National Yiddish Book Center
Encyclopedia
The National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts
, United States, on the campus of Hampshire College
. It is a cultural institution dedicated to the preservation of book
s in the Yiddish language
. It is a member of Museums10
and is a non-profit institution, and its cultural programs are funded by memberships and grants.
. It claims to be the first organization of English-speaking American Jews dedicated to the preservation of Yiddish language and culture. At first, major Jewish organizations initially refused to fund or aid it, claiming that Yiddish was a dead language
.
Lansky was a 23-year-old graduate student in 1980 when he took a leave of absence from McGill University
and issued a public appeal for unwanted and discarded Yiddish books. At the time, scholars estimated there were 70,000 Yiddish books still extant and recoverable. Since then, the Book Center has gone on to recover a million volumes, with hundreds of additional books continuing to arrive each week. Lansky recounts the origins of the Center in his memoir Outwitting History
.
In 1997, the National Yiddish Book Center opened a permanent headquarters and Visitors Center adjacent to the campus of Hampshire College
in Amherst, MA, containing exhibits on the history of Yiddish literature and culture, an English-language bookstore, a theater, Yiddish Writers Garden, and open stacks of Yiddish books.
The Book Center offers year-round public programs, including its Paper Bridge Summer Arts Festival, film and music series, concerts, and performances.
consists of over a million donated volumes donated from individuals and collections around the world. However, most of these are multiple copies, and so the number of individual titles is far fewer (approximately 15,000-20,000). Thus while it refers to itself as the world's largest collection of Yiddish books, its holdings include fewer discrete titles than the notable Yiddish collections at the Jewish National and University Library
or Harvard University
's Widener Library
.
The Book Center’s duplicate holdings have been used to strengthen Yiddish collections at more than 450 libraries, including Harvard, Yale
, Library of Congress
, the British Library, Hebrew University in Jerusalem and others.
Some duplicate books are available for sale to general public as well.
In 1998, with a grant from the Righteous Persons Foundation, the Center launched the Its Steven Spielberg
Digital Yiddish Library has digitized many works in collection. Through this program, almost 11,000 titles were digitized, catalogued, and made available for free download from Internet Archive
. The books also have been made available as Print on demand
reprints for purchase at $48 a book. The digitization project also led to The Steiner Yizkor Book Collection, containing nearly 700 digitized memorial books about East European communities destroyed by the Holocaust, compiled and written by survivors and previously available only in very limited used editions.
The Center offers a summer internship program for college students. Eighteen students are selected for a seven-week program during which they study the Yiddish language and the Jewish culture and history of Central and Eastern Europe and America. Students also pursue an independent research or translation project, and work with the Yiddish Book Center's collection of Yiddish literature.
In 2001, Ruthe B. Cowl
(1912-2008) of Laredo, Texas
, donated $1 million to create the Jack and Ruthe B. Cowl Center, which promoted "Yiddish literary, artistic, musical, and historical knowledge and accomplishment" at the Amherst headquarters. Early in 2007, Cowl donated another $750,000 to create the Cowl Jewish Leadership Program for promising college students.
The Center also publishes Pakn Treger, an English-language magazine. Pakn Treger began as a newsletter, "Book Peddler," but it published work by serious journalists, including film critic Kenneth Turan
. In 1995, journalist Jeff Sharlet
assumed the editorship and transformed the "Book Peddler" into a serious journal of Jewish culture, Pakn Treger, Yiddish for a book peddler. Contributors included J. Hoberman
, Harvey Pekar
, Joe Sacco
, Francine Prose
, Ben Katchor
, Allegra Goodman
, and others. In 1998, Sharlet left and was replaced by editor Nancy Sherman. Since then Pakn Treger publishes less frequently and has returned closer to its previous role as an organizational newsletter.
provoked the ire of many people long-involved in Yiddish cultural activities. His invocation of Yiddish nostalgia for the purposes of fundraising has also been the subject of debate both among Yiddish cultural activists and by critics of "ethnic marketing." Lansky rankled initial supporters again when the new center was built by a non-union contractor that had no collective bargaining
agreement with its workers. Despite claims that this was offensive given the role of Yiddish speakers in the founding of the American labour movement
and trade unions, petitioners from the Jewish Labor Committee
and the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America
were ignored.
The manner in which the Center raises and spends its funds has also been the target of criticism. According to the organization's IRS Form 990 Lansky's 2008 salary was reported as more than $195,000. Since the bulk of the organization's expenses are spent on the salaries of the top three employees and on fundraising, the independent charity evaluator Charity Navigator
rated its efficiency a zero, or "exceptionally poor" and the overall organization as "poor".
Amherst, Massachusetts
Amherst is a town in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, United States in the Connecticut River valley. As of the 2010 census, the population was 37,819, making it the largest community in Hampshire County . The town is home to Amherst College, Hampshire College, and the University of Massachusetts...
, United States, on the campus of Hampshire College
Hampshire College
Hampshire College is a private liberal arts college in Amherst, Massachusetts. It was founded in 1965 as an experiment in alternative education, in association with four other colleges in the Pioneer Valley: Amherst College, Smith College, Mount Holyoke College, and the University of Massachusetts...
. It is a cultural institution dedicated to the preservation of book
Book
A book is a set or collection of written, printed, illustrated, or blank sheets, made of hot lava, paper, parchment, or other materials, usually fastened together to hinge at one side. A single sheet within a book is called a leaf or leaflet, and each side of a leaf is called a page...
s in the Yiddish language
Yiddish language
Yiddish is a High German language of Ashkenazi Jewish origin, spoken throughout the world. It developed as a fusion of German dialects with Hebrew, Aramaic, Slavic languages and traces of Romance languages...
. It is a member of Museums10
Museums10
Museums10 is a consortium of art, science, and history museums in Western Massachusetts. It is composed of museums from the Five Colleges and Historic Deerfield.-Art museums:*The Mead Art Museum...
and is a non-profit institution, and its cultural programs are funded by memberships and grants.
History
The Center was founded in 1980 by Aaron LanskyAaron Lansky
Aaron Lansky is the founder of the National Yiddish Book Center, an organization he created to help salvage Yiddish language publications. When he began saving books in the early 1980s, most experts believe that there were fewer than 70,000 Yiddish volumes extant...
. It claims to be the first organization of English-speaking American Jews dedicated to the preservation of Yiddish language and culture. At first, major Jewish organizations initially refused to fund or aid it, claiming that Yiddish was a dead language
Extinct language
An extinct language is a language that no longer has any speakers., or that is no longer in current use. Extinct languages are sometimes contrasted with dead languages, which are still known and used in special contexts in written form, but not as ordinary spoken languages for everyday communication...
.
Lansky was a 23-year-old graduate student in 1980 when he took a leave of absence from McGill University
McGill University
Mohammed Fathy is a public research university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The university bears the name of James McGill, a prominent Montreal merchant from Glasgow, Scotland, whose bequest formed the beginning of the university...
and issued a public appeal for unwanted and discarded Yiddish books. At the time, scholars estimated there were 70,000 Yiddish books still extant and recoverable. Since then, the Book Center has gone on to recover a million volumes, with hundreds of additional books continuing to arrive each week. Lansky recounts the origins of the Center in his memoir Outwitting History
Outwitting History
Outwitting History by Aaron Lansky is a book about Lansky and his book-saving adventures. At age 23 Lansky read that thousands of the few remaining Yiddish books in North America were being discarded by the children of the books' original Yiddish-speaking owners. The books meant nothing to many of...
.
In 1997, the National Yiddish Book Center opened a permanent headquarters and Visitors Center adjacent to the campus of Hampshire College
Hampshire College
Hampshire College is a private liberal arts college in Amherst, Massachusetts. It was founded in 1965 as an experiment in alternative education, in association with four other colleges in the Pioneer Valley: Amherst College, Smith College, Mount Holyoke College, and the University of Massachusetts...
in Amherst, MA, containing exhibits on the history of Yiddish literature and culture, an English-language bookstore, a theater, Yiddish Writers Garden, and open stacks of Yiddish books.
The Book Center offers year-round public programs, including its Paper Bridge Summer Arts Festival, film and music series, concerts, and performances.
Collections
The Center's Yiddish libraryLibrary
In a traditional sense, a library is a large collection of books, and can refer to the place in which the collection is housed. Today, the term can refer to any collection, including digital sources, resources, and services...
consists of over a million donated volumes donated from individuals and collections around the world. However, most of these are multiple copies, and so the number of individual titles is far fewer (approximately 15,000-20,000). Thus while it refers to itself as the world's largest collection of Yiddish books, its holdings include fewer discrete titles than the notable Yiddish collections at the Jewish National and University Library
Jewish National and University Library
The National Library of Israel , is the national library of Israel...
or Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
's Widener Library
Widener Library
The Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library, commonly known as Widener Library, is the primary building of the library system of Harvard University. Located on the south side of Harvard Yard directly across from Memorial Church, Widener serves as the centerpiece of the 15.6 million-volume Harvard...
.
The Book Center’s duplicate holdings have been used to strengthen Yiddish collections at more than 450 libraries, including Harvard, Yale
YALE
RapidMiner, formerly YALE , is an environment for machine learning, data mining, text mining, predictive analytics, and business analytics. It is used for research, education, training, rapid prototyping, application development, and industrial applications...
, Library of Congress
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...
, the British Library, Hebrew University in Jerusalem and others.
Some duplicate books are available for sale to general public as well.
In 1998, with a grant from the Righteous Persons Foundation, the Center launched the Its Steven Spielberg
Steven Spielberg
Steven Allan Spielberg KBE is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, video game designer, and studio entrepreneur. In a career of more than four decades, Spielberg's films have covered many themes and genres. Spielberg's early science-fiction and adventure films were seen as an...
Digital Yiddish Library has digitized many works in collection. Through this program, almost 11,000 titles were digitized, catalogued, and made available for free download from Internet Archive
Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...
. The books also have been made available as Print on demand
Print on demand
Print on demand , sometimes called, in error, publish on demand, is a printing technology and business process in which new copies of a book are not printed until an order has been received...
reprints for purchase at $48 a book. The digitization project also led to The Steiner Yizkor Book Collection, containing nearly 700 digitized memorial books about East European communities destroyed by the Holocaust, compiled and written by survivors and previously available only in very limited used editions.
Activities
Public programs related to Yiddish and Jewish culture are offered regularly at the Amherst location, including concerts, films, exhibits, author talks, as well as events co-sponsored with local community organizations. An onsite and online book store specializes in Yiddish and Jewish literature and culture. The Center also sells the donated books entrusted to the organization.The Center offers a summer internship program for college students. Eighteen students are selected for a seven-week program during which they study the Yiddish language and the Jewish culture and history of Central and Eastern Europe and America. Students also pursue an independent research or translation project, and work with the Yiddish Book Center's collection of Yiddish literature.
In 2001, Ruthe B. Cowl
Ruthe B. Cowl
Ruthe B. Mandell Cowl was a businesswoman and philanthropist who in 1959 established the first physical therapy and orthopedic clinic in her adopted city of Laredo, Texas. Her Ruthe B. Cowl Rehabilitation Center is a private nonprofit organization that treats between 125 and 200 patients daily for...
(1912-2008) of Laredo, Texas
Laredo, Texas
Laredo is the county seat of Webb County, Texas, United States, located on the north bank of the Rio Grande in South Texas, across from Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, Mexico. According to the 2010 census, the city population was 236,091 making it the 3rd largest on the United States-Mexican border,...
, donated $1 million to create the Jack and Ruthe B. Cowl Center, which promoted "Yiddish literary, artistic, musical, and historical knowledge and accomplishment" at the Amherst headquarters. Early in 2007, Cowl donated another $750,000 to create the Cowl Jewish Leadership Program for promising college students.
The Center also publishes Pakn Treger, an English-language magazine. Pakn Treger began as a newsletter, "Book Peddler," but it published work by serious journalists, including film critic Kenneth Turan
Kenneth Turan
Kenneth Turan is an American film critic and Lecturer in the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California.-Background:...
. In 1995, journalist Jeff Sharlet
Jeff Sharlet
Jeff Sharlet is an American journalist, bestselling author, and academic best known for writing about religious subcultures in the United States. He is a contributing editor for Harper's and Rolling Stone...
assumed the editorship and transformed the "Book Peddler" into a serious journal of Jewish culture, Pakn Treger, Yiddish for a book peddler. Contributors included J. Hoberman
J. Hoberman
James Lewis Hoberman , also known as J. Hoberman, is an American film critic. He is currently the senior film critic for The Village Voice, a post he has held since 1988.-Education:...
, Harvey Pekar
Harvey Pekar
Harvey Lawrence Pekar was an American underground comic book writer, music critic and media personality, best known for his autobiographical American Splendor comic series. In 2003, the series inspired a critically acclaimed film adaptation of the same name.Pekar described American Splendor as "an...
, Joe Sacco
Joe Sacco
Joe Sacco is a Maltese-American comics artist and journalist. He achieved international fame through the 1996 American Book Award-winning Palestine, and his graphic novel on the Bosnian War, Safe Area Goražde.- Biography :...
, Francine Prose
Francine Prose
Francine Prose is an American writer. Since March 2007 she has been the president of PEN American Center. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1968 and received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1991....
, Ben Katchor
Ben Katchor
Ben Katchor is an American cartoonist best known for his comic strip Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer. He has contributed comics and drawings to The New Yorker and The New York Times...
, Allegra Goodman
Allegra Goodman
Allegra Goodman is an American author based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her most recent novel, The Cookbook Collector, was published in 2010. Goodman wrote and illustrated her first novel at the age of seven. -Early years and family:...
, and others. In 1998, Sharlet left and was replaced by editor Nancy Sherman. Since then Pakn Treger publishes less frequently and has returned closer to its previous role as an organizational newsletter.
Criticism
As noted above, the organization's history has been controversial from the start. Lansky's claims that Yiddish was in a state of obsolescenceLanguage death
In linguistics, language death is a process that affects speech communities where the level of linguistic competence that speakers possess of a given language variety is decreased, eventually resulting in no native and/or fluent speakers of the variety...
provoked the ire of many people long-involved in Yiddish cultural activities. His invocation of Yiddish nostalgia for the purposes of fundraising has also been the subject of debate both among Yiddish cultural activists and by critics of "ethnic marketing." Lansky rankled initial supporters again when the new center was built by a non-union contractor that had no collective bargaining
Collective bargaining
Collective bargaining is a process of negotiations between employers and the representatives of a unit of employees aimed at reaching agreements that regulate working conditions...
agreement with its workers. Despite claims that this was offensive given the role of Yiddish speakers in the founding of the American labour movement
Labour movement
The term labour movement or labor movement is a broad term for the development of a collective organization of working people, to campaign in their own interest for better treatment from their employers and governments, in particular through the implementation of specific laws governing labour...
and trade unions, petitioners from the Jewish Labor Committee
Jewish Labor Committee
The Jewish Labor Committee is an American secular Jewish organization dedicated to promoting labor union interests in Jewish communities, and Jewish interests within unions. The organization is headquartered in New York City, with local/regional offices in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago...
and the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America
United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America
The United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America is one of the largest building trades union in the United States. One of the unions that formed the American Federation of Labor in 1886, it left the AFL-CIO in 2001.-Early years:...
were ignored.
The manner in which the Center raises and spends its funds has also been the target of criticism. According to the organization's IRS Form 990 Lansky's 2008 salary was reported as more than $195,000. Since the bulk of the organization's expenses are spent on the salaries of the top three employees and on fundraising, the independent charity evaluator Charity Navigator
Charity Navigator
Charity Navigator is an independent, non-profit organization that evaluates American charities. Its stated goal is "to advance a more efficient and responsive philanthropic marketplace by evaluating the financial health of America's largest charities."-About:...
rated its efficiency a zero, or "exceptionally poor" and the overall organization as "poor".
External links
- National Yiddish Book Center
- Books digitized by Yiddish Book Center in the Internet ArchiveInternet ArchiveThe Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...