Why do I spend so much time creating free high quality printable materials of old Yiddish texts and music, using open source tools?
Because I think that such materials and tools must be available to everyone—not just those privileged with academic access—if we want to bridge the chasm created between us and our ancestors by the Holocaust and the era of assimilation, and effect a Yiddish cultural revival in our Diaspora.
This is not to erase the existence of contemporary Yiddish speaking communities, but those communities are so isolated from even the rest of the Jewish people, and so conservative, that despite the fact that those traits enabled them to keep Yiddish as a living language—that the rest of us must take the initiative if we want to be a part of Yiddish culture.
