Yiddishkayt

About Yiddishkayt

We believe that yiddishkayt — the culture, language, art, and worldviews of Eastern European Jews, as they lived in Europe and in the places they settled — has a crucial role to play in our world today. Often forgotten, obscured, or denigrated, Yiddish culture offers a much-needed model of diverse people coming together and rejecting parochialism, of fusion, collective creativity, and critical engagement. Yiddishkayt is a cultural incubator. We craft hands-on, immersive experiences creatively, inclusively, and outside the confines of academic and religious institutions, making this past present and mapping out the relationships that bring humanity closer together across the divides of national, religious, and ethnic borders. We aim: • to preserve, cultivate, and broadcast the treasures of Yiddish and the progressive tradition of Jewish European and immigrant life and explore this cultural and moral heritage in the face of the disappearance and neglect of the historical, lived experience of European Yiddish culture; • to show how the lessons of minority cultural history are more important than ever and demonstrate that learning about shared cultural treasures opens us up to the riches, not only of our own past, but also of the cultures around us; • to inspire current and future generations with the artists, writers, musicians, performers, filmmakers, philosophers, and social justice activists whose particular form of critical and compassionate engagement with humanity — emerged from the Jewish communities of Europe as they developed in constant contact with their non-Jewish neighbors; • to teach this culture as a crucial bridge that connects personal histories to the present globalized world of displaced people, immigrants, and exiles; • to educate about culture in the most pluralistic way possible in order to understand what history teaches us about being a mentsh — a compassionate human being—in an often hostile world.

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