National Yiddish Book Center News

As many of you may know- this summer I worked as an intern at the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, MA. Much of the amazing experience that I had was because of some of the amazing people there this summer, one such was Mandy Cohen- an advisor and friend in Yiddish and life. She has made me aware of many disturbing happenings at the Book Center- and in this blog I have chosen to reprint her open letter to the Book Center, if you have any friends of Yiddish, please pass it on as well.

To the executives of the NYBC and staff of the summer internship program,

Hopefully you will all remember me. I was a summer intern at the NYBC
in 2006, and following that I worked part time as an assistant to Jane
Gronau in the visitor's center, as well as to Aaron Rubinstein and
Catherine Madsen in the books department, and Robby Peckerar in the
last few months that he was employed there. Last summer I was the
assistant for the internship program and had planned to return this
summer for the same position. It is interesting for me to think that I
have worked for the book center, on and off, longer now than many of
its current staff members. And if I were to return this summer, I
would be outlasting at least two more of the your staff, Aaron and
Jane.

I must inform you that I will not be returning to the book center this
summer and perhaps you will do me the courtesy of reading this email
through, so that I might explain why. I am extremely disturbed by the
poor treatment of the book center's staff that I have observed in my
time there. In fact, I have now watched almost every single staff
member who I respected lose their job in one way or another. This
included Robby Peckerar, Adam Siegel, Janet Kannel, and now Aaron
Rubinstein and Jane Gronau. I've also seen an alarmingly quick turn
over of the staff who were brought in to fill these and other
positions. This seems also to have created a change in staffing ratio
so that there is almost no one now working at the book center who
actually works in any way with the Yiddish language, literature or
history. Rather you have a staff of fundraisers and marketers. I'm
well aware that the book center executives would easily explain away
each of these examples as individual occurrences, or based on recent
financial troubles, but I don't think that can erase the very blatant
pattern that has been established.

The book center has played an incredibly important role in my life.
The summer internship which introduced me to Yiddish was a turning
point for me academically and personally, giving me a connection to my
Jewish history and defining the course of my academic studies. I am
now a graduate student at UC Berkeley in comparative literature, where
I study German and Yiddish. I truly believe it was the internship at
the NYBC that set me on this path, and I honestly cannot imagine what
my life would be like or where I might have ended up without Yiddish.
I love the stacks of the NYBC, and the warehouse, there are few other
places on earth where a person can find so much of the history of
Yiddish assembled. And I loved being a part of the internship last
summer, getting to facilitate that first encounter with Yiddish for 18
amazing students. And yet I've had to watch two very disturbing trends
develop in the organization to which I owe so much: first, I saw the
person who ran that first life changing internship lose his job and
since then I've watched the same thing happen to several other
employees, and second I've had to watch as the attention of the
organization moves further and further from any actual concern with
the Yiddish books which should be the primary focus of its existence.

I think these things are related. I think both are examples of the
willingness of the executives of the book center to use and manipulate
not only the cause the organization was created to serve, but also the
people who work there and by extension the members who support it. Let
me emphasize, I believe that the work of collecting, saving and
redistributing Yiddish books that the NYBC has accomplished over the
last 30 years is invaluable, miraculous, but at some point the
original spirit of the work was completely lost and since then the
NYBC seems only to serve the egotistical and self-promoting business
model of its executives. It is becoming a place devoid of content,
that puts up a front of supporting Yiddish only in order to raise
money for who knows what purpose.

It makes me wonder when the last time was that Mr. Lansky opened any
of the Yiddish books on the now badly disorganized and ill-stocked
repository floor (seeing as there is no full time staff actually
maintaining this collection) in order to think about the values
inherent in that literature. I direct this at Mr. Lansky personally as
I know none of the other executives read Yiddish in the first place.
The story of Yiddish literature, politics and history contained in
those books is one where the interests of the individual are put
behind the interests of working people, behind the interests of the
Jewish people, behind especially the preservation of the history and
literature itself. That was certainly the spirit in which the NYBC was
founded. The organization has accomplished such amazing work. If, in
fact, the executives have grown so tired of that work, as it seems
from the disconnected directions the book center now moves in, one
wishes they might have passed the organization on to people who do
still care about the books on the shelves, and the thousands of books
in storage that have never been properly sorted, cataloged or cared
for because the NYBC never employed the staff to do such work. They
were more interested in funding a new building (before having the
programming or a collection to fill that building) than finishing the
work of physically preserving the books.

I wish I were not so angry about this. I wish I could have returned
this summer in order to do some of the very needed work described
above. But the internship has ceased to be the kind of program that
could use the honest energy and passion of the interns to work with
the books in a meaningful way. The most obvious sign of this is the
center's inability to maintain any continuity in the direction or
support staff running the internship. Those students would be better
served if the Steiner endowment were used to send them to Yiddish
programs that actually offer support to the study of Yiddish, which
the book center cannot do, with it's unmaintained collection and
inaccessible warehouse, without Aaron Rubinstein or any educational
director who qualitatively fills the space that was left vacant by
Robby Peckerar. Unfortunately, I am so angry that instead of
continuing, as I have done for the past two years, to do my part
toward making the book center a place that does support Yiddish, I am
unhappily walking away from it. I do plan to continue expressing these
views with the hope, the very genuine hope, that perhaps your
organization will reflect upon itself and return to its so valid and
essential original work.

Sincerely,

Mandy Cohen