While many haredi Orthodox Jews speak Yiddish as a first language, the Yiddish Book Center celebrates and commemorates what Lansky calls “one of the most concentrated outpourings of literary creativity in all of Jewish history,” lasting roughly from the 1860s to the immediate aftermath of World War II. As newly emancipated Jews encountered modernity, they created a vast Yiddish literature both high-brow and low-brow — books, literary journals, newspapers, plays, songs and films. It was a literature, according to Lansky’s mentor, the Yiddish scholar Ruth Wisse, “that, if it suffers from anything, suffers from its youthfulness, from the exaggerated emphasis on innovativeness and on modernity and originality.”
