אַזאַ יאָר אויף אייך!
YOR, the acronym of Yiddish Online Resources, aims to serve the wide community of students, researchers, readers, writers and educators by providing effective links to Yiddish resources primarily although not exclusively in Yiddish. It's objective is to provide effectively arranged links to:
(a) accessible books, journals, articles, and manuscripts
(b) other tools, i.e. accessible portals, indexes, catalogs
(c) relevant accessible biographic and bibliographic data (as a hypertext)
YOR is arranged according to a number of categories (and whenever applicably subcategories). These may in part overlap but hopefully not too often. The number of main thematic categories will be sufficiently limited thus allowing for an effective and intuitive search, orientation and navigation. In each category (or subcategory) the links will be arranged according to the book's date of publication unless it is specified otherwise on a given page. The links to audio and video resources, as well as to other resources, link portals, library catalogs etc. will be arranged thematically or by the sources' relevance.
The categories and especially their subdivision is not set in stone. The current initial version includes the following (according to their alphabetical order of appearance in Yiddish):
All (or nearly all) linked books (alphabetical by author)
Theater and Drama
Literature
Early Yiddish (16th to 18th century)
Manuscripts
The Nineteenth century
History, scholarship, text editions
"Living word" (collections for declamation & audio recordings)
Modern Yiddish poetry
Literary Periodicals
Books (history, descriptions, fiction, "theory")
Folklore
Sayings, proverbs, tales (texts)
Scholarship (major collections & scholarly periodicals)
Yivo Bleter
Archives
Periodicals (lingustic)
The bulk of provided links is to primary and secondary works in Yiddish, however, whenever possible links to important accessible secondary materials, such as studies, historical overviews, select translations, in other languages will be provided as well.
It should not be left unmentioned that this website is neither designed nor is it capable to replace serious bibliographic research in libraries, archives, and the rich and vast bibliographic resources pertaining to Yiddish. The sporadic and by far incomplete accessibility even of the already scanned Yiddish and Yiddish-related works is all too evident. Therefore YOR can not be used as a representative bibliographic resource. It at best represents only some of the sources and works while by necessity leaving numerous other important and vital sources unmentioned. Nevertheless, thanks to such wonderful enterprises and projects as the Yiddish Book Center (affectionately called "bikher.org"), hebrewbooks.org, books.google.com, archive.org, and europeana.eu (to name but a few), one can now directly access a wide and hopefully growing array of books and publications and effectively peruse them for study, teaching, research and intellectual recreation.