February 6, 2009, New York Times.
Yiddish Library Goes Live Online
By Noam Cohen

More than 10,000 works in Yiddish - perhaps more than half of all that was ever published in the language - are now accessible online as part of a joint project between the National Yiddish Book Center, based in Amherst, Mass., and the Internet Archive in San Francisco, the two institutions announced on Friday. The scanning began more than 10 years ago as part of a $5 million effort to create the Steven Spielberg Digital Library, said Aaron Lansky, founder and president of the book center. The books will be available for downloading in a variety of formats at www.archive.org/details/nationalyiddishbookcenter.

“Ten years ago, our whole goal was preservation and reprinting,” Mr. Lansky said. “Now that the books are online, it has been liberating for us. Yiddish books are safe and available to everyone. Now we are shifting to education.”
The material is largely from around the turn of the last century; some notable writers, including Isaac Bashevis Singer, have been excluded because their works are under copyright, though Mr. Singer’s sister, Esther Kreitman, is the author of the archive’s second-most-downloaded work, “Ghost Dance.” (First is a Yiddish edition of the Bible.)