News & Features

In this episode, originally broadcast on November 28, 1965, Dr. Marvin (Mikhl) Herzog interviews Dr. Florence Guggenheim-Grünberg on Western Yiddish. Recorded examples of native speakers of Western Yiddish are featured, with the discussion in English. Among Guggenheim-Grunberg’s publications are "Horse Dealers' Language of the Swiss Jews in Endingen and Lengnau" ...

In addition to extensive coverage of the Yiddish Fight Club exhibition, there has been media interest in three other major YIVO projects:

• The YIVO Vilna Collections project, YIVO’s international initiative to digitally reunite its prewar collections in New York and Vilnius, is the subject of an article in Le Monde. and an article about the project that originally appeared in Ami Magazine was reprinted in Long Island Jewish World.
• The Letters to Afar video installation, now on view at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, was reviewed in The Huffington Post and in Jewish Journal.
• The Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook, an English translation of a prewar Yiddish cookbook, slated for publication by Schocken Books and YIVO on May 26, was mentioned in Forward’s “The Jew and the Carrot” blog.

The Lithuanian Government-designated joint commission, bringing together various governmental officials and Jewish representatives from the Lithuanian Jewish Community and international Jewish organizations, held its first meeting in Vilnius. Topics addressed were the protection and preservation of Jewish cemeteries and mass graves of Holocaust victims, the restoration of synagogues and other Jewish heritage sites, the education of Lithuanian children about the history of Lithuanian Jewry, and the gaps in Lithuanian law on private property restitution and its subsequent implementation.

Jack Jacobs talks about his book.

YIVO’s Letters to Afar video art installation at the Museum of the City of New York featured home movies from the YIVO Archives made by American Jews who traveled back to their hometowns in Poland during the 1920s and 1930s. What can we learn from and what are we looking for in these films when we look at them so many years later?

On March 10, 2015 writers Dani Shapiro and Glenn Kurtz appeared at YIVO in a program in conjunction with the Letters to Afar exhibition to discuss their own family films from prewar Poland, their search to identify individuals in the films, and how they used the home movies to deepen their understanding of a vanished world. The Shapiro footage of Horodok, Poland, became the basis for YIVO’s 1981 documentary, Image Before My Eyes, and the Kurtz family film of a visit to Nasielsk, Poland inspired Glenn Kurtz’s book Three Minutes in Poland, which was voted “Best of 2014” by The New Yorker and National Public Radio.

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 ...

YIVO has just learned of the passing of Benjamin Harshav yesterday, on April 23, 2015. Benjamin Harshav was Professor Emeritus of Hebrew Language & Literature at Yale University and the author of acclaimed works on Jewish culture, including Language in the Time of Revolution (1999), The Meaning of Yiddish (1990), American ...

The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research mounts new exhibit, Yiddish Fight Club, based on a linguistic study of Yiddish fighting terms that appeared in YIVO's first publication in 1926. It combines the now-forgotten slang of a violent Yiddish underworld with images of Jewish brawlers from the past. This  exhibit reveals the little-known history of the unique Yiddish fighting slang used by Jewish gangsters, boxers and professional wrestlers, among other tough Jews.

by ROBERTA NEWMAN Malka Lee, ca. 1930s. (YIVO Archives) When Yvette Marrin received the poem by her mother from translator Ri Turner (an alumnus of YIVO's Uriel Weinreich Summer Program in Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture), she was stunned. It wasn't the first time she'd been contacted by scholars about her mother, ...