Yiddish Book Center

Yiddish Book Center A nonprofit celebrating Yiddish language and culture. The Center is open to the public Sunday - Friday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
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The Yiddish Book Center is a nonprofit organization working to tell the whole Jewish story by rescuing, translating, and disseminating Yiddish books and presenting innovative educational programs that broaden understanding of modern Jewish identity. The Yiddish Book Center is home to permanent and visiting exhibits; two performance halls with a year-round schedule of educational programs, concerts (including the annual Yidstock: The Festival of New Yiddish Music), films, and events; an English-language bookstore; and a million Yiddish books. Closed Shabbos (Saturday) and Jewish and legal holidays. For visitor safety guidelines, visit yiddishbookcenter.org/events-and-store/plan-your-visit-hours-and-directions.

09/18/2026

80 years ago today on September 18th, 1946, the first part of the Oyneg Shabes Archive was unearthed in a search led by surviving archivists including Rokhl Auerbach and Hersh Wasser. The metal containers they dug up held thousands of materials documenting Jewish life in the Warsaw Ghetto, which Emmanuel Ringelblum and his team worked clandestinely during WWII to preserve.

In this clip, Rose Bergman, retired teacher and daughter of Holocaust survivors, tells the story of how her father managed to preserve crucial papers about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as part of the Ringelblum archive.

Rose Bergman was interviewed by Mark Gerstein on August 10, 2012 at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts. Watch her full interview here: https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/collections/oral-histories/interviews/woh-fi-0000353/rose-bergman-2012

Read her story. Write yours.In this course participants will have the opportunity to develop their own practice of memoi...
09/17/2026

Read her story. Write yours.

In this course participants will have the opportunity to develop their own practice of memoir writing in conversation with a remarkable Yiddish autobiography written by a young woman at the turn of the 20th century. The Winding Road, Rokhl Feygenberg's account of her childhood in a Belarusian shtetl, was written when she was still a teenager.

Each week, we will read a section of the book and explore its themes in depth. We will then use those themes as prompts for our own memoir writing with weekly prompts on such topics as: the transformative power of genre fiction; how illness changes family dynamics; and the loneliness of being caught between tradition and freedom. Through the act of both reading and writing, we will discover not just the extraordinary life of Rokhl Feygenberg, but how much we share in common.

Registration closes on September 29. Learn more and reserve your spot now here: https://tinyurl.com/hpjz4cnh

Join us tomorrow at 7:00 p.m. on Zoom, for a talk with Judy Batalion on 1930s Warsaw: a buzzing capital where theater, ...
09/16/2026

Join us tomorrow at 7:00 p.m. on Zoom, for a talk with Judy Batalion on 1930s Warsaw: a buzzing capital where theater, literature, design, nightlife, and fashion flourished. Judy deeply researched this era while writing her new novel, The Last Woman of Warsaw.

Judy is the New York Times bestselling author of The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos, which won a National Jewish Book Award and a Canadian Jewish Literary Award. Born in Montreal, where she grew up speaking English, French, Hebrew, and Yiddish, she currently lives in New York with her husband and three children. The Last Woman of Warsaw is her first novel.

Register at the link in comments.

Tomorrow on Zoom, join us for a lunchtime conversation with Miriam Lieber about her father, Berl Kagan's, harrowing memo...
09/14/2026

Tomorrow on Zoom, join us for a lunchtime conversation with Miriam Lieber about her father, Berl Kagan's, harrowing memoir A Jew in the Woods, translated by Max Rosenfeld.

Berl Kagan, a 34-year-old journalist and political activist, was one of only a handful of 35,000 Lithuanian Jews to escape the Kovno Ghetto before it was liquidated. Yet this bid for freedom was only the first step in a protracted quest to cheat almost-certain death. The Red Army was advancing—but how many miracles would it take to see the day of liberation? Over the course of those dark, intrepid months, Kagan somehow kept a journal, recording his day-to-day life with unflinching lucidity and eloquence.

Register at the link in comments.

A gut un gebentsht yor (a good, blessed year) to everyone! To celebrate roshashone, we're sharing this counting book, wh...
09/11/2026

A gut un gebentsht yor (a good, blessed year) to everyone! To celebrate roshashone, we're sharing this counting book, which goes from one to ten using objects related to Jewish holidays. The first holiday is, of course, the new year, represented by the shofar.

The accompanying rhyme seems to caution overzealous shofarists: "Roshashone un yom-kiper blozt men shoyfer / Blozt un blozt nor nisht on oyfher" (Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we blow the shofar. We blow and blow — but not forever).

This book was published in Melbourne, Australia in 1988 by the charming Koala Farlag — scroll to see the bibliophile koala himself!

Join us next Thursday, September 17, for a talk with Judy Batalion on 1930s Warsaw: a buzzing capital where theater, li...
09/10/2026

Join us next Thursday, September 17, for a talk with Judy Batalion on 1930s Warsaw: a buzzing capital where theater, literature, design, nightlife, and fashion flourished. Judy deeply researched this era while writing her new novel, The Last Woman of Warsaw.

Judy is the New York Times bestselling author of THE LIGHT OF DAYS: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos, which won a National Jewish Book Award and a Canadian Jewish Literary Award. Born in Montreal, where she grew up speaking English, French, Hebrew, and Yiddish, she currently lives in New York with her husband and three children. The Last Woman of Warsaw is her first novel.

Register at the link in comments.

Rokhl Korn (1898–1982) was one of the most respected Yiddish poets of her generation. Remarkably, she wasn't a native Yi...
09/09/2026

Rokhl Korn (1898–1982) was one of the most respected Yiddish poets of her generation. Remarkably, she wasn't a native Yiddish speaker. After starting her literary career in Polish, she learned Yiddish as a young adult in response to rising antisemitic violence in Poland and rapidly rose to great acclaim. Her poetry touched on both universal themes and the plight of World War 2 refugees. This book, Fun yener zayt lid (On the Other Side of the Poem) was published in 1962 and begins with the iconic poem from which the book gets its name. Rokhl Korn died 44 years ago today.

Next Tuesday, September 15, at 12:30 p.m. join Miriam Lieber, Berl Kagan’s daughter, for a lunchtime conversation about ...
09/08/2026

Next Tuesday, September 15, at 12:30 p.m. join Miriam Lieber, Berl Kagan’s daughter, for a lunchtime conversation about her father’s harrowing memoir A Jew in the Woods, translated by Max Rosenfeld.

Berl Kagan, a 34-year-old journalist and political activist, was one of only a handful of 35,000 Lithuanian Jews to escape the Kovno Ghetto before it was liquidated. Yet this bid for freedom was only the first step in a protracted quest to cheat almost-certain death. The Red Army was advancing—but how many miracles would it take to see the day of liberation? Over the course of those dark, intrepid months, Kagan somehow kept a journal, recording his day-to-day life with unflinching lucidity and eloquence.

Register at the link in comments.

Continue meeting our 2026–2027 Translation fellows!Vivi Lachs is a historian of the Jewish East End. She translates song...
09/06/2026

Continue meeting our 2026–2027 Translation fellows!

Vivi Lachs is a historian of the Jewish East End. She translates songs, plays, poetry, and sketches from the London Yiddish press to find new aspects of the lived life of Jewish immigrants to London from the 1880s to the 1960s. Vivi is a performer, a Yiddish pop singer with the bands Klezmer Klub and Katsha’nes, leads Yiddish song and literature tours of the Jewish East End, and is the author of three books combining history and translated work: Whitechapel Noise (2018), London Yiddishtown (2021, from her previous YBC Fellowship of 2019), and East End Jews (2025). Vivi is the vice chair of the UK’s Yiddish Café Trust and the annual Sof-Vokh; she also runs the Great Yiddish Parade and is a popular speaker and performer.

For this year’s translation fellowship she is working toward creating The London Yiddish Songbook, which will include translations of over thirty songs written about the experience of immigration to London. The songs include protest songs for union activism, local ballads, music-hall pop songs, and street ditties. The translations will match the rhythm and rhyming pattern of the originals so that performers can use the material to sing in Yiddish, English, or a combination of the two.

Address

1021 West Street
Amherst, MA
01002

Opening Hours

Monday 10am - 4pm
Tuesday 10am - 4pm
Wednesday 10am - 4pm
Thursday 10am - 4pm
Friday 10am - 4pm
Sunday 10am - 4pm

Telephone

+14132564900

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