Aaron Lansky (born June 17, 1955, in New Bedford, Massachusetts) [1] [2] is the founder of the Yiddish Book Center, an organization he created to help salvage Yiddish language publications. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1989 for his work.
Lansky graduated from Hampshire College in 1977 with a B.A. in modern Jewish history, and earned an MA in East European Jewish studies at McGill University in Montreal. [2]
He holds honorary doctorates from Amherst College (1998), [3] the State University of New York, and Hebrew Union College.
While a graduate student at McGill University, Lansky founded the Yiddish Book Center in 1980. [4]
Lansky is the author of Outwitting History (2004), an autobiographical account of how he saved the Yiddish books of the world, from the 1970s to the present day. It won the 2005 Massachusetts Book Award. [5] A children's book called “The Book Rescuer: How a Mensch from Massachusetts Saved Yiddish Literature for Generations to Come” also tells his story.
In February 2024, Lansky noted that he would be retiring from the Yiddish Book Center in June 2025. [6]
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Yiddish is a West Germanic language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. It originates from the 9th century Central Europe, providing the nascent Ashkenazi community with a vernacular based on High German fused with many elements taken from Hebrew and to some extent Aramaic. Most varieties of Yiddish include elements of Slavic languages and the vocabulary contains traces of Romance languages. Yiddish has traditionally been written using the Hebrew alphabet; however, there are variations, including the standardized YIVO orthography that employs the Latin alphabet.
The University of Massachusetts Amherst is a public land-grant research university in Amherst, Massachusetts. It is the flagship campus of the University of Massachusetts system, and was founded in 1863 as the Massachusetts Agricultural College. It is also a member of the Five College Consortium, along with four other colleges in the Pioneer Valley.
The Yiddish Book Center Yiddish: ייִדישער ביכער־צענטער, romanized: Yidisher Bikher-Tsenter, located on the campus of Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, United States, is a cultural institution dedicated to the preservation of books in the Yiddish language, as well as the culture and history those books represent. It is one of ten western Massachusetts museums constituting the Museums10 consortium.
Milton Meltzer was an American historian and author best known for his nonfiction books on Jewish, African-American, and American history. Since the 1950s, he was a prolific author of history books in the children's literature and young adult literature genres, having written nearly 100 books. Meltzer was an advocate for human rights, as well as an adjunct professor for the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He won the biennial Laura Ingalls Wilder Award for his career contribution to American children's literature in 2001. Meltzer died of esophageal cancer in 2009.
YIVO is an organization that preserves, studies, and teaches the cultural history of Jewish life throughout Eastern Europe, Germany, and Russia as well as orthography, lexicography, and other studies related to Yiddish. Established in 1925 in Wilno in the Second Polish Republic as the Yiddish Scientific Institute.
The Jewish Book Council, founded in 1944, is an American organization encouraging and contributing to Jewish literature. The goal of the council, as stated on its website, is "to promote the reading, writing and publishing of quality English language books of Jewish content in North America". The council sponsors the National Jewish Book Awards, the JBC Network, JBC Book Clubs, the Visiting Scribe series, and Jewish Book Month. It previously sponsored the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. It publishes an annual literary journal called Paper Brigade.
Jonas Phillips (1736—1803) was a veteran of the American Revolutionary War and an American merchant in New York City and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was the immigrant ancestor of the Jewish Phillips family in the United States. Emigrating from Germany in 1759, Phillips worked off his passage as an indentured servant in Charleston, South Carolina. He moved to the North in 1759, becoming a merchant in New York City and then moving to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Joshua Fishman was an American linguist who specialized in the sociology of language, language planning, bilingual education, and language and ethnicity.
Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books by Aaron Lansky is a memoir published by Algonquin Books in 2004. It was the recipient of the 2005 Massachusetts Book Award. The book is about the author's efforts to rescue a large number of books in the Yiddish language from destruction.
David Sword Wyman was the Josiah DuBois professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Gregory Smith Prince Jr. became Hampshire College's fourth president in 1989 and retired in 2005.
Jules Chametzky was an American literary critic, writer, editor, and unionist. His essays in the 1960s and 1970s on the importance of race, ethnicity, class, and gender to American literary culture anticipated the later schools of New Historicism and Cultural Studies in American letters.
The Yiddish Theatre District, also called the Jewish Rialto and the Yiddish Realto, was the center of New York City's Yiddish theatre scene in the early 20th century. It was located primarily on Second Avenue, though it extended to Avenue B, between Houston Street and East 14th Street in the East Village in Manhattan. The District hosted performances in Yiddish of Jewish, Shakespearean, classic, and original plays, comedies, operettas, and dramas, as well as vaudeville, burlesque, and musical shows.
Yizkor books are memorial books commemorating a Jewish community destroyed during the Holocaust. The books are published by former residents or landsmanshaft societies as remembrances of homes, people and ways of life lost during World War II. Yizkor books usually focus on a town but may include sections on neighboring smaller communities.
Harold Grinspoon is an American real estate developer and philanthropist. He is the founder of Aspen Square Management, but is perhaps even more widely known for his philanthropic flagship PJ Library. In 2015, Grinspoon and wife Diane Troderman signed The Giving Pledge, and joined a growing list of leading philanthropists who have made a commitment to dedicate at least 50% of their wealth to philanthropy.
David Fishman is an American academic and author. He is a professor of Jewish History at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.
Susan Beth Macy is an American author. She writes young adult nonfiction, focusing mainly on women's history and sports. Her 2019 book, The Book Rescuer, won the American Library's Association's 2020 Sydney Taylor Book Award.
Leah Garrett is a professor and "Larry and Klara Silverstein Chair in Jewish Studies" and Director of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, at Hunter College, City University of New York.
Caraid O'Brien is an Irish-born, US-based writer, performer, translator and theater director. Although she is from an Irish Catholic background, she is best known for her work with material originally written in Yiddish. Theater J Artistic Director Adam Immerwahr has praised "her superb theatrical ear and facility for transforming Yiddish work into relevant contemporary text."
S.L. Shneiderman was a prominent Polish-American Jewish writer, journalist, translator and poet, who wrote in Yiddish and English.
