“The First Yiddish War Reporter”: Aaron Lansky and Deborah A. Green on S. L. Shneiderman (1906-1996)

Translator Deborah A. Green and Lisa Newman, director of White Goat Press (the Yiddish Book Center's imprint), talk about the recent recently released Journey Through the Spanish Civil War (White Goat Press 2024) by poet, translator and literary journalist S. L. Shneiderman (1906-1996), translated by Deborah A. Green. Aaron Lansky, Yiddish Book Center founder and president, gives an introduction prior to the conversation. This event took place live at the Grolier Club on June 25, 2024.

Shneiderman’s coverage of the 1936–39 Spanish Civil War earned him the moniker “the first Yiddish war reporter.” With his wife, Eileen, he became one of the 20th century’s most influential Yiddish journalists and a pillar of New York’s Yiddish literary and journalistic community. His book on the Spanish Civil War was published in 1938 (two years before he immigrated to the U.S.) as Krig in shpanyen: hinterland. The Yiddish Book Center's White Goat Press is bringing out its first appearance in English.

Deborah A. Green is a native Yiddish speaker and translator, author, and attorney. Her research focuses on Jewish participation in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War and with Polish partisan groups during WWII. Her translations of Yiddish letters written by Jewish fighters have been featured in anthologies, magazines, and journals.

Aaron Lansky is founder and president of the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass., a nonprofit organization working to recover, celebrate, and regenerate Yiddish and modern Jewish literature and culture. White Goat Press, the Center’s imprint, publishes newly translated work in all genres of fiction and nonfiction. The Center grew out of Lansky’s discovery in the late 1970s of vast numbers of Yiddish books being discarded by younger Jews who could not read their ancestors’ language. Since his first public appeal for unwanted Yiddish books in 1980, when scholars believed just 70,000 volumes were extant and recoverable, more than a million volumes have been gathered at the Center. Lansky has earned degrees from Hampshire College, McGill University, Amherst College, the State University of New York, and Hebrew Union College; received a so-called “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation in 1989; and wrote a bestseller in 2005, Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books.