This is the Yiddish Book Center which lies four hours north of New York City in Amherst, Massachusetts, adjacent to Hampshire College. It’s really great and you should visit. It’s an archives, museum, and cultural center housed in a gorgeous new building recalling a rural eastern European village. A big draw for me was Shtetl in the Sun: South Beach, Miami 1977-1980, an exhibition of photographs of Jewish retirees.
Everything is really well done and worth the visit, which, by the way, I can’t say for the more famous Eric Carle Museum (of Hungry Hungry Caterpillar fame) which is just down the street and was okay but underwhelming. Most of the Yiddish Center’s many thousands of books are available online for free, along with vast audio and video collections. They even sell old Yiddish books and sheet music when they have too many copies of a title.
Highlights included a little exhibit on Catskills resorts and an information panel on how they had rescued a thousand books from African-Yiddish publishers that had belonged to a members of Jewish community, now mostly dispersed, in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) in the mid-twentieth century.
The center began in 1980 as a simple project to collect unwanted Yiddish books, by a graduate student working on his own and with no institutional backing to speak of. He was soon inundated by thousands of donations from around the world, the project mushroomed, and in 1989 he received a MacArthur Fellowship (the “genius grant”*). In 1997 the center got its first dedicated building and along the way Steven Spielberg became a major donor.
- The MacArthur grant is the most illustrious in the U.S. and is awarded to roughly 25 individuals each year (not organizations) who each receive $600,000 through a secret selection process that does not accept applications and is based on potential rather than past achievement, and where the recipients reportedly have no idea they are candidates until they are notified of winning.