Digital Libraries
- Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library
The Digital Yiddish Library hosts more than 11,000 titles in Yiddish, all available for free to browse and download. There are many textbooks, Yiddish-English dictionaries, and children’s workbooks used in the past that can still be useful today. However, the database can be somewhat difficult to navigate as many of the titles are only written in Yiddish. Still, the children’s workbooks in particular are extremely useful for learning the alphabet and getting started reading.
- Mayn Alef-BeysThis is an example of a children's book that would have been used to teach the alef-beys that adult learners could still use today. The vocabulary is simple and the illustrations help to understand the words on the page. We recommend searching through the Spielberg Digital Library to find similar primers.
https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/collections/yiddish-books/spb-nybc202044/kaminski-y-koslowsky-nota-mayn-alef-beys
- Internet Archive
Here you can find surviving Yiddish books that have been scanned and added to the Internet Archive database. You may need to create an account, but borrowing virtual materials is free of charge. There are also Yiddish films and music, as well as spoken word in Yiddish available to browse.
Tips for Searching Databases
Searching through a database requires different methods than searching on Google. Here are some tips to ensure you're searches are as effective as possible:
- Use quotation marks (" ") when you want a specific word or phrase to be included in the results verbatim.
- Searching "Yiddish literature" will ensure that results include the full phrase "Yiddish literature" and not the two words disconnected.
- Use Boolean operators AND and OR.
- Use AND when you want both search terms to be included in the results.
- Use OR when you want at least one of the search terms to be included in the results.
- Use the filters whenever possible.
- If you're looking for a source in Yiddish, you want to be sure to filter out results from any other languages. As Yiddish was spoken throughout Eastern Europe, it is not unusual to find related resources in German, Polish, Russian, Hebrew, etc.