Donald Trump takes questions from the press on the South Lawn of the White House. Photo by Getty Images

Aviya Kushner May 6, 2025

In the tsunami of cuts the federal government has been making to everything from food banks to public health, it may be tough to find time to mourn the humanities.

But if you have ever searched for something at the National Yiddish Book Center’s website, or if, over the past 20 years, you have enjoyed the translation of a medieval Hebrew poem into English, you may have the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts to thank.

President Donald Trump’s budget proposal includes the elimination of the NEH and the NEA. This is a harsh blow to America, and it will hit the Jewish academic and literary community hard.

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It will also hurt individual readers of Jewish history, literature and thought.

These federal agencies have supported some of the transformational cultural projects in recent Jewish American history — and now, one day after the entire literature staff of the NEA was let go, it’s time to talk about it.

Essential support of Jewish culture

The National Yiddish Book Center received a $350,000 grant for its Wexler Oral History Project, which is more than 1,000 video interviews on Yiddish language and culture. These oral histories are from 18 countries and were done in English, Yiddish, Russian, French, Portuguese and other languages.

What the NEH grant did was make everything more accessible — and connect crucial information sources that many at home are enjoying. It paid for the technological stuff that has made it far easier to get information on all things Yiddish.

“The award will enable us to do exciting technical work, including creating new metadata that connects to authority files such as the Library of Congress and the Getty Thesaurus of Geographical Terms,” Christa Whitney, the founding director of the Wexler Oral History Project, said at the time.

Today, the project is a treasure trove of information on how Yiddish has survived — and thrived — despite all the odds. The speakers’ deep and personal connection to the language is often incredibly moving.

Projects that have been defunded

In 2024, eight NEH funded projects related to Judaism and Israel, for a total of more than $1 million, were approved. Those grants have been terminated.

One grant was for a translation and annotation of the work of the modern Yiddish writer Rokhl Brokhes, who was murdered by the Nazis. The project, including the translation of 20 short stories, was led by Allison Schachter, the chair of Jewish studies at Vanderbilt University.

“Nazi violence towards Jews resulted in a transformation of the canon of Yiddish literature and led to the erasure of women writers from its history,” Schachter wrote in her application for the grant. “Translating her work not only recovers a major woman writer, but also reshapes our understanding of Russian, Soviet and Jewish cultural history of the period.”

Scholars have been quick to condemn the cuts — and note that they contradict the Trump administration’s stated commitment to fight antisemitism.

“Why would an administration battling antisemitism cripple an organization with a tiny budget — just $207 million last year — whose projects add to our knowledge about Jewish history and culture?” Pamela S. Nadell, a professor of history at American University, wrote in an op-ed. “This history is more essential than ever today to counter the rising tide of antisemitism in this nation.”

In mid-April, 65% of the NEH staff was terminated, and more than 1,000 grants were rescinded.

Why the NEA matters for Jewish literature

The NEH funds projects that are scholarly. For literary projects, the NEA is the address.

For decades, readers of Jewish literature in English and in English translation have benefited from the financial support writers, translators, publishers, and literary organizations received from the National Endowment for the Arts. It can be difficult to sustain a literary career financially, and NEA support was often critical — in terms of both money and morale.

The literature specialists at the NEA, who will all be out of a job at the end of this month, are extremely knowledgeable, hardworking professionals who made sure that fellowship judging panels reflected a broad swath of the literary community. (Full disclosure: I have served as a judge for an NEA panel, and I have seen this process up close.)

As grant money was taken away, shockwaves went through the literary community.

Poet Michael Dumanis, the editor of Bennington Review in Vermont, posted the email he received on Instagram. The magazine was founded in 1966 by Laurence J. Hyman; it had received a $10,000 grant — until it was taken away because the NEA was “updating its grantmaking policy.”

The email has Trump’s characteristic capitalization and adoration of the word “beautiful.”

The NEA, it states, will “elevate the Nation’s HBCUs and Hispanic Serving Institutions, celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence, foster AI competency, empower houses of worship to serve communities, assist with disaster recovery, foster skilled trade jobs, make America healthy again, support the military and veterans, support Tribal communities, make the District of Columbia safe and beautiful, and support the economic development of Asian American communities.”

Who the grants have supported

We should also take the time to remember the NEA’s support of individual writers and translators working on essential Jewish literary projects.

Peter Cole, who translated Aharon Shabtai, Taha Muhammad Ali, and Yoel Hoffmann, as well as the poems in his important anthology of medieval poetry, The Dream of the Poem, won an NEA Fellowship.

So did Rose Waldman, who recently translated Chaim Grade’s novel Sons and Daughters. Waldman won in 2019 for another Yiddish project: Rings on the Soul by Eli Shechtman.

Other notable projects in recent years have included Maia Evrona’s translation of the great Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever’s Poems from My Diary and Adriana X. Jacobs, who won a fellowship for her translation of Avarice by Israeli poet Tahel Frosh, which examines how “economic policies have shaped Israeli lives.”

Not just money but morale

That phone call from the NEA can be life-changing. I received one, and I know that it instantly transformed me into an award-winning translator; a book contract for a volume of Hebrew poetry in translation soon followed.

I had worked on that project for nearly a decade.

I know the prestigious NEA fellowship helped make its completion possible, and it’s the knowledge that many books will now be impossible to complete that is devastating.

These cuts are not just a blow to literature, and to Jewish culture, but a blow to a commitment to excellence. For the scholars, writers, translators and publishers who have had crucial funding taken away — and for the NEA and NEH staff who were let go — it’s this shunning of American excellence that hurts too. For work in translation in particular, America’s leadership has made it possible for readers around the world to access the best of Jewish literature and culture, and that accessibility is now at grave risk.

Amid everything else, this is the time to notice the war on literature, language and culture — and to remember that Jewish history is full of examples of the danger of attacks on books, and those who write them.

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