נאריש זשלאָב מענטש<p>"In the hallways of <a href="https://babka.social/tags/NewYork" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>NewYork</span></a>’s <a href="https://babka.social/tags/YIVO" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>YIVO</span></a> Institute for <a href="https://babka.social/tags/Jewish" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Jewish</span></a> Research, the story was told as a punchline: the great <a href="https://babka.social/tags/Yiddish" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Yiddish</span></a> <a href="https://babka.social/tags/dictionary" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>dictionary</span></a> project that took 25 years and never got beyond the first letter of the alphabet, aleph.</p><p><a href="https://babka.social/tags/Composer" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Composer</span></a> Alex Weiser and <a href="https://babka.social/tags/librettist" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>librettist</span></a> Ben Kaplan, both longtime YIVO staffers, heard the tale so often that it seemed like lore. Then they dug deeper — and found an epic.</p><p>The result is “The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language,” an original chamber <a href="https://babka.social/tags/opera" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>opera</span></a> premiering this week as part of YIVO’s centennial celebration. Featuring <a href="https://babka.social/tags/music" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>music</span></a> by Weiser, a 2020 Pulitzer Prize finalist for an album of Yiddish and English <a href="https://babka.social/tags/song" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>song</span></a>, and a libretto by Kaplan, YIVO’s director of education, the work dramatizes the extraordinary, and unfinished, post-Holocaust effort to create the definitive Yiddish dictionary."</p><p><a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/at-nys-yivo-a-legendary-unfinished-yiddish-dictionary-gets-the-last-word-as-opera/" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">timesofisrael.com/at-nys-yivo-</span><span class="invisible">a-legendary-unfinished-yiddish-dictionary-gets-the-last-word-as-opera/</span></a></p>