Aaron Lansky on the Yiddish Book Center & Preserving Jewish Culture

The Learning Curve Aaron Lansky

Alisha Searcy: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Learning Curve podcast. I’m your co-host, Alisha Thomas Searcy, and we have a special guest host with us today. Welcome, Andrea.

Andrea Silbert: So, oh, it’s so nice to be with you again, Alisha.

Alisha Searcy: Happy to have you remind folks who you are and what you do.

Andrea Silbert: Yes, I am the president of the EOS Foundation, which is an endowed philanthropy that makes investments in combating hunger in Massachusetts and promoting gender and racial justice.

Alisha Searcy: Excellent. Excellent. Well, again, very happy to have you and we have a very special show today, so we appreciate you for joining us. Before we get into that, though, it’s time for us to talk about our news stories for the week, and since you [00:01:00] are our guest host, we’d love for you to go first. What are you reading today?

Andrea Silbert: Oh, I was so interested in this story by Adam Latote about how four Bronx charter schools are achieving educational excellence and their classical academies. And what they’ve done is they have very high standards. These are serving low income students in the Bronx and they have a laser-like focus on student outcomes.

Their true north is all about what are the student outcomes, and everything else has to be secondary. And I am a big fan of classics and when I read about this and saw that these are elementary schools and all the kids are learning Latin, two things, Latin and debate. For me, the notion of learning Latin, which I took in high school, is the art of learning.

For its own sake. It is like the foundation of understanding that learning isn’t just tactical, but it is [00:02:00] valuable in and of itself. And then the debate, I think, probably is the most important thing that we need to see in our school children, in our K 12 systems. We have to be able to debate both sides of an issue.

I love it when. Teacher says, debate the side that you don’t believe in, and people begin to see, oh, most of everything lives in the gray, so I just thought this was terrific. The other thing they do, it’s very structured. A lot of these kids come from very unstructured lives, so structured, they show up on time.

Parents have to be bought in, they wear uniforms, and they most of all hold high expectations. We should have just as high expectations for kids who are under-resourced do have greater needs. So it’s a great, great article. I highly recommend it.

Alisha Searcy: I love that. And I, particularly the two points that you’re making about the value of kids learning Latin. I immediately go to thinking about SAT words, right?

Andrea Silbert: Yes. We did that.

Alisha Searcy: Yes. [00:03:00] And you know, even when you’re trying to decode, when you’re thinking about this just as skills gone K through 12, and just knowing the foundation of words is so powerful and so important, and so that foundational piece, and then to your point about debate, I’m really coming to value more and more.

When kids are getting an education that is more than just about the content areas, but it’s giving more foundational skills, like critical thinking. And it reminds me, I was visiting, lots of folks have heard of the school, Ron Clark Academy. I’m not sure if you have, but Oprah made it famous several years ago, and it’s a private school, but it’s a nonprofit.

And we, I happened to visit the school last week and so the short version is we’re observing a math class. Ron Clark himself is teaching and it’s fifth graders. Clearly it was high school level math. I couldn’t help solve the problems. I don’t remember that stuff from years ago. But what was most interesting to me, Andrea, is when they were solving this very complex math problem, [00:04:00] the students who got parts of it wrong had to kind of stand up and tell the class what they did wrong and how they would fix it moving forward.

So clearly they were learning more than just math, right? But acknowledging how to take accountability, how to problem solve, how to use those skills in every part of their life. And so I really, I love that you brought forth this article and just talking about how important it’s to teach kids more than just reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Andrea Silbert: Absolutely.

Alisha Searcy: I love that in my article. I think I’m gonna take us in a slightly different direction, but an important one nonetheless. It’s an article that’s written in Education Next, and it’s written by Charles Barone, who happens to be a former coworker of mine, um, back from our defer days. And I have a lot of respect for his work, but the title is How Democrats Lost the Plot on Schools and How to Get it Back.

And so he’s bringing up some really good points about how. These culture wars, and I don’t wanna make this [00:05:00] political, and you may know this or may not know this, but I run a national organization now focused on elected officials who are center left. The goal right, is to make them more interested, if you will, in education reform type things like accountability, et cetera, literacy, those kinds of things, which I feel like shouldn’t be reformed necessarily.

These things that we should be doing. Across the board, but I, in this particular work that I’m doing, I focus on center left. And so there’s a conversation about where Democrats are in terms of education, the things that we’re talking about, what our priorities are. Some of us who are Democrats are frustrated that our party in general is not focused on some of these things that we should be.

And so one of the points he’s making as an example is that. Some Democrats are treating student achievement as like a radioactive topic, and I find myself frustrated, particularly when we talk about this issue of accountability, where there’s almost this bipartisan focus of like, [00:06:00] let’s water down the standards.

Let’s not tell kids that they actually are not proficient in reading. Let’s not tell parents, you know, we lowered the cut score. And so the kids who were not proficient last year automatically are now proficient because we’ve lowered the cut score. And so he’s making some really good points, I think, about how Democrats need to kind of get back to.

The fundamentals of, we believe that all kids can learn at high levels, that we need to be holding schools and adults accountable. But he also acknowledges that there are actually people on the left or those of us who are in blue states, or, well, not in the blue state, but those of us who are, you know, on the blue side, but there are some.

Things happening across the country, whether it’s Jared Polis in Colorado, west Moore, who hired Carrie Wright, right? The architect of the Mississippi work in terms of literacy. We have great things happening in Washington, dc We have an office there, and so the work that we’re doing I think is really important.

And [00:07:00] so the list goes on. Obviously Massachusetts is on that list. I bring this up just to say. We need to keep having this conversation on the left center left that Democrats need to get back into the fold, that instead of allowing our issues to be defined by some of these cultural wars, I believe very strongly, and it’s why we have Center for Strong Public Schools, that Democrats should lead on transforming public education.

This is something that we believe in, in terms of our values. We believe that it’s a right. And it’s our responsibility to make sure that all kids have access to a high quality public education. So I would also recommend this article again in Education Next, and kudos to my good friend Charlie Barone for writing this piece.

Any thoughts from you?

Andrea Silbert: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more about it. I was really disappointed that our state put to a ballot initiative getting rid of our, what’s called MCAS. That testing as a graduation requirement, when my kids were young and I had two kids who are traditional learners and one [00:08:00] who was not, one who really couldn’t pass the mcm CAS, and I kept saying, this is not your report card.

This is a report card on your school and your teaching, and I need to know. If you’re passing. And so the kids, my older two were ready to vote when this came on the ballot. And they looked at me and they, they said, this is a no-brainer. Why don’t we have, of course, you should have to pass a standardized test to get your graduation.

And you know, they moaned about, oh, all the MCAS, all the drill. Wrote drill, but they voted for it. And it’s what you need as a parent to understand if your kids are learning and if they’re at their highest potential. And I just don’t understand. I think it’s reactionary to go against the testing and all the things.

Phonics was a big issue in Massachusetts. So I am, I am with you, Alisha. Sign me up.

Alisha Searcy: Right, and I appreciate that. And we’ve talked about this MCAS issue a few times on this show, and I think we all share a very [00:09:00] deep concern about the lowering of standards. And so whether you’re on the left or the right, I think we should all want to know how kids are actually performing so that we can support those that needed, right?

So that we can celebrate those educators who are doing well and replicate what they’re doing. There’s so much information that comes out of accountability, and so this notion of. Lowering standards and you know, allowing people to believe that kids shouldn’t be tested and you know, that they aren’t smart enough to be able to function is just problematic to me. So, agree, agree, agree.

Andrea Silbert: Kids are not fragile. They understand they can take a test and they can survive not passing and understand They have to. Change something or the school has to change something or they’re a teacher. So we cheat kids, like they’re fragile and they’re anything but.

Alisha Searcy: Yes, even the kids today. Well, that’s a whole different conversation.

Andrea Silbert: Yes, it is. We’ll have that another time.

Alisha Searcy: Yes, we will. Well, again, happy to have you today. We’ve got an [00:10:00] exciting guest coming up. Aaron Lansky, who’s the founder and senior advisor of the Yiddish Book Center. So stick with us. We’ll be right back.

Aaron Lansky is the founder and senior advisor of the Yiddish Book Center as a graduate student in Montreal in the late 1970s. He discovered that large numbers of Yiddish books were being discarded by younger Jews who could not read the language of their parents and grandparents. He took what he expected would be a two year leave of absence from graduate school and founded the Yiddish Book Center.

He served as a center’s president for 45 years and stepped down in June of 2025. Continuing now as a senior advisor. He received a genius grant from MacArthur Foundation in 1989, his bestselling book, outwitting History, the amazing adventures of a man who rescued a million Yiddish books [00:11:00] won the Massachusetts Book Award in nonfiction in 2005.

Aaron holds a BA in modern Jewish history from Hampshire College and an MA in East European Jewish Studies from McGill University, an honorary doctorates from Amherst College, the State University of New York and Hebrew Union College. Welcome to the show, Mr. Lansky.

Aaron Lansky: I’m pleased to be here.

Alisha Searcy: Great. Let’s jump in.

You are the founder, 45 year president, and now senior advisor of the Yiddish Book Center. In the 1970s, you discovered that large numbers of Yiddish books were being discarded by younger Jews who were unfamiliar with the language and culture of their parents and grandparents. Could you briefly share with our listeners some of your family background, early, informative, educational experiences in your origin story founding the Yiddish Book Center.

Aaron Lansky: Okay, well, I guess we’ll go right back to the beginning then. I grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts. I was born in 1955, so I just turned 70 when I was a kid. You know, I grew [00:12:00] up in a very Jewish household of the kind. My grandparents came from the old country. My, my parents were born here, but there was a Jewish spirit that kind of infused everything in our lives and Yiddish as such was the language that was spoken by older people back then, or so we thought, you know, it was kind of the, the catch phrase at the time. They said it was the language that you heard spoken as when the grandchildren weren’t supposed to understand what you were talking about, because that way it was kind of a secret language for that, that older generation.

The fact that it represented though a vast literature of, you know, a million and a half books and, oh, I don’t know, maybe 40 or 50,000 discre titles, that was totally unknown to me. We were never told about it. Nobody ever spoke about it. There was no evidence of it that it was almost like history had been kind of erased or, or I guess maybe even a more accurate way of saying it’s kind of swept under the rug.

And it wasn’t until I went off to college that all that began to change in the 1973. I went to Hampshire [00:13:00] College as a first year student. Hampshire was brand new at the time, and it was kind of an experiment and self-directed learning, and when I got there, I, I’m not quite sure what I intended to study, but one of the very first classes I enrolled in was on the Nazi Holocaust.

And although I didn’t appreciate it at the time, it was one of the first times, of course in the Holocaust that ever been offered in the United States. Most of the professors were distinguished lecturers from all over the world who had come in for, you know, a day at a time to speak with us. And by the end of that first semester, I found myself not so much fascinated by the Holocaust per se.

You know, the process of destruction of the Jews of Europe, but much more interested in who were these Jews and what was it about them that was so different? That was so antithetical to fascist ideology that did Nazi, you know, dropped everything to pursue their annihilation. So I eventually started studying Jewish history.

First Islam, I worked with an [00:14:00] anthropologist, a Hampshire named Leonard Glick. Finally, I went off to graduate school with a professor named Ruth Weiss, who was at McGill at the time, later at Harvard. And I immersed myself in what had been kind of a a lost world or a world that nobody had ever told me very much about.

And along the way, of course, I needed to learn languages. So I started out studying Hebrew, and then I realized that, hmm, for the last, oh, I don’t know, a thousand years or so, most of the world’s Jews have been speaking, not Hebrew that really came much, much, much later, but had been speaking Yiddish, which were the language of Jews in Central and Eastern Europe.

So I decided I needed to learn that as well. I found a professor at the University of Massachusetts named Jules Pikos, who taught medieval Spanish literature, and he spoke 20 languages of which Yiddish was the very first that he knew. And we went to him and he agreed to teach me and two other students after hours, and we used to go at five o’clock in the afternoon, we’d bring with us a bottle of wine and a [00:15:00] loaf of homemade bread.

And as long as it lasted, he was willing to keep on teaching. And so that was how I first learned Yiddish. And once I did it, opened up this vast literature, eventually went off to graduate school and here I am, um, all these years later, you know, and I still find it as fascinating as I did on the very first day.

Andrea Silbert: I’m gonna pick up on that your experience at Hampshire College as a small liberal arts school in the western part of Massachusetts. In addition to what you learned there that set you in this direction, I’d love to have you talk about why you decided that this international Yiddish Book Center should reside in Western Massachusetts as, uh, you know, a rural area.

Aaron Lansky: I can’t really take the credit for that exactly. As I said, I was in Montreal at the time. I decided to start the organization and decided to, you know, well more accurately, decided to go out and save the world’s Yiddish books before it was too late. ’cause an older generation was passing on, books were being thrown out, and I could have gone anywhere.

[00:16:00] I thought I would go to New York and my professor said to me, she says, you don’t wanna go to New York. She said, the politics of the old Jewish world are so contentious that you really need to go to what she called the Jewishly neutral location where I could pursue this endeavor. You know, without anybody, yeah, without giving offense or getting drawn into these old political battles.

So Amherst seemed to do the trick since I had gone to to school there. So I came back, spoke to my professors there, and they were all very enthusiastic. And so it was really almost a happenstance that I ended up there, but it ended up working out extremely well, and it truly was a fresh start and an ability to not get drawn into old nessian battles, but to start fresh.

Andrea Silbert: I have to laugh with Passover coming up about the Jewishly neutral location. I think that’s a location with under two Jewish people.

Aaron Lansky: That’s funny. There weren’t a lot of Jews here [00:17:00] at the time though. You know? I mean, and

Andrea Silbert: for you that’s

Aaron Lansky: just

Andrea Silbert: terrific. Great choice.

Aaron Lansky: Yeah. But that did change over time, so,

Andrea Silbert: yeah. Well, ’cause you have book center.

Aaron Lansky: Yes. Everything changes all the time, obviously, but you know, there was no way when I started the organization that I could possibly have an imagine where it would go or what it would lead to that, that that would’ve been inconceivable at the time.

Alisha Searcy: This is all very interesting to me, and as I’m learning, I am discovering that Yiddish is a Judeo West Germanic language, historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. And you mentioned this a little bit in the first question, but for listeners and co-hosts who may not be familiar with Yiddish and its history, can you briefly discuss its Origins development and how before World War II, there were 11 to 13 million speakers.

Aaron Lansky: The first, I have to explain, just to put this in context, Yiddish is not unique as a Jewish language. There are probably as many as [00:18:00] 20 different Jewish languages. So most people know about Hebrew, of course, and some people know about Aramaic, which is the language that Jesus had spoken and the language of the Talmud.

But after that, wherever Jews went. They kind of did this alchemy where they basically took whatever the indigenous language was and created a Jewish reversion of it that was imbued with Jewish historical experience. And, and they brought with them words from, you know, other languages that they’ve spoken over the years and are all integrated.

But of all these 20 Jewish languages, Yiddish was like one of the largest and most widely spoken. And as you said, upwards of probably 11 million people before the, you know, before the war, before the second World War. And by the end of the war, more than half those people were dead. So it was a huge disruption in Jewish history that took place in terms of what happened to Yiddish, that so many of those Native Yiddish speakers were gone and the world there created these great centers of Jewish culture all across Europe were [00:19:00] also largely decimated during the war.

So it became a process of rebuilding. And you know, we joke about the contentiousness of Jewish life with within Jewish society, all the arguing and all the wrangling that goes on. But the truth is that it’s a process that continues till today. So after the war. There were a number of different ways of redefining Jewish life.

It was clear that it was never gonna be quite the same as as it had been. So Yiddish became a thing that was adopted by, in very different groups. You had the, the native Yiddish speakers from the old country who were still living in the United States and elsewhere. Then you had Zionist Jews who had left Europe and gone to Israel and created a new state there.

But for them, the spoken language, even though many of them were native Yiddish speakers, not all, and not even a majority in the end, but many were native Yiddish speakers, they adopted Hebrew as their language for this new Jewish state because [00:20:00] it was unencumbered by the immediate. Passed. And then of course there were also religious Jews living all over the world who held on to Yiddish as a language of a very insular community with a language of its own. So Yiddish found expression in all those venues and all those different areas of life.

Andrea Silbert: In your book, outwitting History, the amazing Adventures of a Man who rescued a million Yiddish books. I call it a Madcap Caper when I read it 20 years ago.

Aaron Lansky: That’s nice.

Andrea Silbert: Yeah. Yeah, I was, I loved it. I gave it to my son, actually.

You note that across the English language, a wide variety of words have enriched our everyday vocabularies, including schmo, kibbitz, schmooze, chutzpah, glitch, and even mishmash. Could you tell us right about the details of the Yiddish language itself and what makes it such a unique and culturally enduring part of human communication?

Aaron Lansky: Well, that goes right to the core of Jewish history and who [00:21:00] Jews are as a people because, you know, there are many, many different peoples living on this earth, but Jews have always been a bit different in the sense that for much of our history, we didn’t have a country, a physical country of our own, or at least not one that we were living in.

And as a result, Yiddish became kind of the language of everyday life and stood into, um, a dichotomy within Jewish life itself. You had Hebrew, which retained as a language of scholarship and prayer, and Yiddish was a language of everyday existence. And it reflected totally the viewpoint, you know, of the people who actually were, were living in it and speaking it.

So I think it, it’s not surprising that many Yiddish words made their way into English and it’s other languages as well. I was once sitting on a train in Yugoslavia many, many years ago. I was a college student at the time. I was in a compartment with two working class German guys, and we were trying our best to communicate.

And I had studied German along the way, so you [00:22:00] know, I could speak about German. So they were speaking with me and we were doing reasonably well in communicating. And at one point they had this idea that it was kinda rampant at the time that everybody in America was a gangster or an outlaw of some sort.

They said to me, ah, you know, Al Capone, Al Capone, or something like that, you know? And I- and I tried to explain to him that not all Americans were gangsters, except I didn’t know the word for gangsters in German. And I knew the words in Yiddish, but the words in Yiddish were all of Hebrew origin and you know, thieves and robbers.

But I figured they would never understand that, and I didn’t know what word he use. And I said, well, they’re not all, um like bandits. Yeah. And they looked at each other and that was clearly not a German word, and they had no idea what I was saying. And they said, fun. Deon Van Deon and finally one of the guys goes.

The God using a Hebrew word that had made its way into Yiddish and in turn made its way into German, into modern German, filling a [00:23:00] gap where that word was somehow needed. And you know, that continues to go on if you, the word you refer to as glitch, which is a computer error glitch, comes from glitching, which is the slide.

So it’s something that kind of goes awry and that somehow made its way into contemporary English. So, you know, this process goes on.

Alisha Searcy: When we were talking Mr. Lansky about the language and the millions of people that were killed, it’s important that I think we talk about the Holocaust, which was a central event of the 20th century.

Approximately 85% of the over 6 million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust were Yiddish speakers. Could you share with us the vital importance of Holocaust remembrance and how your work leading the Yiddish Book Center has been an expression. Of preserving the memory of those who perished due to the tyranny of Nazi Germany.

Aaron Lansky: I can, but I have to start it out with a caveat and to say that you have to be careful with this only because it’s easy for Jews to become redefined. You [00:24:00] know, in terms of the Holocaust. It’s what most people know about Jewish lifes in Eastern Europe. They know anything at all. Um, it’s fine. And I, I applaud the Holocaust museums that had been developed and, you know, the interest in all of this.

But to think that studying the process whereby Jews were killed somehow elucidates Jewish life, I think is erroneous. Oh, I remember something once asked me about this and I said that, you know, ma, just, they were a great musical conductor and this conductor had written the composer rather, and the composer had written all these extraordinary pieces of music.

And then one day. The composer is walking down the street and he’s mugged and killed. What would people do? What would they make monuments to? Would they put up monuments memorializing the murder of this composer, or would they play the music? And I think in a large part, we’ve forgotten to play the music, and so there’s a lot of focus on the Holocaust and across the destruction, but not nearly enough on the culture that was almost destroyed.

One of the [00:25:00] remarkable things about Yiddish, it just what an extraordinary literature it produced. It was the spoken language of recorders of the world’s Jews at the, you know, by the time of the war. But it had generated one of the most extraordinarily concentrated outpourings of literary creativity in all of Jewish history.

So there was something like, which we’re still not really sure, but we think 50 to 60,000 discreet titles were published in Yiddish, largely as a modern literature beginning late into the 19th century. The earliest story that we credit is 1864, which I think is also the year that War and Peace came out.

So we just contextualize this and the EF came pouring forth US Jews try to figure out what it meant to live as Jews in a modern world, and they turned to Yiddish to explore that. So you had writers like Shala Mala Forum in Terret. Gained extraordinary popularity early on, but there were subsequent generations of Yiddish writers.

If you know someone like Isaac [00:26:00] Vinger who won the Nobel Prize in literature that was very late in the game, and he was still writing in Yiddish and still creating these extraordinary works. We’re reaching a point now whether or not many Yiddish writers left. But the interest in Yiddish literature I think is continuing to grow.

Andrea Silbert: It’s really good to know. I will say you probably personally have had such an impact on the interest in Yiddish and Y literature. One of my kids went to Middlebury and they have something there. They’re very good at languages, right. So they have something there called J Term and you have to take a class for J term.

It’s a one month

Alisha Searcy: right.

Andrea Silbert: And he was very late ’cause he is perpetually late in signing up and there was nothing left but Yiddish.

Aaron Lansky: I love it. Yid. I love it.

Andrea Silbert: It was fabulous. And that’s when I gave him your book when he took Yiddish and I said, you will never regret this. This will be so much fun. And he, he really enjoyed it.

Aaron Lansky: So we have this very beautiful building in Amherst, [00:27:00] Massachusetts, and it sort of modern in every way, but it echoes it. East European stetl, the, the architecture of these Jewish towns in Eastern Europe. And people would come in and they’re on a balcony level and they’re looking out over the stacks in this kind of sea of books, you know?

And it’s really quite an experience. And people often will come up to me and they start crying and they’ll say, oh, I only wish my parents could be here to see this, or, I only wish my grandparents could be here to see this. And I’d always say, yes, yes. And, but in my heart, I was always thinking. That’s great.

But what we really want is for your kids and your grandchildren to feel of this, to understand what they’ve inherited because it’s been so, we’ve been so cut off from it for so long, and that’s the phenomenon that we’re seeing more and more of.

Andrea Silbert: That is so beautiful. And that’s why I said to ’em, you’re gonna love this.

You’re gonna have a whole, this whole new vocabulary that everybody else is saying is the zeitgeist, right? So

Aaron Lansky: yes, right.

Andrea Silbert: So let’s go back to your [00:28:00] accomplishment. I mean, I can’t, it’s hard to fathom that over the decades you have heroically rescued over a million Yiddish books. Yeah. And in the process helped restore and perpetuate an entire body of Jewish literature.

Your works earned you the nickname of the Yiddish Indiana Jones

Aaron Lansky: for those things

Andrea Silbert: and the US Oscar Schindler of Yiddish literature.

Aaron Lansky: Oh my goodness. That’s all overstating it a little bit, I think, but Okay.

Andrea Silbert: Okay. Anyway, you should take it. You should take it. Yeah. Would you discuss this life and career journey as well as the vital importance of preserving these books, the written word, and the remarkably enduring cultural inheritance of the Yiddish language?

Aaron Lansky: People often refer to Jews as aha, safer, which means people of the book, and one assumes that means the people of the of the Bible of the Torah, but it means more than that. It means people of books. And the reason we’re a people of books is because we didn’t have territory of our own for so [00:29:00] long. And during thousands of years of, of exile or, you know, wandering from country to country and from land to lands, books took on an an inordinate significance for Jews as the repository of our culture and our own identity.

So as a result, they were given tremendous veneration. I remember when I was a kid, if we dropped the book on the floor, it didn’t matter what it was. You know, it could have been a, a volume of the Bible, but could also have been, you know, Norman Mailer. It didn’t matter, some, whatever book it was. If we dropped the book on the floor, we were taught to pick it up and kiss it before we put it back on the shelf.

And you know, when I was a kid I never thought anything of, it’s just what we did. But many people have told me similar stories and they grew up exactly the same way. And the reason One Kiss is a book that’s been dropped is just to express one’s respect to that book and to show how much we treasure and value it.

And the reason we value those books is because there are some, they are us. They tell our story, they position us in history, and as a result, I think they take [00:30:00] on this outsize of significance in Jewish life.

Alisha Searcy: In your book, outwitting History, you write, sitting together in that crowded apartment. He an 87-year-old man in a wool suit.

I a bearded 24-year-old in jeans and t-shirt. We were enacting a ritual of cultural transmission. He was handing me not merely his books, but his world, his Isha. Could you briefly share with us some of the most memorable vignettes? From your journey through this ritual of cultural transmission as well as the special intergenerational nature of your work?

Aaron Lansky: Yeah, it’s a very good question. It was really always intergenerational right from the get go in, except when I first started out, I was only 23, 24 years old when I began this work. I was dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, and when I went out with a bunch of other young people the same age as I was, and we’d go out in the truck and we’d go from house to house, picking up books.

People were, were waiting for us, and they used to refer to me as the [00:31:00] Jman. They’d say, Jman Kim here, you know, young man. Come here. Because in that world I stood out as this young man in, in a world of much, much older. People, of course there were people far younger than I in in the religious communities who were speaking the language as well, but they didn’t have much room.

They didn’t see it as a literary language, so them, it was simply the language of everyday life. It was just a spoken language for me though, there was no way you could remain unaware of the intergenerational nature of what was happening. And it really was a process of cultural transmission. Of an older generation who themselves have been neglected for a very long time.

And they realized that if they didn’t do something, this was gonna be lost with them. And then I came along as a young person and plenty of other young people working with me, and we were just embraced. And when I say embraced, I mean that quite literally. You know, they would invite us into the apartment and they would hug us and they would kiss us and they would.

Sit us down at the dining room table, and they would serve us very [00:32:00] heavy Jewish food, which wasn’t conducive to hauling books the rest of the day. They would tell us over and over again how pleased they were that there was some continuity here. They called it a Hampshire continuity would take place that this wouldn’t die with their generation.

So I was always keenly aware of that and it’s a heavy responsibility, you know, for someone to tell you that, that they’re counting on you. They had no choice and we were only too eager to try to pick up that mantle just because we understood how significant this was.

Alisha Searcy: That is so equally beautiful and powerful. Thank you.

Aaron Lansky: Sure.

Andrea Silbert: Uh, wedding history you discussed the recent neglect of history, the challenges of assimilation and persistent antisemitism. You write, quote, sometimes at night, standing alone in our warehouse, looking at those rows upon rows of rescued books. I marvel at the wildes of history. How did it happen that we arguably the most book loving people on the planet parted with an [00:33:00] entire literature?

So as we close this discussion with you, would you talk about the future of the ish book center? The best way to ensure the follow on generations of young people appreciate this legacy and more generally what families and educators like need to do to restore a better understanding of our shared past.

Aaron Lansky: What I can tell you to begin is that there’s a growing urgency to the work that we do. You know, it seems you would think as we move farther away from that earlier generation and from the history that preceded us, that it would begin to fade in some way. But just the opposites happened that we really are in many ways a people that’s been uprooted.

And we don’t quite know ourselves. And the danger of that is when you don’t know yourself, you’ll be with the others that define you. And so we see this extraordinary rise in antisemitism in recent years. That’s really hard to take, you know, it, it, it’s just so shocking that this would become the challenge of our generation as well.

We thought this, these days were over. In [00:34:00] fact, it’s continuing to spread around the world, and we don’t have to get into the politics of it to understand that this hatred of Jews, the people who are somehow different, has gone on for a very long time in the early 1960s when Adolf Eichman or the Nazi leaders has put on trial in Jerusalem.

They captured him in Argent, kidnapped him in Argentina, brought him to to Israel. He was put on trial for some of the crimes of the Holocaust, and it was the first time there had been this public airing of what had actually happened, and witnesses got up to speak. One of those witnesses was a great Jewish historian named Seila Barone, who at the time was teaching at Columbia.

And the defense lawyer, not the prosecutor, but the defense lawyer, said to Barone, said, professor Barone said, is it not true that antisemitism has fitted for generations? And Barone says, yes, sadly, this is true. And he said, well then as though as the Jew’s own fault, he says, well, then he said, can you explain to me [00:35:00] why that happened?

Or why throughout thousands of years, people have always hated Jews. And Barone wasn’t the least bit fooled by this, and he said, I can answer you very simply. He said. Antisemitism is the dislike of the, unlike the dislike of those who are different from ourselves, and that continues to be a mode of force in history every single day.

I mean, there are days I can barely bring myself to pick up the New York Times and see what’s happening, just because hatred continues to persist in so many ways. Not just hatred is Jews, but. Everywhere. Minority people are subjugated and oppressed and persecuted, and threatened in, in so many different ways, but I think it was a profound understanding of what Yiddish represented Views are.

Tiny people, you know, most people don’t believe that because we seem to loom so large in the, the intellectual life of Western civilization, and it’s true, but we are, we’re really, you know, even in the United States, we’re under 2% of the population. 98% of the people in this country are not Jewish. [00:36:00] That’s very hard for me to believe, but it’s, it’s the only where I fit.

But, um, it’s very much the case. So I think that nowadays, you know, a lot of Jews especially, were just shocked at the outpouring of antisemitism. That’s followed the massacres a few years ago. But in retrospect, I think we can understand it. And what was so. Cobbling for Jews is that when they were pilloried and when they were singled out and when they were subjected to this new, whole new wave of, of violent against Jews, most of us didn’t know how to defend ourselves.

I don’t mean physically, but just how to defend ourselves against the, the squirrels attacks that were being, you know, thrown out there because we didn’t know our own history. And when you don’t know your own history, you see the right to tell that story. And I think for that reason. The notion of reclaiming a history and a literature and a culture.

As I speak to you right now, I’m surrounded by bookcases full of Yiddish books. You know, they tell this [00:37:00] amazing human story, but it’s a story that’s been largely unknown until now. Something like, oh, maybe one and a half percent of Yiddish books have been translated into English, for example. So again, you know, over 98% of every Yiddish of all Yiddish books ever written have never been translated into English until recently.

So not only are we saving books, but we launched a program to train a new generation of Yiddish translators who could figure out what’s out there and figure out what, you know, what would appeal or speak to contemporary leaders. And we’ve trained hundreds of people at this point. It’s a year long program.

And they’re now going into our online library, it’s called the Stephen Spielberg Judicial Library. They go online and they can, you know, look through these books that they’ve never seen before and begin reading books that most of us know very, very, very little about, and explore them. And they find that, you know, we’ve been on the outside for a long time and the literature that came [00:38:00] out of that has more resonance today and more relevance and more immediacy today than it ever has before.

So for that reason, our work continues to grow.

Andrea Silbert: Wow. That gives me great hope. It really does. I mean, I am of the same generation as you and watched things get so much better for us, the Jews of Boston. I grew up in Boston and um,

Aaron Lansky: right,

Andrea Silbert: and so it’s hard to realize that it’s tougher for us now and for my children.

So you’ve given me hope and I’m doing all sorts of things every day to make a difference. But yeah, we have to really educate our kids and there’s so many beautiful things to enjoy in our traditions, whether you’re secular or religious. There’s, we are a people and we are a religion. And

Aaron Lansky: yes,

Andrea Silbert: where you have, where you have two Jews, you have three opinions.

Very rich, very rich. There we go. So would you read a passage from your book for us, please?

Aaron Lansky: You know, there was such a warmth to the culture and SW, of course, was a, a [00:39:00] way of accessing it. And so wherever we went, everybody wanted to feed us. So I’ll give you one example. This was a time early on when the New York Times decided to run a story about what we were doing, and they called me up and they made the arrangements.

The Times had a feature then like a A Day in the Life, you know? And they wanted to have a day in the life of the young people who are collecting Yiddish books, which seemed so anomalous at the time. They called me up and they said they were gonna send a reporter to go around with us for the day, and the reporter they assigned was a young guy named Doug McGill.

Doug was, as the name suggests, he wasn’t Jewish and he was 29 years old and he had never done anything quite like this assignment before. So I said to him, I said, well, I’ll tell you guys, why don’t you just beat us in the morning and we’re gonna do a whole round of, you know, visits today. I think we had a dozen people to go see and to from whom to pick up books that day.

And so he met us at the home of one of our zomm, one of our volunteer book collectors named Sam Ostroff, who lived in Seagate in [00:40:00] Brooklyn. And so the rest of the day, he would hop in the truck with us and we drove around and we went to house, to house picking up books. I’ll pick up is just here on one paragraph and said, uh, at the next apartment, Doug took out his notebook.

Do you mind if I ask a few questions? He politely inquired of this older Jewish woman. You won’t ask me questions, and the hostess replied. First I have to ask you a question. Do you want your cake with ice cream or whipped cream from the can? Neither please said Doug. You see, we just ate nonsense. The woman interrupted a big boy like you.

You need to eat now that sit. Doug remained standing. The woman who barely came up to his waist, grabbed his belt and pulled him down hard onto a dining room chair. Such a big boy kind of horror, which means no evil eye for you. I’ll give both the ice cream and the whipped cream. That’s just like one tiny little moment in all of this, but it reflects the interactions that we had, you know, day after day after day in doing.

I’ll give you one other example here, a biblical sort of story. This was a time when we had rescued a [00:41:00] great many books and then we had mechanical problems with the truck and we were late getting there, but we finally met the stross of these LERs of all these volunteer collectors, and we were out in Seagate.

We were supposed to get back. We were way behind sketcher at that point. They said, okay, good. Now you’ll come for dinner. And I said, we can’t come to dinner. We’re way behind scheduling. And Mrs. Ostro says, you must. And I said, we can’t. It was Le and Mrs. Ostro who broke the inhouse, Pam, she said to her husband, don’t make a big deal kinder children.

If you don’t have time, it’s okay. You’ll come to my house, I’ll pick you a snack. It’s a 40 minute drive from Seagate to the Lower East Sydor Manhattan where we were staying with her snack. We could have made it all the way to California. Among the highlights. I remember Bala and Cream Cheese fil Fish and Charain braided horse radish wrapped in tinfoil egg salad sandwiches, three cans of sardines, marble cake, and hava.

There were also two tea bags and a plastic spoon, but what we were supposed to do with those and a [00:42:00] moving truck was never quite clear. Well, we got the truck loaded up and we went down the Lower East Sydor Wish thing that night. And around midnight, we’ll find out, you know, crashed. They were so tired. And around midnight the telephone rings and the friend I was staying with came in from the other room and he said, uh, Aaron, I think it must be for you.

He said, because he’s not speaking English. I picked up the receiver with understandable trepidation. Hello KY also throw off Seagate tro, Mr. Ostroff. I said, so this will’s a little bit late, isn’t it? You nevermind said Sam. We’ve been worried sick ever since you left our house. What are you worried about?

I asked, well, he said after you left, we realized, Oman,

they realized that they’d forgotten to pack the election, Kruger the noodle pudding. And they were afraid we might be hungry. So they’re always like, it’s a funny because of the excess of them, you know, everything was extreme, but it’s also touching and poignant in a way that’s [00:43:00] hard to even recollect right now in the sense that they were so eager to embrace us and we were eager to embrace them as well in, in the most literal way possible.

And so, you know, I’m aware of the fact I’m 70 years old now. I retired this year and. I’m aware of the fact that, you know, this world that we had stumbled upon was much larger and more passionate and more alive than anything we’d ever expected in our wildest dreams. But it’s not over yet. You know, it, it will go on in different forms.

Everything’s always changing, of course, but the fact is there are, you know, very large numbers of young people who are studying Yiddish. Again, we’ve developed it. Two volume, brand new Yiddish textbook that people use to study all over the world. And I say we train translators. We are working on so many different fronts.

We’ve digitized Yiddish literature, we’ve scanned almost every page of every Yiddish book, and we’re making them available mostly free of charge to readers all over the world. And the [00:44:00] number of people downloading those books is against staggering. So the truth is. It was a chapter in history that may have been swept under the rug early on.

It’s a chapter in history that almost was destroyed during the war and during the Holocaust, but it’s a chapter of history that still endures because without it, we don’t really know who we are. We don’t know ourselves. We. No one knows exactly where all this will go. No one knows what the next chapter will be.

You know what the next chapters of Jewish creativity will be. But I think we can say with certainty that whatever happens, Yiddish matters and we’ll continue to matter long into the future.

Andrea Silbert: Thank you. I have two suggestions I hope you’ll take. I think coming out of that, we need outwitting history, a cookbook, and and Outwitting history, the Broadway musical. So maybe that’s what you can, uh, take on in your retirement.

Aaron Lansky: Well, as long as I don’t have to sing, I’ll be very happy to.

Andrea Silbert: Thank you so [00:45:00] much.

Aaron Lansky: Appreciate it.

Alisha Searcy: Well, Andrea, that was such a delightful interview. I think it was pretty cool to be able to talk to the Yiddish Indiana Jones.

Andrea Silbert: I just loved it. I have been looking forward to this for weeks and really since I read the book when it came out over 20 years ago. So fun.

Alisha Searcy: Wow. Well what a treat for you too then.

That’s good. Again, I appreciate you joining us today. Before we go, definitely wanna talk about our tweet of the week. It comes from the hill and it says, student misbehavior is up. Teachers want something done. Probably not a shocking headline, but apparently there’s a survey that’s out and more than 60% of teachers want something done about the misbehavior in classroom, so make sure you check that out on the hill.

Andrea, again, great to have you. Great interview today and hanging out with you, so [00:46:00] thanks for joining us.

Andrea Silbert: Oh, it’s always my pleasure alisha.

Alisha Searcy: Before we go, gotta make sure we tell you who’s next week’s guest. So our listeners will be sure to join us. We’re going to have Heisman Bergen. He is a Dutch art historian and author of gdi, A Biography, the Saga Familia Gaudi’s Heaven on Earth.

And this was a special episode and celebration of Passover. So of course, we want to wish all who celebrate a happy Passover. Andrea, great to have you and hope everybody has a wonderful week.