Perry J Greenbaum: Send Me a Note

Yiddish Sites

There are dozens of sites dedicated to Yiddish language, culture and music. Here are some that I have found noteworthy. I will add to the list regularly. If you have a Yiddish site or know of one, please do not hesitate to contact me at pjgreenbaum@gmail.com:

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Afn Shvel (“On the Threshold”), a magazine published by the League for Yiddish, dating to 1941, it is committed to the promotion and preservation of the Yiddish language and culture. It published two double issues a year. Its editor-in-chief is Sheva Zucker;

American Jewish Archive at Hebrew Union College’s Jewish Institute of Religion contains more than 10 million pages of documents. manuscripts, genealogical materials, as well as thousands of audiovisual recordings, photographs, microfilm and digital collections;

Committee For Yiddish, in Toronto, in partnership with UJA Federation, fosters and promotes Yiddish language and culture—indeed the entire Ashkenaz tradition—as a vibrant part of contemporary Jewish life and as a vital link between the Jewish past and future

Center for Jewish History, in New York City, has 5 miles of archival material (in dozens of languages), more than 500,000 volumes, as well as thousands of artworks, textiles, ritual objects, recordings and photographs;

Dartmouth Jewish Sound Archive, providing scholars and researchers access to thousands of recordings of music;

Der Yiddish Moment, an online Yiddish-language newspaper that writes, it says, in “prewar authentic Yiddish by native speakers from Eastern Europe”;

Digital Yiddish Theatre Project, an academic research initiative dedicated to the study of Yiddish theatre and drama;

Forverts (“Forward”), one of the first mass Yiddish newspapers in America, founded in New York City in 1897;

Jewish Folk Songs, by Batya Fonda, is a series of lectures given in either English or Hebrew about the ways folk songs reflect different themes of Jewish heritage;

Golden Age of Yiddish Radio, the 1930s to the 1950s, is brought to you by the Dora Teitelboim Center for Yiddish Culture in Miami, Florida.

Hebrew University’s Index to Yiddish Periodicals, a large database of Yiddish periodicals, with both a Yiddish and English interface; approx, one-quarter of the materials are accessible online;

In Geveb (“in web”), a journal of Yiddish studies, which aims to serve both the academic community and popular culture;

Jane Peppler's Yiddish Emporium, selling books, CDS, and songbooks;

JewishGen Yizkor Book Project, a database of more than 1,000 yizkor books worldwide, a good number of them have been translated from Hebrew and Yiddish into English;

Language and Cultural Atlas of Ashkenazic Jews, from Columbia University, consists of 5,755 hours of audio tape interviews with Yiddish-speaking Jews from Central and eastern Europe, done between 1959 and 1972 along with around 100,000 pages of linguistic field notes;

Lexilogos, a compilation of Yiddish online resources, including dictionaries, grammar books, and a translation of the Torah (Toyre) in Yiddish;

Milken Archive of Jewish Music, a record of the American Jewish Experience; since 1990, it has become the largest collection of American Jewish music with about 600 recorded works, including a number in Yiddish;

Montreal Jewish Public Library’s Yiddish Audiobooks, a collection of Yiddish literary works read by native speakers;

Montreal Jewish Public Library’s Yiddish Resources on the Internet, a list of resources dedicated to language, culture and music;

Museum of the Yiddish Theatre, an online museum originating in New York City and founded by Dr. Steven Lasky, has in its collection such items as photographs, theatre programs, sheet music, audio recordings and other documents of some importance and historical significance;

Pakn Treger, (“itinerant bookseller in Eastern Europe who traveled from shtetl to shtetl ”), the magazine of the Yiddish Book Centre;

Polish Jewish Cabaret, contains forgotten Yiddish songs of interwar Poland; the site is by Jane Peppler;

Recorded Sound Archives (RSA) of Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton contains more than 100,000 recordings of music, a great many in Yiddish;

Songs of My People, a site by Josephine Yalovitser dedicated to Yiddish songs of mourning and of joy;

The National Center For Jewish Film, based at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., is the home to 15,000 reels of feature films, documentaries, newsreels, home movies and institutional films, dating from 1903 to the present; this effort has led to the revival of Yiddish cinema;

The University Library in Frankfurt am Main, a digitalized collection of more than 800 complete Yiddish works, from the 16th to the 20th centuries;

The Workmen’s Circle (Der Arbeter Ring), working to build a shenere un besere velt far ale—a better and more beautiful world for all;

The Yiddish Voice, a radio show serving Boston’s Yiddish-speaking community, and a comprehensive Yiddish Internet resource. On WUNR 1600 AM/Brookline, Massachusetts;

The Yiddish Wikipedia, contains thousands of articles in Yiddish;

The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, providing the most complete picture of the history and culture of Jews in Eastern Europe from the beginnings of their settlement in the region to the present;

Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a video of the 1948 United Nations declaration in Yiddish;

Vertebukh, an online Yiddish-English dictionary based on the 2002 Dictionnaire yiddish-français (37,000 entries), a project led by Yitshok Niborski, an Argentinian-born Yiddish scholar;

Yiddish Book Center, dedicated to rescuing, translating, and disseminating Yiddish books and presenting innovative educational programs that broaden understanding of modern Jewish identity;

Yiddish Book Center's Francis Brandt Online Yiddish Audio Library, contains recordings of lectures by and interviews with writers and poets who visited the Jewish Public Library of Montreal between 1953 and 2005. It is one of the largest and most accessible recordings of Yiddish authors and academics;

Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project, since 2010 has conducted more than 700 in-depth interviews with people of all ages and backgrounds, looking at the Jewish experience in general and Yiddish in particular;

Yiddish Farm, an organic farm in New York where individuals can immerse themselves in Yiddish culture and where Jews can reclaim Yiddish as a source of Jewish identity and learning;

Yiddishkayt, based in Los Angeles and focused on the culture, language and art of Eastern Europe Jews;

Yiddish Language Playscripts, a resource of the U.S. Library of Congress that contains 77 unpublished manuscripts of Yiddish theatre;

Yiddish Penny Songs, a site dedicated to Yiddish theater and variety show songs published and sung between 1895 and 1925; the site is maintained by Jane Peppler.

Yiddish Poetry, Yiddish poetry with translations in several languages; based in Melbourne, Australia;

Yiddish Radio Project, a site dedicated to the golden age of Yiddish radio (1930s to ’50s);

Yiddish Sheet Music, part of Brown University’s large Sheet Music Collection, which numbers approximately 2,000 items;

Yiddish Song of the Week, by the An-sky Jewish Folklore Research Project and edited by Itzil Gottesman, which presents Yiddish songs and their translation into Yiddish;

Yiddish Wit, a site by Johanna Kovitz, dedicated to Yiddish proverbs, folk sayings, insults, curses, idioms and other expressions of Yiddish;

Yidlid, a music site with a large compilation of Yiddish songs; it includes the lyrics in the original Yiddish, and translations in English and French as well as a transliteration using latin script;

YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, a focus on the history and culture of East European Jewry;

Yizkor Book Collection at the New York Public Library provide a documentation of daily life, through essays and photographs and the memoralizing of murdered residents, of Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust. Of the 750 yizkor books in its collection, 618 have been digitalized. Most yizkor books are in Yiddish or Hebrew;

Yungtruf (“call to youth”), the site says, “cultivates the active use of the Yiddish language among today’s youth here and abroad by creating opportunities for Yiddish learning and immersion, and by providing resources and support for Yiddish speakers and families within an expansive social network”;

Yiddish sources, a site listing other Yiddish sites;

Zemirot Database, a user-editable online collection of zemirot.

On My BookShelf

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
A History of the Jews by Paul Johnson
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
A Russian Journal by John Steinbeck
A Tzaddik in Our Time: The Life of Rabbi Aryeh Levin by Simcha Raz
All My Sons by Arthur Miller
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Anna Karenin by Leo Tolstoy
Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition by David Nirenberg
Anti-Semite and Jew by Jean-Paul Sartre
At the Mind's Limit by Jean Amery
Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
Barney's Version by Mordecai Richler
Blindness by José Saramango
Bociany by Chava Rosenfarb
Call it Sleep by Henry Roth
Complete Works of William Shakespeare
Concerning the Spiritual in Art by Wassily Kandinsky
Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews — A History by James Carroll
Conversations With Joseph Brodsky: A Poet's Journey Through The Twentieth Century by Solomon Volkov (Trans. Marian Schwartz)
Crime and Punishment by Fyodr Dostoevsky
Daniel Deronda by George Eliot
Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler
Dead Souls by Gogol
Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All by Paul Offit
Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
Discovering the News by Michael Schudson
Disorder and Early Sorrow by Thomas Mann
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Errata: An Examined Life by George Steiner
Essays of George Orwell
Essays, Collections & Other Short Pieces by C.S. Lewis
Eugene Onegin by Pushkin
Exile’s Return by Malcolm Cowley
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Fixer by Bernard Malamud
For Whom the Bell Tolls By Ernest Hemingway
Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography by Roger Shattuck
Four Great Plays by Anton Chekhov
Four Theories of the Press by Fred Siebert, Theodore Peterson and Wilbur Schramm
From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present by Jacques Barzun
Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust by Yaffa Eliach
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Henderson The Rain King by Saul Bellow
Herzog by Saul Bellow
How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker
How to Read and Why by Harold Bloom
If Not Now, When? by Primo Levi
If This is Man by Primo Levi
In Your Words: Translations from the Yiddish and the Hebrew by Seymour Mayne
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Jesus of Nazareth by Joseph Klausner
Jewish Bible
Jewish Literacy by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin
Joshua Then and Now by Mordecai Richler
Like One That Dreamed : a portrait of A.M. Klein by Usher Caplan
Long Day’s Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neil
Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Montreal of Yesterday: Jewish Life in Montreal, 1900–1920
More Die of Heartbreak by Saul Bellow
Night by Elie Wiesel
Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell
Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Outwitting History by Aaron Lansky
Paradise Lost by John Milton
Patrimony by Philip Roth
Pensées by Blaise Pascal
People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks
Plato’s Republic
Portrait of an Artist by James Joyce
Power, Faith & Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present by Michael B. Oren
Red Calvary by Isaac Babel
Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy
Short Stories by Anton Chekhov
Solomon Gursky Was Here by Mordecai Richler
St Urbain’s Horesemen by Mordecai Richler
Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi
Survivors: seven short stories by Chava Rosenfarb
The Adventures of Augie Mach by Saul Bellow
The Age of Reason by Jean-Paul Sartre
The Apprentice of Duddy Kravitz by Mordecai Richler
The Assistant by Bernard Malamud
The Bible
The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche
The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker
The Blessed Human Race: Essays on Reconsideration by George Jochnowitz
The Bridal Canopy by S.Y. Agnon
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov
The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom
The Complete Plays of Marlowe by Christopher Marlowe
The Crucible by Arthur Miller
The Divine Comedy by Dante
The Duel by Anton Chekhov
The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption by Gad Saad
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature by Northrop Frye
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Human Use of Human Beings by Norbert Wiener
The Illiad & Odyssey by Homer
The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
The Lady With the Dog by Anton Chekhov
The Legend of Baal-Shem by Martin Buber
The Lonely Man of Faith by Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
The Middle East by Bernard Lewis
The Misanthrope & Other Plays by Molière
The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey Through Language and Culture by Ruth R. Wisse
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
The Outsider by Albert Camus
The Pearl by John Steinbeck
The Periodic Table by Primo Levi
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
The Poetics of Aristotle
The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics by Mark Lilla
The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel
The Second Scroll by A.M. Klein
The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
The Thebian Plays by Sophocles
The Tragic Sense of Life by Miguel de Unamuno
The Trial by Franz Kafka
The Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook: Garden-Fresh Recipes Rediscovered and Adapted for Today’s Kitchen by Fania Lewando (Trans: Eve Jochnowitz)
This is My God by Herman Wouk
Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov
To Pray as a Jew: A Guide to the Prayer Book and the Synagogue Service by Rabbi Hayim Halevy Donin
Ulysses by James Joyce
Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov
Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

List of Pages

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