Yiddish Book Center

06/22/2026

In honor of the World Cup, here’s an oral history clip from Yiddish cultural activist Linda Gritz, who shares the story of how her uncle may have nearly jumped overboard on their ship immigrating to the United States in order to save her father's beloved soccer ball.

Linda Gritz was interviewed by Christa Whitney on July 24, 2011 at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts. Watch the full interview here: https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/collections/oral-histories/interviews/woh-fi-0000186/linda-gritz-2011

06/18/2026

Celebrate Pride Month with a guided tour through the Yiddish Book Center’s exhibition! Our pride tours will explore the connections between language and gender, delve into representations of q***rness in Yiddish literature, theater, and press, and celebrate the contributions of q***r Yiddishists to the vibrant world of Yiddish today.

Pride tours will be offered at 2:00 p.m. on June 21, 23, 25, and 26.

06/16/2026

Step into the world of radicals, revolutionaries, romantic heroes, and miracle-working rabbis. These characters and more populated the dime novels and story pamphlets that gripped Yiddish speakers in what came to be known as the epidemic of the pamphlets.

Yiddish Pulp—Writing for the Masses is now on view in the Yiddish Book Center's Brechner Gallery. Learn more and plan your visit at the link in comments.

06/15/2026

Join us on Thursday, June 25, for a talk with Piotr Nazaruk, curator at Poland’s Grodzka Gate–NN Theatre. Piotr will the story behind his work with the discovery of a treasure trove of thousands of glass plates, which offer a glimpse into the everyday lives of Jews and Poles before 1939. Piotr will also speak on the vanished library of Yeshivas Chachmei Lublin, or Academy of the Sages of Lublin—one of the greatest mysteries from the postwar history of Lublin.

Learn more and register at the link in comments.

A nonprofit celebrating Yiddish language and culture.

06/12/2026

Work with us! The Yiddish Book Center seeks someone with German, Yiddish, and English language expertise to work as an independent contractor processing oral history interviews recorded in a combination of German and Yiddish.

More Information at bit.ly/YiddishGermanSpecialist

06/11/2026

See Levyosn perform at Yidstock this year! Get your tickets at the link in comments.

06/09/2026

Cows and tractors are both common sights in Amherst, but this book is about a different North American town with a surprising Yiddish connection: Edenbridge in Saskatchewan.

Edenbridge (an anglicized spelling of Yidn bridge—Jews bridge) was a Jewish farming colony established in 1906, just one year after Saskatchewan became a province. The Canadian government offered 160 acres of land for just $10 CAD (about $300 CAD today) to anyone willing to work the land, drawing settlers from around the world, including the small group of Lithuanian Jews living in South Africa who were to become Edenbridge's founding families. At its peak in the 1920s, the community numbered about 170 people, and students could learn both Yiddish and Hebrew in school. The land that once was Edenbridge is today a nature preserve, and, along with the cemetery and the synagogue, which is the oldest surviving one in Saskatchewan, is managed by the Saskatchewan Wildlife Federation.

This book, Oksn un motorn: zikhroynes fun idishn farmer-pioner (Oxen and Motors: Memoirs of a Jewish Farmer-Pioneer) by Mikhl Usishkin traces his experience in the colony from the first time it captured his imagination on the streets of London in 1910 to his first experience with woodcutting to visits by Yiddish writers.

06/05/2026

To hear more about Arthur Horwitz's story, register at the link in comments.

06/04/2026

Today is the 76th anniversary of the death of Pinkhes Kahanovitsh, better known by his pen name Der Nister (The Hidden One). Known for his surrealist short stories and his monumental family epic, The Family Mashber, he was one of the most significant Soviet Yiddish writers. Like many of his cohort, he was arrested in 1949 and sent to the Abez Camp, a GULAG in the far-north Russian Komi Republic. Among the other inmates there at the time were Shmuel Halkin, a Yiddish poet who had translated King Lear into Yiddish; Lina Prokofieva, a soprano and wife of the well-known Soviet composer; and Nikolay Punin, a prominent art scholar and husband of Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. Der Nister would die after just a year in the camp.

The book pictured here is Vidervuks (Regrowth) was published posthumously in 1969 by Sovetski Pisatel with cover design by Valeriy Lokshin. It is a collection of complex, often shocking, short stories about life before, during, and after the Holocaust.