Founded by Aaron Lansky in 1980, the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst has served as a vital repository of Jewish literature and culture by collecting approximately 1.5 million Yiddish language volumes.
The books, as Andrew Silow-Carroll wrote in a JTA published last June are “only the foundation of an institution that now includes Yiddish classes, academic fellowships, a training program for translators, scholarly conferences, a publisher of books in translation, an oral history archive, a podcast and [a] digitized library of both classic and obscure Yiddish books. ‘This is not just a matter of collecting books,’ said Lansky, 69, recalling that he always had a vision beyond warehousing unread books. ‘It’s really a whole culture, it’s a whole civilization, it’s a whole historical epoch that needs representation, that wants to tell its story.’”
Two years ago, the Center unveiled its landmark exhibition, “Yiddish: A Global Culture,” realizing Lansky’s vision by transforming its building’s public spaces into an engaging museum of the Yiddish culture that flourished in Europe, but also worldwide, from the 1860s until the catastrophe of World War II. A virtual version of the exhibit and a new book by curator David Mazower will provide further entry points to the story of Yiddish, as will the Center’s continuing outreach and extensive educational programming.
This year, Lansky is retiring as the Center’s president – he and his wife, Gail, now live primarily in the Berkshires. His successor, Susan Bronson, also has history in the Berkshires, having lived here while working in development and management of local cultural institutions before going to work at the Center fifteen years ago. She says that taking that job was a marriage of her personal background growing up in the heavily Jewish Upper West Side of New York City, her graduate studies in Russian and Jewish history, and her experience working in higher education and cultural organizations, including as president of the board of the Council of American Jewish Museums. In her years as the Center’s executive director, she worked closely with Lansky to bring the institution to the place it is now.
“I think it’s been a very organic transition,” says Bronson about her new role. “Aaron’s role has changed a lot in recent years, and mine has grown, so it just feels like another natural step.”
Bronson spoke to the BJV in September about her new role at the Yiddish Book Center. Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
The BJV Interview: Susan Bronson
You’ve been with the Yiddish Book Center for 15 years. In light of its original mission as a repository of Yiddish books, did this evolution into a museum of Yiddish culture seem inevitable?
When I arrived, I think we had 21 people on staff. We now have 40. When I arrived, Aaron and maybe one other person were the only two Yiddish speakers, and there wasn't a lot of content expertise on the staff. I worked alongside Aaron in building the center over the last 15 years to expand the extent of our programming. Our educational programs have grown dramatically. We have a translation initiative now, which has trained more than 100 translators. We launched a publishing imprint to publish Yiddish books in translation. The Oral History Project started tiny in the first year I got here, and we've now recorded more than 1,500 oral histories from all over the world. There’s Yidstock, the music festival, and now the big new exhibition. A decade ago, most Jewish museum professionals didn't know what the Yiddish Book Center was, and now we're considered among one of the leading institutions. I launched a public library program, which just got a major $2.5 million dollar grant from the Lily Endowment to expand. Over the next three years, we’re going to be partnering with 120 public libraries around the country, working with librarians to bring Yiddish literature in translation to their libraries.
My vision is very much about in terms of the next phase of the center, about thinking about how we build awareness of what the center is and what it does, both within and outside the Jewish world, as well as how we think about leveraging a small organization. The content that we represent is sadly absent from most Jewish settings. One of our goals has been to figure out ways to bring Yiddish literature and culture into more mainstream Jewish spaces and non-Jewish spaces, and how to build partnerships both within and outside the Jewish world. While we're not a tiny organization, we're here in Amherst, Massachusetts. We have a beautiful building, but we're a little off the beaten track. Training translators is a way of leveraging our work. We work with teachers to do similar kinds of things.
When I first covered the transformation of the Center two years ago, I spoke with curator David Mazower about the curatorial challenges of transforming the institution. As an administrator, how did you guide this big change for the Center?
The Yiddish Book Center always had exhibitions. I just felt like we needed to tell a more coherent story and to better use the space. We started talking about how five years before the exhibit actually opened. Before I knew it, we were basically talking about the entire public area of the Yiddish Book Center. The board was always excited about it. The toughest part was figuring out how to raise the money to make it happen.
Obviously, there was a lot of work in figuring out how to tell the story we wanted to tell. We always knew it wasn't going to be a chronological story, and we had to figure out how to create some coherent exhibition. David obviously deserves the lion's share of credit for that. But I was really anxious that we create a bigger visitor experience. For me, it goes beyond the people who come to the Center to see the exhibition here. We're about to launch a virtual version of the exhibit for our friends and supporters and people all over the world who may never experience the exhibit in person. We're about to publish an incredible exhibition catalog that David has written called that will be another way for people to connect to the content, a jumping off point for public programs and education programs. Because so much thought went into each section of the exhibit, we can do more around women writers, we can do more around Yiddish theater – we can do more.
Yiddish is never going to be the Jewish lingua franca like it was in the past. And how do you foresee the Yiddish culture going forward? There seem to be two tracks. One is the preservation of this world that existed and that was lost. But within the Haredi community, Yiddish is still a living language getting 21st century additions and changes. How does the center, going forward, look to manage both tracks?
Well, I would say there are three tracks. There's the preservation, which is the foundational work. None of this would have happened had Aaron not started rescuing the books that, both physically and metaphorically, are the foundation. There's a big scholarly audience – the field of Yiddish within Jewish studies has expanded dramatically within a generation. Then, of course, you have the Haredi community, which is the living Yiddish-speaking community; whether there will be more connection in the future, I can't say. The fact of the matter is we represent a form of secular Yiddish culture that is not their culture – it's actually treyf. It's been very interesting to meet people who've left that community. We recently had Ricky Rose, who's a music phenomenon who sings in Yiddish. She left the community. She came here for the first time, and her mind was blown. She loved it, because, of course, it was her language, but in a context she never could have imagined.
Another track that I think is important and interesting is for a younger generation that is not part of the Haredi community that is engaging with Yiddish language and culture and doing all kinds of new things with it. We see it in art, in music, in theater. It has become a way for a subset of young Jews to find an entry point into a Jewish connection and to Jewish identity. We're training Yiddish teachers. We're creating new textbooks and new learning materials. But we know that most Jews who are not in the Haredi community will not learn Yiddish, but that doesn't stop us from opening up the culture and everything that it represents. Most people who go to shul don't know Hebrew either. They think of going to shul or going to a Holocaust Museum as ways we create connections to our own identity and culture. You think about when kids go to Hebrew school, of course, they're going to learn to read Torah so they can do their bar or bat mitzvah. But since, 80 percent of American Jews are of Ashkenazi background, maybe they should also learn a little bit about that history and culture.
You've got these different subsets of people who are engaging with Yiddish in new and different ways that we couldn't have imagined 20 years ago, and we probably can't imagine where it's going in 20 years. The Center has played an important role in a new generation engaging with Yiddish language culture in ways that wouldn't have seemed possible when Aaron started his work. [Jews were] moving on from a time when assimilation was the main objective and moving into a time when people were ready and eager to embrace their cultural identities in different ways and celebrate them in ways that one wouldn't have when my grandparents came to this country – then one wanted to basically push that aside so that you'd seem more American. Now, well, I'm perfectly American. I can become immersed in my cultural and ethnic background without it threatening my American identity.
Obviously, the last two years have been very difficult for the Jewish people. I remember David Mazower saying that, in his opinion, Yiddish culture was really a counterculture. Jews now seem to be also seeking their own spaces in which they don't feel harassed, in which they don't feel judged, they don't feel politicized. In your opinion, might Yiddish form a new counterculture for Jews?
Well, I don't disagree with David, but I guess I don't think it's necessarily a counterculture. I think a lot of young people, at various points have come to Yiddish because it pushed back against the main ways that they were being told to be Jewish, like going to Hebrew school or going to a Holocaust museum. These things are valid and important, but I think people are often looking for something else, and we've represented that. Yiddish culture has represented that. It's certainly true that it’s a difficult time in the Jewish world. There's a lot of contention and division. We had a program for teachers this summer, and one of them commented in their review of the program that it was a relief to come to this space where she didn't feel like she had to defend herself as a Jew, and she could just learn and exist.
In our high school program, we have kids coming from all kinds of backgrounds, some deeply connected to Jewish life in various ways, some religious, some completely secular, some from mixed backgrounds, Zionist family families, anti-Zionist. Here they're all sitting in a room together discussing Yiddish and Jewish literature. I think there are ways in which we can provide opportunities for dialogue in the Jewish world that takes people outside of the very fraught debates of the headlines. It's important for the Yiddish Book Center to stay focused on what it is that we do and what we're here to do, which is, as our mission says, to preserve, teach, and celebrate Yiddish language and culture. That takes many, many forms. You can find all different perspectives in Yiddish. Yiddish wasn't only progressive politics. It was many things. We will be best served, and we can best serve the community and the broader world by focusing on that mission and not getting too drawn into the swirl that is going on all around us.
Yiddish: A Global Culture: Bold Lives, Boundless Creativity
This new exhibition catalog brings the museum's landmark permanent exhibition to a general readership, situating the sweeping story of Yiddish culture within broader world history. The catalog covers literature, theater, art, music, journalism and politics, and includes incredible individual stories, and features an eight-page gatefold of “Yiddishland,” the exhibition’s 60-foot mural, along with hundreds of reproductions of artworks, rare artifacts, and other key elements of the exhibition. The exhibition itself was curated and developed over five years by the catalog’s author, David Mazower, a former BBC journalist and great-grandson of Yiddish writer Sholem Asch.