Evolution is a process that can take many millennia, if not longer. For a scholarly organization like the Yiddish archive and cultural institution YIVO, the process only took a century.
YIVO (the Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut, or Yiddish Scientific Institute) marks its 100th anniversary in 2025 and one would be forgiven for thinking that the birthday might be an elegy.
However, this would be misguided. Despite the decline in Yiddish speakers across the globe, YIVO has experienced an unexpected second wind as it enters its second century.
From its perch at the Center for Jewish History at 15 W. 16th St., YIVO’s exhibits are drawing record numbers. A few years ago the institute began digitizing its archive which has lured some 350,000 annual visitors. Thousands have tuned into its online lectures on Yiddish poets, international terrorism, and a myriad of other topics.
Once upon a time, Yiddish was the lingua franca of Eastern European Jews. Starting in the 1880s millions of Jews carried it with them through Ellis Island and into the tenements of the Lower East Side, or to the Grand Concourse in The Bronx. By 1870, there were approximately 60,000 Jews in New York City, according to Irving Howe’s “The World of Our Fathers,” but by 1910 that number had ballooned to 1.1 million. With these immigrants Yiddish theater, Yiddish newspapers, Yiddish lettering on storefronts cropped up to make this jargony dialect a force in the city. In 1915, for instance, New York’s daily Yiddish newspaper had a circulation of over 600,000. It was a golden age of Yiddish, which began to decline in the wake of World War II.
Despite that decline, YIVO has continued to stand as the city’s — if not the world’s — foremost scholarly institution for the study and preservation of the Yiddish language and culture. And, in what feels like a supreme irony, technology has perhaps been one of the key factors in reawakening Yiddish at a time when many had written it off as slowly nearing extinction.
Of course, the topic of Yiddish’s health is a fraught one amongst Yiddishists. “It’s always the phoenix,” said Jonathan Brent, the CEO of YIVO. “Dying and being reborn.”
“They’ve probably been talking about Yiddish dying 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 might no longer dominate the signage of Hester Street — and while the names of Yiddish actors like Boris Thomashefsky or Molly Picon are known by an ever-narrower 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 approximately 250,000 Yiddish-speakers in America today.
Which is not to say that Yiddish language hasn’t experienced a downturn. “There were four to five million Jews in the U.S. in 1940—an estimated 1.5 to 2 million of them had some facility with Yiddish,” Weiser says. This wasn’t a population of Orthodox or Hasidic Jews, necessarily, but Jews who were in many cases wholly secular and enmeshed in the Bundist, Bolshevik, Anarchist and Zionist movements (although Zionism eventually turned toward speaking Hebrew). A literary movement was being forged by the likes of Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer and Sholem Aleichem whose “Tevye the Dairyman” stories would make a spectacular breach into the popular imagination with its adaptation “Fiddler on the Roof” on Broadway.
As the generation that survived the Holocaust began dying off — and the number of native, secular Yiddish speakers dwindled — the great fear was that Yiddish culture would fade into oblivion. But this has not been the case.
“The movement to bring young people [into YIVO programming] increased in the last 20 years,” Weiser said. “Thousands of people are attending—as opposed to tens, or dozens.”
Attending by Zoom, of course. Indeed, when YIVO mounted a program about Hamas last year “over 30,000—close to 40,000 people—around the world” viewed it.
Zoom took off for YIVO (as it did on much of the rest of the planet) during Covid. Luminaries within the world of Yiddish letters like Ruth Wisse, a professor at Harvard, and the writer Curt Leviant — who translated Singer and Aleichem and whose latest book is “Tinocchia,” a Yiddish Pinocchio — were able to host classes about writers Chaim Grade, Avrom Reyzen and Lamed Shapiro. “It was totally new to me,” Leviant told The Post, “it was the only way [programs] could be done.” Still, Leviant added, “it worked out nicely.”
YIVO’s revival is not exclusively a Zoom phenomenon. Two years ago, the writer and Yiddish 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 exhibit and opening night panel discussion Portnoy had been curating — “Am Yisrael High: The Story of Jews and Cannabis.” Was there really a connection between Judaism and weed? Yes, there’s a connection between Judaism and everything.
Moreover, the pot exhibit was hardly the only one to have popular appeal; back in 2015 Portnoy put up an exhibit that wound up being called Yiddish Fight Club, which displayed the Jewish wrestlers of yore.
“It attracted a different category of visitor,” Portnoy said. “I would see policemen standing in front of the exhibit reading about it. That never happened before. Hasidim, kids, elderly people, younger people — it drew a broad interest.”
That’s one of the things that tends to get lost when thinking about a heady, scholarly institution like YIVO—how much fun can be gleaned 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 remembered sifting through the artifacts of the Yiddish theater. “There were costumes, jewelry . . . makeup kits that were 100 years old.”
When Portnoy put up his Jews in Space exhibit (the name, of course, being an homage to Mel Brooks) the exhibit explored Rabbinical writings on astronomy, astrology and images of old astrolabes that charted the skies. He also invited Jewish astronaut Jeffrey Hoffman to give a talk.
Of course, as fascinating a resource as YIVO is for the layman, it is much more essential to scholars.
“No one 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 Forward newspaper. “Anyone who wants to study Yiddish culture in America [knows YIVO].”
The literature spawned from those associated with YIVO has been popular and scholarly — and some treading the line between both. Portnoy’s book “Bad Rabbi,” for instance, is a tour de force of tabloid stories from the Yiddish press including true tales of murder, bigamy, the “Miss Judea Pageant” of 1929, “Blimp Levy” the 625-pound Yiddish speaking wrestler, and so on. (Blimp Levy was one of the wrestlers featured in “Yiddish Fight Club” and graces the cover of “Bad Rabbi.”)
David E. Fishman’s “The Book Smugglers” is a wildly improbable stories about YIVO itself — essentially, it’s the true story of “the Paper Brigade,” YIVO archivists in Vilna who sneaked manuscripts and artifacts that were marked for destruction by the Germans during World War II. They left these documents out in the Lithuanian wilderness with the hopes 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 fall of the Soviet Union, there was a great dispute as to who would control the recovered materials, New York or Vilna (New York did not become the official YIVO headquarters until 1940).
“[The archive] had been kind of forgotten about,” said Brent, who went to Europe to view it in person and found documents that were neglected, out of order, and beginning to disintegrate. Since 1991, he noted, only seven people had actually visited the archive. “Two of the seven I knew personally.”
“There’s a bunch of different questions since World War II about to whom the heritage of Eastern European Jewry belongs,” said Weiser.
Of course it was going to be a big dispute — but disagreements are half of what Yiddish scholarship is all about. But in 2013 the Americans and Lithuanians agreed to digitize both New York and Vilna archives and a $7 million fundraising project commenced.
And there is 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 the Pulitzer-prize winning Anne Applebaum will be lecturing on autocracy and the poet and literary critic Adam Kirsch will be speaking about colonialism later this month.
As Levinat summed up: “The name, the facility, the library resonates everywhere over the world where people care about Yiddish.”
