Two competing nation-building projects for Jewry's future shaped the Jewish political landscape in the twentieth century. The Zionist venture aimed—at least theoretically—at ingathering a multitude (preferably all) of Jews in the Land of Israel, whereas the alternative portfolio of blueprints took into consideration predominantly Ashkenazic Jews and reflected predominantly dispersed/“diasporic” ideologies of national rejuvenation. The two competing master plans usually banked on recognition of different languages as national ones: Hebrew by Zionists or Yiddish by anti- and non-Zionists.

While support for reinvigorating the Yiddish language found a place in a number of ideological camps, such as the Bundist and the communist, there was also a “pure” form of Yiddishism, detached, or at least semidetached, from a direct commitment to one of the -isms. Pure Yiddishism, which was first and foremost about building a modern Yiddish-speaking nation, never became the ideology of a mass movement, though it inspired the creation of organizational structures at some historical moments. The Kultur-Lige, or Yiddish Culture League, established in Kiev in 1918, with offshoots and replications in many corners of the world, played an exceptionally important and consequential role in the history of Yiddishism. It was the activists of the Kiev Kultur-Lige who devised plans for organizing a Yiddish academic center, but these plans only crystallized when the league's activities in Kiev had declined following the advent of Soviet power. Nokhem Shtif (1879–1933), whose pseudonym Bal-Dimyen, or “Dreamer,” matched this man's visionary inclinations, was the key figure in elaborating the plan for a Yiddish academic Olympus.

Cecile Esther Kuznitz's excellent monograph, based on her doctoral dissertation, presents an exhaustively researched account and analysis of the establishment and pre-World War II period in the history of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, which in its nine decades of existence remains a vibrant institution, and is now based in New York. True, nowadays it operates in a completely different academic climate: while in the 1920s Yiddish essentially did not have a place in Western academia, today scores of contemporary universities in the Americas, Europe, and Israel endorse Yiddish studies.

We learn that “Shtif first dreamt of founding a Yiddish academic institute in 1917 in Saint Petersburg in the wake of the Russian revolution, and he carried his plan with him as he fled first to Kiev and then to Berlin” (45). Indeed, Shtif moved (rather than fled) to Kiev in 1918, then to Kovno and, finally in 1922, to Berlin. During that period of time he belonged to the Folkspartey, whose Dubnowian ideology was close to Pure Yiddishism. In Berlin, where a large group of Kultur-Lige activists settled in the early 1920s, he wrote, in October 1924, a memorandum entitled “On a Yiddish Academic Institute,” suggesting the establishment of such a body in a western European capital, preferably in Berlin or Vienna. In August of the following year, nine people, including Shtif (who soon returned to Kiev), gathered in Berlin to take part in a preliminary conference, and this meeting later came to be referred to as the act of the founding of YIVO.

The institute was designed as a conglomerate of several sections based in Berlin, Warsaw, and Vilna. As it turned out, the institute's headquarters was established in the “provincial” city of Vilna. This development had to do with the fact first, that the city, with its influential group of local enthusiasts of Yiddish culture, offered a propitious environment for such an institution, and, second, that Max Weinreich, the Vilna representative at the August 1924 preliminary conference and head of YIVO's Philological Section, emerged as the linchpin of the project. The presence of YIVO in Vilna reinforced the city's reputation as a Jewish intellectual center. The “mystique of Vilna,” dubbed “the Jerusalem of Lithuania,” became an important fundraising tool, especially when the expectation to find sponsors in the West did not materialize on the hoped-for scale. In Vilna, too, Weinreich and his colleagues could only dream of turning the institute into a financially secure institution, though its economic base somewhat stabilized by the end of the 1920s. However, only days after laying the cornerstone of YIVO's headquarters, the Wall Street crash changed the world. “When YIVO finally moved into its new headquarters in January 1933, there was still no floor laid in the vestibule, no paint on some walls, and no furniture in some rooms” (131).

Weinreich, who grew up in a German-speaking family in Kurland, now Latvia, defended his doctoral dissertation (“Geschichte der jiddischen Sprachforschung”) at the Marburg University in 1923, but—strictly speaking—he “illegally” titled himself “Dr.,” because German regulations stipulated that his thesis had to be published “in a quotable form” before he might add Dr. to his name tag. (His dissertation saw light posthumously only in 1993.) Still, his academic status was solid compared to that of the autodidact Simon Dubnow and to those of Elias Tsherikower and Jacob Lestschinsky, heads of the Historical and Social-Economic Sections, respectively (the latter two only attended universities).

Weinreich, who combined in himself excellent qualities of a scholar, administrator, and journalist, had to solve numerous problems in order to keep the institute afloat. Formerly a Bundist, he cultivated, together with his colleagues, YIVO's image of “a neutral forum for cultural work above political strife” (104). It was an important if arduous task for an academic institution, endeavoring to survive in the pugnacious ideological atmosphere of interwar Jewish Poland. In addition, the institute was careful to shun the reputation of an ivory tower and emphasize that its scholarship was rising “from the folk.” Significantly, YIVO engaged the public in collecting material to create a record of various aspects of Jewish life in eastern Europe.

Lack of money, its extra-academic status and linguistic insularity, as well as the exceeding attention paid to hair-splitting topics certainly weakened the position of YIVO. Concerning the place which YIVO had carved for itself in the pre-World War II landscape of Jewish life, Kuznitz summarizes:

In March 1940, Max Weinreich arrived in America from a Europe already engulfed in war. Coincidentally, the same voyage of the SS Drottingholm brought to New York the Lubavitch Rebbe and his entourage. The press widely reported Rabbi Schneerson's arrival, but usually did not mention Weinreich. Even the Yiddish socialist daily Forverts, which had, since the early 1920s, employed Weinreich as a journalist, reported his arrival less prominently than that of Rabbi Schneerson. Still, Weinreich breathed new life into the American Section of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, established in New York in October 1925, and essentially rebuilt and reinvented the institute on the new ground. The American period in the history of this remarkable institution is synopsized in the epilogue, but generally it is beyond the scope of Kuznitz's book, which sets a high standard for all subsequent YIVO-related studies