The Yiddish Book Center works to rescue Yiddish and other modern Jewish books and open up their content to the world. As the world’s only comprehensive supplier of Yiddish books, the Book Center helped establish Yiddish collections at more than 600 great libraries, including Harvard, Yale, Library of Congress, the British Library, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and national libraries in countries as distant as Australia, China and Japan.
In 1998, the Center’s Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library made high-quality reprints available on demand. The Center then placed the full texts of 11,000 Yiddish titles online through our Digital Yiddish Library, where they are easily downloaded, free of charge. Yiddish, once the most endangered of literatures, is now the most accessible.
Our beautiful 37,000-square-foot headquarters in Amherst is a lebedike velt—a lively world featuring an open Yiddish book repository, theatres, art galleries, museum exhibitions about Yiddish language and culture and more.