As anyone who has done research using Yiddish newspapers can tell you, it’s not easy to find primary sources, especially those from newspapers, in the digital world.  While Yiddish newspapers contain critical information about the labor industry, immigration, the Jewish day-to-day environment, and so much else, finding these materials is not easy, and often requires endless searches through microfilm or brittle newspapers.

The Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives at Cornell University and the Modern Records Centre at the University of Warwick, however, have taken impressive action to begin to make these materials available.  Realizing that transcribing and/or translating Yiddish newspapers is no quick task, they have turned to crowdsourcing in order to publish online important papers relating to the Jewish garment workers in 19th and 20th century USA and UK.

Among the newspapers they are working with are The Polish Yidel (1884-1886), Hashulamith. (1891-1895), and The Ladies’ Garment Worker. (1910-1918).  One must register for an account to begin translating, but people have already been translating and transcribing!  See here for the full list of scanned pages from the Polish Yidel, for example; (P) indicates a partially completed page; (C) indicates that the page has been completed

Now this is something we can all learn from!

(Crossposted at Jewish Studies @ CUL)