by Sacha Mankins
The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is a Manhattan-based archive on Eastern European Jewish life before the Holocaust. YIVO (the name stands for Yiddisher Visnshaflikher Institut, Yiddish for “Jewish Scientific Institute”) was originally founded in the 1920s in Lithuania, with the purpose of documenting Jewish culture and folklore in Eastern Europe. The Institute formed a New York City branch early on in its life, which became the only branch after the destruction of Lithuanian Jewry in the Holocaust.
YIVO today is a thriving center for Yiddish culture, not only preserving and exhibiting objects from an invaluable archival collection, but also hosting an intensive six-week Yiddish language program every year. The audience is chiefly, but broadly, Jewish. YIVO’s outreach programs both emphasize the importance of remembering what was lost in the Holocaust, and capitalize on widespread American Jewish affection for the culture of Eastern Europe, the culture of most of our parents and grandparents.
YIVO does outreach through traditional and electronic mailings, social media, exhibiting and hosting lectures: all of the methods one would expect from a cultural heritage center. The “Yiddish Quizzes” hosted on the Institute’s website offer a less expected form of outreach. Multiple-choice quizzes of the type made popular on sites like Buzzfeed, the Yiddish Quizzes teach lessons from the YIVO archives through humorous tests of cultural knowledge. Humor is an important and well-recognized element of Yiddish culture, which makes it a fitting tool for YIVO. The audience for a quiz goes beyond the serious scholar of Eastern European Jewish language and culture to anyone who enjoys tongue-in-cheek Jewish humor, from Andy Samberg to the Marx Brothers.
In the last year, five quizzes have appeared on the website and been shared via Facebook and Twitter. They cover the following topics: Yiddish curses, Yiddish idiots, Ashkenazi folklore (a tie-in to an online course on the subject), Yiddish romance (can you identify a Yiddish pickup line when you hear one? It’s harder than you think, but if you get enough right, you can win a pickup line mug!), and most recently Yiddish theater. Each quiz consists of five to ten multiple-choice questions, such as “What custom did the Jews observe on Christmas and why?” or “which of these Yiddish words means a fool made of clay?” Though the questions are often in transliterated Yiddish, the multiple-choice format allows for guessing, and the options are humorous: some possible answers on the romance quiz include “It must be illegal to look as good as you” and “You’re as beautiful as a cat in sour cream.”
To score the quiz, the visitor enters an email address, and at the same time can check a box agreeing to receive regular mailings from YIVO. Typical of Buzzfeed-style personality and trivia quizzes, the YIVO page then offers buttons to share one’s results on Facebook or Twitter. Quizzes like these are a natural fit for a social media site like Facebook, where sharing trivia, game scores and quiz results and comparing with friends is already a habit.
In this way a quiz both engages the first user it’s sent to, and encourages them to pass that engagement on to others, as part of a fun and lightly competitive social interaction. As a form of cultural heritage outreach, YIVO’s quiz project capitalizes gracefully on the urge we all have to show off our talent for remembering movie lines or Disney princess gowns, or even different words for “idiot.”
Can you pass a Yiddish Quiz? Try one for yourself!
https://www.yivo.org/Yiddish-Quizzes