Yiddish Book Center’s research bibliographer and the chief curator and writer of the Center’s acclaimed permanent exhibition, Yiddish: A Global Culture. David will share his favorite objects and images from the exhibition, stories […]
How the Holocaust Changed the Yiddish Language, with Hannah Pollin-Galay Register for the Zoom livestream with Hannah Pollin-Galay During and immediately after World War II, Eastern European Jews perceived a radical transformation in the Yiddish language. This perception inspired some intellectuals to create dictionaries and glossaries that deciphered the metamorphosis of Yiddish words. Others incorporated […]
Chanukah, oy khaneke! Who knew that “menorah,” the familiar American Jewish term for the Hanukkah candelabrum, comes from Ladino? In Yiddish, the nine-branched candle holder is a khanike-lempl (Hanukkah lamp), and in Israeli Hebrew it’s a hanukia. That’s not the only linguistic confusion surrounding the Festival of Lights. According to Dovid Braun, “there are more […]
