My Hero, Aaron Lansky

Aaron Lansky is in the process of retiring, and I don’t think that he’s getting enough attention. There’s was a nice little something that took place on Zoom last summer, and I’ve seen a couple of articles about his career. Maybe if I were an East Coast Jew, I would know more about the things the press has churned up, but there should be a whole hoop-di-do all over the world.

As you may already know, Lansky is all about Yiddish, its history, its literature, its transcendent importance. When he was a very young man, he was seized with the sense that a crucial piece of culture was quickly fading. He committed himself to the life of a zammler, collecting Yiddish books from synagogue libraries, the shelves of the literati, and old age home dumpsters all over New York. He told the story in a sparkling book, Outwitting History, where he describes his battle with the Angel of Death. He cajoled, befriended, and drank endless cups of tea to persuade would-be donors that he was a trustworthy guarantor. He promised people near the end of their lives that he would see to the safety of the libraries they had assembled and place needed books in university collections. The idea was to fuel the Yiddish revival with the raw materials of Yiddish creativity and scholarship.

One thing eventually led to another. He returned to the stomping grounds of his undergraduate experience and established one of the great depositories in Jewish history: the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts near the campus of the now defunct Hampshire College. From shelves in a warehouse, the Center has grown to be a powerful generator of Jewish experience. People come to study from all over the world, to catalog books, to make Jewish music. Volumes continue to accumulate on its loading dock, and it is now translating, publishing, filming and archiving. I have danced with Yiddish culture workers in its beautiful multi-purpose auditorium, and shaken hands with the presiding world-builder.

It’s not as if Lansky been ignored. At one point along the way, he was designated a McArthur Genius, and there are many people who know his name. But it’s important to underscore the magnitude of his achievement. Yiddish is spoken by hundreds of thousands of religious Jews, but it needed a place to be studied by the rest of us, so that its own interest in modernity, in the political debates of Jewish life, in the great diversity of the European Jewish experience would not be lost or scrubbed away by religiosity.

Lansky accomplished all of this with healthy energy and humility, and he did it all far from the so-called centers of Jewish life. The Yiddish Book Center is not in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. It’s in a college town in western Massachusetts. I bless Lansky’s vision and his risk-taking entrepreneurialism. He believed that the frontier of the American Diaspora was the right place for a crucial cultural undertaking. He was—and remains—a modern Jewish hero whose work should endure for centuries to come.