Building an Archive of Language, Identity, and Diaspora:

The Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project

Wed February 7, 2024
3:30 – 4:30 pm
UWM Library E272 (former DH Lab)

How does one create an archive? What is oral history? What is informed consent? How can archival work be simultaneously reparative and generative? In this workshop, we’ll dig into the practical and theoretical aspects of creating a digital archive—specifically, an oral history archive about a language and culture with presence around the world: Yiddish. Christa P. Whitney will draw on her experience of traveling extensively and building a digital oral history—the Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project—since 2010 to present key aspects, challenges, and delights of digital recording, digital archives, and the face-to-face relationship building that underpins it all. We’ll explore oral history theory, interviewing techniques, workflows, editing and curation, and much more.

Christa P. Whitney
Christa is the director of the Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project, a growing collection of more than 1,000 in-depth video interviews about Yiddish language and culture with people of all ages and backgrounds. Originally from Northern California, Christa discovered Yiddish while studying comparative literature at Smith. She has studied Yiddish language at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, the Workers Circle, and the Yiddish Book Center. For the past ten years, she has traveled near and far recording oral history interviews, while also managing a video archive and producing documentary films and web features about all aspects of Yiddish language and culture.

Christa Whitney’s visit is a partnership with Jewish Museum Milwaukee

Co-sponsored by UWM’s:
Center for 21st Century Studies

Departments of English; Film, Video, Animation & New Genres; Global Studies, and History; and Programs in Creative Writing; Film Studies; Museum Studies; and Russian and East European Studies

Honors College

UWM Libraries

Attempting to better understand her grandfather Avrom Sutzkever, Israeli actress Hadas Kalderon travels to Lithuania, using her grandfather’s diary to trace his early life in Vilna and his survival of the Holocaust. Sutzkever (1913–2010) was an acclaimed Yiddish poet—described by the New York Times as the “greatest poet of the Holocaust”—whose verse drew on his youth in Siberia and Vilna, his spiritual and material resistance during World War II, and his post-war life in the State of Israel. Kalderon, whose native language is Hebrew and must rely on translation of her grandfather’s work, is nevertheless determined to connect with what remains of the poet’s bygone world and confront the personal responsibility of preserving her grandfather’s literary legacy.

Woven into the documentary are family home videos, newly recorded interviews, and archival recordings, including Sutzkever’s testimony at the Nuremberg Trial. Recitation of his poetry and personal reflections on resisting Nazi forces as a partisan fighter reveal how Sutzkever tried to make sense of the Holocaust and its aftermath. As Kalderon strives to reconstruct the stories told by her grandfather, the film examines the limits of language, geography, and time.

Christa P. Whitney, Producer and Co-Director
Christa is the director of the Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project, a growing collection of more than 1,000 in-depth video interviews about Yiddish language and culture with people of all ages and backgrounds. Originally from Northern California, Christa discovered Yiddish while studying comparative literature at  Smith. She has studied Yiddish language at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, the Workers Circle, and the Yiddish Book Center. For the past ten years, she has traveled near and far recording oral history interviews, while also managing a video archive and producing documentary films and web features about all aspects of Yiddish language and culture.

Joel Berkowitz is a Professor of English and Director of the Sam & Helen Stahl Center for Jewish Studies at UW-Milwaukee. A theatre historian and translator, he has published four books on Yiddish theatre and drama, and is currently writing a book about Yiddish drama after the Holocaust. He is co-founder of the Digital Yiddish Theatre Project (yiddishstage.org), an international research group that publishes articles and other resources on Yiddish theatre for both specialists and the general public. He also consults for the professional stage, including both the Milwaukee and Broadway productions of Paula Vogel’s Indecent.

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