News & Features

YIVO’s exhibition Yiddish Fight Club has continued to receive wide media attention from mainstream publications. Reviews of the show appeared on Vice and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ “Marginalia,” and the exhibition’s curator, Edward Portnoy, was interviewed on NPR and for a Yiddish Book Center podcast. There was also a review of the exhibition in Jewish Currents.

The publication by Schocken of The Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook, a translation of a Yiddish cookbook from the YIVO Library, has also been receiving broad coverage. The book was fingered as a good hostess gift by Vogue, and reviewed in Observer. Tasting Table praised the book as being “totally on trend.” The book has also been reviewed by Tablet, Haaretz, the Jerusalem Post, and Jewlicious.

An article about YIVO’s upcoming exhibition Shtetl: Graphic Works And Sketches Of Solomon Yudovin (1920-1940), a joint project with the Russian American Foundation and the Russian Museum of Ethnography, which will open on June 21, appeared in the New York Post, “Carving the Shtetl.”

YIVO mourns the passing of Ezra Mendelsohn, Rachel & Michael Edelman professor emeritus of European Jewry and Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University, who died last week in Jerusalem at age 74.

Mendelsohn, a historian, published over 30 books and articles on the Jewish labor movement, Jews in Poland and Russia, Jewish politics, and modern Jewish art and music. He served as the co-editor of the journal Studies in Contemporary Jewry and Zion. Among his works are Class Struggle in the Pale (1970), The Jews of East Central Europe Between the World Wars (1987), On Modern Jewish Politics (1993), and Painting a People: Maurycy Gottlieb and Jewish Art (2002). At the time of his death, he was working on a book on Jewish universalism, to be published by Rutgers University Press.

by J.D. ARDEN, Reference Services & Genealogy Librarian, Center for Jewish History, Reference Division & Genealogy Institute

117 years ago in January 1898, Emile Zola boldly took up his pen to bring those famous words, “J’accuse…!,” to the defense of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery officer in the French army, whose conviction of espionage was widely believed to be an expression of anti-Semitism. The same year, Zola’s third book of the Three Cities Trilogy, Paris, was published—and subsequently translated into Yiddish in Warsaw by Israel Chaim Zagorodski. That book, in two editions, is in the collection of the YIVO Library.

Assemble the letterheads of Jewish organizations, institutions, and individuals in Europe, North and South America, and Palestine from the 1890s to the eve of World War II in 1939 and you have a portrait of the Jewish world: transnational; diverse in language, political, and religious orientation; and flourishing. Di gantse velt ...

In this episode, originally broadcast on February 13, 1966, Dr. Mordkhe Schaechter talks about a course in standardized Yiddish orthography recently offered by YIVO. Host Sheftl Zak talks about a class for public school teachers entitled “One Hundred Years of Yiddish Literature” that is about to begin and about the ...

The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research receives a generous anonymous challenge grant of $1,160,000. The challenge grant, the single largest gift in YIVO’s 90 year history, will provide funds over the next 5 years to support the creation of The YIVO Vilna Collections project. The anonymous donor will match all contributions, 1:2, up to $1,160,000.

Last week, YIVO hosted two audience-packed events: the opening of the exhibition, Yiddish Fight Club and “YIVO at 90,” an all-day conference in honor of YIVO’s 90th anniversary.

Yiddish Fight Club is based on a 1926 linguistic study of Yiddish fighting terms and combines the now-forgotten slang of a violent Yiddish underworld with images of Jewish brawlers from the past. The exhibition was curated by YIVO Academic Advisor Edward Portnoy and designed by YIVO Web and Graphics Designer Alix Brandwein. It runs through September 1, 2015.

“Building a Future in America,” which took place on May 3, focused on YIVO’s work and activities in the 75 years since its relocation to New York and featured a keynote address by Kalman Weiser, as well as three panels with presentations by leading scholars. Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs of Lithuania Mantvydas Bekešius was an honored guest.

“In 1921 the GOSET troupe moved into a theater less than a mile from the Kremlin. For 28 years, through purge, terror, and paranoia, they presented world-class theater in Yiddish to audiences that only spoke Russian. And then they went too far.”

On May 17 and May 18, New Yiddish Rep will present a multi-lingual workshop production of David Schneider’s “Making Stalin Laugh" at Theater 80 in New York. The play features Israeli television star Gera Sandler and Yelena Shmulenson (“A Serious Man”)  and is directed by Allen Lewis Rickman (“The Big Bupkis”; the Yiddish “Pirates of Penzance”).

Originally presented in London, New Yiddish Rep’s production will be the play’s American premiere. In this revised version of the play, which first appeared in English, the characters will sometimes speak Russian, sometimes Yiddish, sometimes English, sometimes German, etc., just like their real-life counterparts did — but all dialogue will be simultaneously translated via English supertitles projected directly over the actors’ heads.

Two weeks ago, we reported on the death of Benjamin Harshav, translator, poet and eminent scholar of Hebrew and Yiddish literature. He died at age 86 in New Haven, Connecticut.

Since then, several full-length obituaries have appeared online, mourning his passing and celebrating his work and accomplishments. Forward notes that he was a mentor to “generations of students” and discusses his career in Israel as a poet and as a scholar at Tel Aviv University, where he founded the Department of Poetics and Comparative Literature.

Assemble the letterheads of Jewish organizations, institutions, and individuals in Europe, North and South America, and Palestine from the 1890s to the eve of World War II in 1939 and you have a portrait of the Jewish world: transnational; diverse in language, political, and religious orientation; and flourishing. Di gantse velt ...