Evolution is a process that can take many millennia, if not longer. For a scholarly organization like the Yiddish cultural archive and institution YIVO, the process took only a century.
YIVO (the Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institute, or Yiddish Scientific Institute) marks its 100th anniversary in 2025, and one would be forgiven for thinking the birthday might be an elegy.
However, this would be wrong. Despite the decline of Yiddish speakers across the globe, YIVO has experienced an unexpected second wind as it enters its second century.
From her position at the Center for Jewish History at 15 W. 16thth St., YIVO exhibitions are attracting record numbers. A few years ago, the institute began digitizing its archive, which has attracted about 350,000 visitors a year. Thousands tune in to his online lectures on Yiddish poets, international terrorism and a host of other topics.
Once upon a time, Yiddish was the lingua franca of the Jews of Eastern Europe. Beginning in the 1880s, millions of Jews carried it with them across Ellis Island and into the tenements of the Lower East Side, or the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. By 1870, there were about 60,000 Jews in New York City, according to Irving Howe’s The World of Our Fathers, but by 1910 that number had grown to 1.1 million. With these immigrants, Yiddish theater, Yiddish newspapers, Yiddish lettering in shop windows appeared to make this slang dialect a force in the city. In 1915, for example, New York’s daily Yiddish newspaper had a circulation of over 600,000. It was a golden age of Yiddish, which began to decline after World War II.
Despite this decline, YIVO has continued to stand as the city’s—if not the world’s—leading scholarly institution for the study and preservation of Yiddish language and culture. And, in what seems like a supreme irony, technology has been perhaps one of the main factors in the revival of Yiddish at a time when many had written it off as slowly dying out.
Naturally, the topic of Yiddish health is a hot one among Yiddishists. “It’s always the phoenix,” said Jonathan Brent, CEO of YIVO. “Dying and being reborn.”
“They’ve probably been talking about the death of Yiddish not for 100 years, but for 200 years,” said Saul Noam Zaritt, an associate professor at Harvard. When this reporter casually mentioned that Yiddish was eroding in America, he was politely (but firmly) corrected by Professor Kalman Weiser of York University, who is in the middle of writing a history of YIVO. “That’s not objectively true,” Weiser said.
While Yiddish may no longer dominate the signage of Hester Street—and while the names of Yiddish actors like Boris Thomashefsky or Molly Picon are known to an increasingly narrow sector of the public—Yiddish itself is still spoken in America among many Hasidic Jews, often. as a first language. Indeed, according to data from the Department of Jewish Studies at Rutgers, there are about 250,000 Yiddish speakers in America today.
This is not to say that the Yiddish language has not experienced a decline. “There were four to five million Jews in the US in 1940—about 1.5 to 2 million of them had some facility with Yiddish,” says Weiser. This was not a population of Orthodox or Hasidic Jews, necessarily, but Jews who were in many cases thoroughly secular and involved in the Bundist, Bolshevik, anarchist and Zionist movements (although Zionism eventually turned to speaking Hebrew). A literary movement was being created by Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer and Sholem Aleichem, whose stories Tevye the Dairyman would make a spectacular breakthrough in the popular imagination with its Broadway adaptation Fiddler on the Roof.
As the generation that survived the Holocaust began to die off—and the number of native, secular speakers of Yiddish dwindled—the great fear was that Yiddish culture would fade into oblivion. But it was not like that.
“The movement to bring the youth [into YIVO programming] it’s grown in the last 20 years,” Weiser said. “Thousands of people are participating — as opposed to dozens or dozens.”
Participating with Zoom, of course. Indeed, when YIVO hosted a program on Hamas last year “over 30,000 – close to 40,000 people – worldwide” watched it.
Zoom took off for YIVO (as it did for much of the rest of the planet) during Covid. Luminaries in the world of Yiddish letters like Ruth Wisse, a professor at Harvard, and writer Curt Leviant—who translated Singer and Aleichem and whose latest book is “Tinocchia,” a Yiddish Pinocchio—were able to organize classes for Chaim writers. Degree. Avrom Reyzen and Lamed Shapiro. “It was completely new to me,” Leviant told The Post, “it was the only way [programs] could be done.” Still, Leviant added, “it has worked well.”
YIVO’s revival is not exclusively a Zoom phenomenon. Two years ago, Yiddish writer and scholar Eddy Portnoy saw something he had never seen before: A line was stretching down the block of eager visitors to YIVO.
The occasion was an opening night exhibit and panel discussion that Portnoy had curated — “Am Yisrael High: The Story of Jews and Cannabis.” Was there really a connection between Judaism and weed? Yes, there is a connection between Judaism and everything.
Furthermore, the pottery exhibition was not the only one with popular appeal; in 2015 Portnoy mounted an exhibit called the Yiddish Fight Club, featuring former Jewish wrestlers.
“It attracted a different category of visitors,” Portnoy said. “I would see the policemen standing in front of the exhibition reading about it. This has never happened before. Hasidim, children, old people, young people – it attracted a wide interest.”
That’s one of the things that tends to get lost when you think about a bold, scholarly institution like YIVO—how much fun can be extracted from its materials.
Professor Emeritus Cecile E. Kuznitz of Bard was a researcher at YIVO years ago (and is the author of “YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture”) and recalled sifting through Yiddish theater artifacts. “There were costumes, jewelry. . . Makeup sets that were 100 years old.”
When Portnoy mounted his exhibit Jews in Space (the name, of course, is an homage to Mel Brooks), the exhibit explored rabbinical writings on astronomy, astrology, and images of ancient astrolabes charting the heavens. He also invited Jewish astronaut Jeffrey Hoffman to give a speech.
Of course, as fascinating a resource as YIVO is to lay people, it is far more essential to researchers.
“Nobody has the archive or library that YIVO has,” said Itzik Gottesman, who teaches Yiddish language and culture courses at the University of Texas at Austin and was managing editor at the Yiddish-language newspaper Forward. “Anyone who wants to study Yiddish culture in America [knows YIVO].”
The literature generated by those associated with YIVO has been popular and scholarly—and some walk the line between the two. Portnoy’s book Bad Rabbi, for example, is a tour de force of tabloid stories from the Yiddish press, including true stories of murder, bigamy, the 1929 Miss Judea Compant, the 625-pound Yiddish-speaking Blimp Levy . , and so on. (Blimp Levy was one of the featured wrestlers on “Yiddish Fight Club” and graces the cover of “Bad Rabbi”.)
David E. Fishman’s “Book Smugglers” is an extremely unlikely story about YIVO itself – basically, it’s the true story of the “Paper Brigade”, YIVO’s archivists in Vilna, who hid manuscripts and artifacts that were marked for destruction by the Germans during the world. War II. They left these documents out in the wilderness of Lithuania in the hope that they would be recovered after the war, which, indeed, many of them were.
YIVO’s original home was Vilna, and after World War II and the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a major dispute over who would control the foundlings, New York or Vilna (New York did not become YIVO’s official headquarters until in 1940).
“[The archive] it was kind of forgotten,” said Brent, who went to Europe to see it for himself and found documents that had been neglected, out of order and beginning to fall apart. Since 1991, he noted, only seven people had visited the archive. “Two of the seven I knew personally.”
“There have been a lot of different questions since World War II about who owns the heritage of Eastern European Jews,” Weiser said.
Of course it would be a big disagreement – but disagreements are half of what Yiddish scholarship is about. But in 2013, the Americans and Lithuanians agreed to digitize the New York and Vilnius archives, and a $7 million fundraising project began.
And there’s still more to come. This spring a new translation of Chaim Grade’s book “Sons and Daughters” is being published by Knopf under the direction of YIVO and the National Library of Israel. And intellectual powerhouses like Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Applebaum will lecture on autocracy, and poet and literary critic Adam Kirsch will speak on colonialism later this month.
As Levinas summarized: “The name, the object, the library resonates everywhere in the world where people care about Yiddish.”
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Image Source : nypost.com