Cecile E. Kuznitz, “YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture: Scholarship for the Yiddish Nation” (Cambridge UP, 2014)

In YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture: Scholarship for the Yiddish Nation (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Cecile E. Kuznitz, Associate Professor of Jewish History and Director of Jewish Studies at Bard College, offers the first book-length history of YIVO, the center for Yiddish scholarship founded in the 1920s by a group of Eastern European Jewish intellectuals. Could scholarship serve as the foundation for a diaspora nationalism? Kuznitz traces the ups and downs of YIVO, using unpublished documents from the center’s archives.