Archive stacks at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Credit: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
In addition to its global mandate, YIVO seeks individually \u201cto awaken people to the possibilities of their own identity. Jewish identity in the world today,\u201d Brent said.<\/p>\n
Growing up in the postwar period, Brent described his childhood as a \u201ccomplete wasteland\u201d with an \u201cabsent Jewish identity.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAll there was was the synagogue, Jewish jokes, my father\u2019s cursing in Yiddish. Very little else. No knowledge. Nothing,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t believe that my experience was that different from the majority of American Jews my age and younger.\u201d <\/p>\n
He and his peers wanted to reclaim something more of their Jewish heritage, but they didn\u2019t know what that was. To become religious? To go to Israel?<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat did it mean to be Jewish? I know this sounds crazy, but that question occupied me consistently from after my bar mitzvah to today. What does it mean to be Jewish?\u201d he said. \u201cYIVO helps to fill that gap.\u201d<\/p>\n
The nonprofit doesn\u2019t tell people what it means to be Jewish, but it shows the variety of ways that one can be Jewish, and that people have understood themselves as Jews, according to Brent. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe aren\u2019t at the end of this scholarship. We are still somewhere in the middle of it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
From archive to knowledge center<\/strong><\/p>\nWhen Brent first started at YIVO 15 years ago, the average age was 78. \u201cThe staff was so old we couldn\u2019t even get health insurance,\u201d he told JNS. \u201cToday, the average age is about 35\u201d with some fresh out of college. \u201cThis is going to be the face of a new generation of Jewish life,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Another major change has been YIVO\u2019s self-conception. When Brent started, it was an archival library, staffed by conservators. Now it self-identifies as a \u201cknowledge center.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have gone over these 15 years from being a closed kind of archive, where you could only have access if you knew Yiddish, Russian and Polish, and also if you knew the archivists and worked with them, to one where we are trying to make our materials as available as possible to the entire world,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Classes, with 10 to 70 students each\u2014both Jewish and non-Jewish\u2014now come to YIVO to pore over facsimiles of historical documents and to learn about primary sources.<\/p>\n
\u201cI cannot tell you how hopeful this makes all of us at YIVO feel,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
YIVO has been digitizing its materials<\/a> and making them freely available\u2014recently completing a $7 million project to digitize its prewar collections, and currently digitizing some 7 million documents related to the Holocaust, and 3.5 million documents on the Bund, the Jewish Socialist party.<\/p>\n\u201cThis is potentially a golden age for Jewish self-awakening. I really believe that,\u201d Brent said. <\/p>\n
He sees the present time as a period following one dominated by typecasts\u2014whether the poor-but-pious shtetl Jew, like Sholem Aleichem\u2019s Tevye the Dairyman, Irving Howe\u2019s stereotype of all Jews as basically left-wing or the stereotype that Jews were disconnected from nature and weak.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf we manage this moment properly\u2014and if we continue to interest people who have the wealth to make things happen\u2014this can be a great time for Jewish history, for Yiddish, for a re-understanding of what the Diaspora means,\u201d he said. \u201cThe Diaspora was always such a negative concept in Jewish tradition, and yet there are so many positive things that one can point to, so many creative things. You have to let that stereotype go.\u201d<\/p>\n
But for the present and the near future to be a great time for the Jewish people, Brent advised caution.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can\u2019t have a chauvinistic understanding of what our history is, but it is a great history,\u201d he said. \u201cI will repeat that endlessly to anybody who asks. This is a powerful history of a small people. It has had a disproportionate influence on world history. It just has.\u201d<\/p>\n
He notes the dangers of rising antisemitism and white nationalism, stateside and overseas. But he is optimistic.<\/p>\n
\u201cI see very many, many hopeful, positive, encouraging signs that certainly keep me energized and interested in my work.\u201d<\/p>\n
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