How New Yorks YIVO Institute is keeping Yiddish culture alive

Evolution is a process that can take many millennia, if not longer.For a scholarly organization like the Yiddish archive and cultural institution YIVO, the process only took a century.YIVO (the Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut, or Yiddish Scientific Institute) marks its 100th anniversary in 2025 and one would be forgiven for thinking that the birthday might be an elegy.However, this would be misguided.

Despite the decline in Yiddish speakers across the globe, YIVO has experienced an unexpected second wind as it enters its second century.From its perch at the Center for Jewish History at 15 W.16th St., YIVO’s exhibits are drawing record numbers.

A few years ago the institute began digitizing its archive which has lured some 350,000 annual visitors.Thousands have tuned into its online lectures on Yiddish poets, international terrorism, and a myriad of other topics.Once upon a time, Yiddish was the lingua franca of Eastern European Jews.

Starting in the 1880s millions of Jews carried it with them through Ellis Island and into the tenements of the Lower East Side, or to the Grand Concourse in The Bronx.By 1870, there were approximately 60,000 Jews in New York City, according to Irving Howe’s “The World of Our Fathers,” but by 1910 that number had ballooned to 1.1 million.

With these immigrants Yiddish theater, Yiddish newspapers, Yiddish lettering on storefronts cropped up to make this jargony dialect a force in the city.In 1915, for instance, New York’s daily Yiddish newspaper had a circulation of over 600,000.

It was a golden age of Yiddish, which began to decline in the wake of World War II.Despite that decline, YIVO has continued to stand as the city’s — if not the world’s — foremost scholarly institution for the study and preservation of the Yiddish language and culture.  And, in what feels like a supreme irony, technology has perhaps been one of the key factors in reawakening Yiddish at a time when many had written it off as slowly neari...