Vhat, Voody Allen is not a rider? :-) Our friends at Jewish Book Council devised this gem featuring writers and literary characters of the Big Apple
Yiddish Goes Digital (with a Little Help from Its Friends)
The first page of the Polish Yidel, July 1884Calling all Yiddish speaking people...Two archives, one at Cornell University, the other at University of Warwick in the UK, have teamed up to digitize more than 1,500 pages from journals and newspapers originally written for working-class Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.Much of the original material has never been translated into English and with the number of Yiddish speakers in the world in significant decline the project was opened up to the public: relying on individuals’ to help translate the publications, which include The Polish “Yidel” and “Hashulamith” newspapers and “The Ladies’ Garment Worker,”...
The Scarce First Edition in Yiddish of “Hashish” (1911)
In a recent column, This Is Your Brain On Books, I briefly discussed Fritz Lemmermayer’s Haschische (1898) and the Yiddish translation published in 1911 with its stunning and evocative cover illustration. It is the only drug-themed book to ever appear in Yiddish.Book people of all faiths and faithful tongues have since been hounding me to reproduce that illustration. The original is in color; all I could access was an image in black and white. It remains, however, an intoxicating feast, made all the more dramatic by Yiddish's use of the Hebrew alphabet, which visually lends itself so well to this...
This Is Your Brain On Books
There has been a spate of recent books covering new research upon how our brains work and the human decision-making process. Madeleine Bunting, at the Guardian, nicely sums up the science and its implications. It turns out that just about all of our assumptions about free-will, autonomy, and rationality in our choices and decisions are chimerical.I was reminded of this just the other day when I received the following note from a close friend and rare book collector with a Ph.D,, and who has been certified as sane. His first note limns an extraordinary find in which serendipity smiled upon...