Tune in! The Yiddish Book Center's Podcast

Today's episode is the first in our series of conversations with Yiddish Book Center "zamlers" (volunteer book collectors). To celebrate the Yiddish Book Center's 40th anniversary in 2020, we're looking back at the Yiddish Book Center's storied history. As part of this effort, we wanted to record interviews with our "zamlers," beginning with an interview with "zamler" Jack Hirschberg. As Yiddish Book Center founder and president Aaron Lansky wrote in "Outwitting History," regarding the early days of the Center's work, "There was a Sisyphean dynamic to our work: The more books we collected, the more the word spread, the more books there were to collect. By midwinter of the first year on the road it was clear that the immigrant Jews had been more avid readers than anyone imagined. Yiddish books were scattered in virtually every city in North America, and there was no way that we, a handful of young people with extremely limited resources, could collect them all on our own. We needed help! So I decided to organi