Yiddish Book Center to Launch Major Core Exhibition This Fall

By Nicole Kagan, Globe Correspondent, June 13, 2023

Is there such a thing as modern Yiddish culture?

For years, staff at the Yiddish Book Center have fielded questions like this one — and the answer is a resounding yes. Now, the institution will unveil a new core exhibition this fall, “Yiddish: A Global Culture.”

“With this show, we want to change people’s understanding of the Yiddish world,” said Susan Bronson, executive director of the center. “Yiddish isn’t just about a few curse words — and it’s not dead.”

YBC President Aaron Lansky founded the center in 1980 with the mission of saving Yiddish books from dumpsters. His goal was to create a hub for cultural understanding and education. Since then, it has evolved into a multifaceted institution, with a digital library, public programming, and more than a million books.

This new exhibition will tell stories of migration, personal transformation, creativity, and ethnic solidarity through 350 objects. They include photographs, drawings, rare books, memorabilia, and personal effects from around the world. To prepare for the installation, the center will close to the public from July 30 to Oct. 15 for an extensive renovation.

“We’ve had core exhibitions with objects and artwork in the past, but this is such a big undertaking,” Bronson said. “It’s really at a level that we have never tried to reach before.”

According to the center, this effort will make it the first comprehensive museum of modern Yiddish culture in the world, though organizers didn’t necessarily set out to earn that distinction.

“It’s grown and snowballed and become more ambitious as we’ve worked on it,” said David Mazower, research bibliographer and editorial director at the center. “We just keep finding more extraordinary things.”

Mazower led the object search for the exhibition. Locating items that would illuminate figures central to the Yiddish story was his primary focus. His favorite object is a brown leather medicine ball that belonged to Sholem Asch, a famous Yiddish writer of the 1930s who also happens to be Mazower’s maternal great-grandfather.

“We’re telling stories that most people don’t grow up learning about,” Bronson said. “They don’t read books by these Yiddish writers who were revered during their day. They don’t know that there were famous people on the Yiddish stage that were really true celebrities. They don’t know about the incredible world of the Yiddish press. I think people will be amazed by what they learn.”

Mazower and the curatorial team organized the objects into displays according to themes, including women’s voices, celebrities, theater, press and politics, and the Holocaust. Interactive elements, including audio and video stations showcasing playlists of Yiddish music and archival videos, will be sprinkled throughout the exhibition. And visitors will be able to walk through a re-creation of writer I.L. Peretz’s Warsaw apartment.

According to Lansky, the exhibition’s target audience is everyone.

“We wanted to make it accessible for those who can’t read a single word of Yiddish or don’t know a single letter of the Hebrew alphabet,” he said.

When the exhibition debuts, Lansky expects people will have the same reaction as they did when the center first opened over 40 years ago: “Who knew?”

See fully illustrated article at the Boston Globe.