Aaron Lansky

Aaron Lansky is the founder of the Yiddish Book Center, an organization he created to help salvage Yiddish language publications. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1989 for his work.

Education

Lanksy was born on June 17, 1955, in New Bedford, Massachusetts.
He graduated from Hampshire College in 1977 with a B.A. in modern Jewish history, and earned an MA in East European Jewish studies at McGill University in Montreal.
He was awarded honorary degrees from Amherst College in 1998 and Hebrew Union College, as well as an honorary Doctor of Letters from the State University of New York at Brockport in 2000.

Career

While a graduate student at McGill University, Lansky founded the Yiddish Book Center in 1980. With approximately 1.5 million volumes, the collection serves as the foundation of a multifaceted institution encompassing Yiddish language instruction, university scholarships, translator training programmes, academic conferences, a publishing house for translated works, oral history archives, a podcast, and a digitised library of classic and lesser-known Yiddish texts.
Lansky is the author of Outwitting History, an autobiographical account of how he saved the Yiddish books of the world, from the 1970s to the present day. It won the 2005 Massachusetts Book Award. A children's book called “The Book Rescuer: How a Mensch from Massachusetts Saved Yiddish Literature for Generations to Come” also tells his story.
Lansky retired from the Yiddish Book Center in June 2025, after 45 years as its president. He lives in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, with his wife, Gail, and has stated that he intends to devote his retirement to writing and study.