One Sunday this past October, after months of being closed for renovations and installations, the Yiddish Book Center reopened to celebrate its new permanent exhibition, Yiddish: A Global Culture.
Although I live just a few miles from the Book Center, this was still something of a homecoming for me. The first time I walked into the Yiddish Book Center it was 1998, and I was visiting because I thought this curiously located repository would be of interest to my in-laws who were in town for the weekend.
But it was I who was changed by the discovery there of a modern Jewish renaissance—one that had flourished right up until I was born, but which no one had ever told me about. The visit exploded my thinking about Jewish creativity and set me on a course that continues to this day.
I wrote about the return as part of a larger piece about Yiddish exhibitions for the CANVAS journal Compendium.