Aaron Lansky

Aaron Lansky (born 17 June 1955, New Bedford, Massachusetts) is the founder of the Yiddish Book Center, an organization he created to help salvage Yiddish language publications. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1989 for his work.

Education Lanksy was born on June 17, 1955, in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

He graduated from Hampshire College in 1977 with a Bachelor of Arts in modern Jewish history, and earned a Master of Arts in East European Jewish studies at McGill University in Montreal.

Career While a graduate student at McGill University, Lansky founded the Yiddish Book Center in 1980. With approximately 1.5 million volumes, the collection serves as the foundation of an institution encompassing Yiddish language instruction, university scholarships, translator training programmes, academic conferences, a publishing house for translated works, oral history archives, a podcast, and a digitised library of classic and lesser-known Yiddish texts.

Lansky is the author of Outwitting History (2004), an autobiographical account of how he saved the Yiddish books of the world, from the 1970s to the present day. It won the 2005 Massachusetts Book Award. A children's book called “The Book Rescuer: How a Mensch from Massachusetts Saved Yiddish Literature for Generations to Come” also tells his story.

Lansky retired from the Yiddish Book Center in June 2025, after 45 years as its president. He lives in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, with his wife, Gail, and has stated that he intends to devote his retirement to writing and study.