Salon Jewish Studies Blog

The National Yiddish Book Center (Amherst) offers online access to 11,000 out of print Yiddish titles. Users are able to browse, search and download the books through the Internet-Archive. The titles were scanned under the auspices of Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library, which was launched in 1998 with the help of a major grant to the Yiddish Book Center from the Righteous Persons Foundation.

"The Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library is believed to be the only project ever to digitize an entire modern literature, preserving it permanently for future generations of readers, students, and scholars. The project began when diminishing supplies of popular Yiddish titles made it increasingly difficult for the Center to fill requests for important books. In addition, our collection of 1.5 million books was physically deteriorating, as pages and bindings yellowed and crumbled. With the help of state-of-the-art technology, every title in the Center’s collection has now been scanned, page by page, creating permanent computer files that can be readily reprinted, on demand, as high-quality, affordable new books."

(Picture: National Yiddish Book Center)