Since its founding in 2010, the Mayrent Institute for Yiddish Culture has approached the project of supporting Yiddish culture at UW–Madison in three ways. First and foremost, we work to create programming that offers our community diverse opportunities to learn more about Yiddish culture, history, language, music, and art. The work of Yiddish culture is multi-medial and our aim is to introduce its breadth and depth with equal enthusiasm.
We are also fortunate to be located within and supported by the Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, an institution that has long fostered innovative scholarship in the interdisciplinary field of Jewish studies. We contribute to this tradition with our second goal. The Mayrent Institute works to support scholarly inquiry into Yiddish culture through classes, lectures, and symposia. We stand as an active resource for faculty and students who are looking to advance conversations about Yiddish culture past and present.
Finally, at the core of the Institute is the Mayrent Collection of Yiddish Recordings, a repository of more than 9,000 historical recordings of Yiddish music. We continue to work with the UW-Libraries and Mills Music Library to make the Mayrent Collection of Yiddish Recordings accessible for study to those on and off the UW-Madison campus. Click here for samplings of these recordings, which use lyric and melody to examine the power of love, migration, and nostalgia.