Chaim Beider: Poet, Editor, Essayist

A new film by Boris Sandler Co-presented by the Congress for Jewish Culture, the Jewish Labor Committee, and YIVO Admission: Free

This year, in memory of the Yiddish artists and writers who were murdered by the regime or suffered from repressions and cultural purges in the Soviet Union, the Congress for Jewish Culture joins with the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the Jewish Labor Committee to present Boris Sandler's new film, a one-on-one interview with his old mentor and friend, Chaim Beider (1920-2003). The film is in Yiddish with English subtitles. We invite you to join us for an insiders' glimpse into the fascinating milieu of Soviet Yiddish culture.

The Soviet regime dealt a near death-blow to Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union when it executed Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee members David Bergelson, Itzik Feffer, David Hofshteyn, Leyb Kvitko, Peretz Markish, and Benjamin Zuskin on August 12th, 1952. But other writers and artists who remained behind lived to see "the thaw" of the 50s and 60s and the remarkable rise of new Yiddish publications, including the journal Sovetish Heymland.  A key figure in that journal was Chaim Beider, who helped keep it going until 1991, as an editor and, eventually, Aaron Vergelis's Deputy Editor in Chief. Beider later emigrated to Israel and then in 1998 to the United States where he assumed an important role in New York Yiddish culture, becoming a staple of the Forverts, editor of the journal Di Zukunft, and an active contributor to almost every Yiddish publication the world over.  A quiet, gentle soul and a dedicated cultural activist, Beider was a prolific polymath of a writer, publishing books of poetry, children's literature, essays, and, perhaps his crowning achievement, the Biographical Dictionary of Yiddish Writers in the Soviet Union, published by the Congress for Jewish Culture in 2011.