Spielberg Helps Yiddish Lit Go Digital

More than 10,000 works in Yiddish are now available online. The Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library, a joint project between the National Yiddish Book Center and the Internet Archive, has gone live.

The collection currently features what could be more than half the works ever published in the language, making them available for download in a variety of formats. The project started scanning titles 10 years ago after being launched by a major grant to the Yiddish Book Center from Spielberg’s Righteous Persons Foundation, which the director established to help support a flourshing Jewish community after his experience making Schindler’s List.

The most downloaded book so far: a Yiddish edition of the Bible.

The project began when diminishing supplies of popular Yiddish titles made it increasingly difficult for the Book Center to fill requests for important books. The books themselves were also physically deteriorating.

By helping to archive a disappearing piece of modern Jewish history, the library is similar to Spielberg’s USC Shoah Foundation Institute, which began with the mission of recording and preserving Holocaust survivor testimonies.

When first announcing the grant for the Book Center, Righteous Person Foundation’s Rachel Levin said:

"Our hope is that both projects will help us better know a piece of our past and enable us, as a diverse community, to move into the next century with a more complete sense of what we are and where we came from."

What do you think?

About The Author

6 Responses

  1. nisht_gefilte

    where was this when i took that yiddish lit class in college?
    no worries steve, you still rock my world.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

This will close in 0 seconds