Eyn shprakh iz keynmol nisht genug!*

Tucson Jewish Museum & Holocaust Center is thrilled to join the 2025 Yiddish Arts & Culture Initiative for Jewish Communities (YACI) cohort, a program of the Yiddish Book Center. The year-long program provides financial and curatorial support to organizations interested in exploring and presenting Yiddish culture, and fosters a deeper understanding of Yiddish’s relevance to Jewish history.

Cohort members from the U.S. and Canada gathered recently in Amherst, MA, to get a taste of all that the Yiddish Book Center (the Yidisher Bikher-Tsenter, or YBC) has to offer in terms of scholarship, resources, and educational programs.

The YBC was founded in 1980 by Aaron Lansky. As a twenty-four-year-old graduate student of Yiddish literature, Lansky realized that American-born Jews, unable to read the language of their parents and grandparents, were discarding scores of irreplaceable Yiddish books on a daily basis. He organized a nationwide network of  volunteer book collectors (“zamlers”) and launched a campaign to save the world's remaining Yiddish books. (His 2004 memoir, Outwitting History, is a very entertaining read.)

The Yiddish Book Center has since recovered more than 1.5 million volumes, and people around the world continue to contribute thousands of new books each year. But the YBC is so much more than just an archive. In addition to its hard copy, digital, and recorded collections, the Center supports summer programs for high school and college students; workshops for teachers; a translation fellowship; an English language magazine; and their own publishing imprint, the White Goat press.

The Center is also a remarkably beautiful place to visit. Situated in the middle of the apple orchard at Hampshire College, its roofline evokes that of an Eastern European shtetl. The center is home to permanent and travelling exhibits, a Yiddish book repository, educational programs, and Yidstock, an annual festival of new Yiddish music. The core exhibit, Yiddish: A Global Culture tells remarkable stories of migration, adaptation, innovation and enduring creativity, throughout 1,000 of history, while also celebrating the musicians, theater artists, writers, and graphic artists who are creating new works in Yiddish today. 

I learned so much in just a couple days, and I’m excited to see where this journey takes us. We will use this grant to celebrate the international, transcultural phenomenon that is Yiddish, and share Yiddish language and culture with a broader audience. And we hope you’ll share your stories! Is Yiddish your mameloshn (mother tongue)? Does hearing it evoke memories of parents or grandparents? Do you have a favorite song or favorite author? With your help, we’d love to create a picture of what Yiddish has looked like in Tucson.

You can learn more about the Yiddish Book Center, download books in Yiddish and translation, and access community programs at their website.

*One language is never enough!

YACI is made possible thanks to support from Debbie Mitzner and Wayne Miller in memory of Iris Mitzner.