The Best Museum in the World

I have been to many, many, many, many, many museums, so I do not use the superlative “best” lightly, and I apply it to the museum as a whole. But the museum I believe all other museums should try to emulate is the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Not what you were expecting, right? But it really is. Not just because I entered with an unremarkable interest in Yiddish books, but I left telling Josh, “Let’s sign up for a Yiddish class.”

So, you enter the building and watch a brief video giving context for how the museum came about, which is an interesting story because of Aaron Lansky’s (the founder) passion. Then, you go on a “tour.” I’m putting quotes around it because it’s not really a tour, per se — it’s more like a walking, spoken table of contents for the museum. A guide takes you around and shows you what you’ll see in each section. It takes about 20 minutes. Then, the guide brings you back to the beginning, and you explore the museum like you would any other museum, except you now know the path you want to take through the museum (everyone in our group took a different path), and you understand what you’re seeing.

Isn’t that so smart?

Finally, small exhibits are off the main exhibit, such as continual video playing from their story collection project. And interactive exhibits help you understand how they sort books that reach the museum. And through it all, you start to understand the scope of this project that began in 1980 to save the written history of a language.

The most brilliant part is how they get volunteers. So you have this language that few people speak, and it’s not easy to pick up a book in this language and read enough to understand how to sort it. So they have a program where they teach college students Yiddish in the morning, and then you practice using the language to sort books in the afternoon.

I was blown away by the attention to every small detail in the museum, and I’m still thinking about our time there long after the fact. I feel so lucky that I got to see it in 1997 before it opened, and then 27 years later to see what it has become.