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At YIVO, an unfinished Yiddish dictionary gets the last word — as opera

JL;DR SUMMARY Marking YIVO's centennial, Alex Weiser and Ben Kaplan present "The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language," a chamber opera exploring the epic but incomplete post-Holocaust effort to compile a definitive Yiddish dictionary. A way out west there was a fella, fella I want to tell you about, fella by the name of Jeff Lebowski. At least, that was the handle his lovin' parents gave him, but he never had much use for it himself. This Lebowski, he called himself the Dude. Now, Dude, that's a name no one would self-apply where I come from. But then, there was a lot about the Dude that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. And a lot about where he lived, likewise. But then again, maybe that's why I found the place s'durned innarestin'.

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Tags

Yiddish LanguageHolocaustJewish HeritageYivo InstituteMax WeinreichCultural MemoryYudel MarkYiddish DictionaryChamber OperaPost Minimalism

Places mentioned

New York, United States
"In the hallways of New Yorks YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the story was told as a punchline: the great Yiddish dictionary project that took 25 years and never got beyond the first letter of the alphabet, aleph."
Vilna, Vilnius County, Lithuania
"YIVO was founded in 1925 in Vilna, Lithuania as a hub for the academic study of East European Jewish life, language and culture."

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Retrieved 2025-09-17 18:00:27 UTC
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