News & Features

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 ...

On April 11, 1965, YIVO Chief Archivist and historian Ezekiel Lifschutz visits the studio to talk with host Sheftl Zak about YIVO’s photographic archive, which documents Yiddish culture and life in Eastern Europe, and whose oldest images date from the 1860s. From 1963-1976, YIVO had its own program on WEVD, the ...

How do we understand the burgeoning interest in Jewish culture in Poland today? Does this interest, which manifests itself in a plethora of festivals, restaurants, art, etc., help Poland’s Jews? Against the backdrop of the official opening of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews just a few weeks ago and the renewed conversation about the significance of Jewish life and history to Polish life, YIVO,  the Polish Cultural Institute and Tablet Magazine will present a public forum at 7:00pm on November 20 to discuss these and related issues: “Towards Life: Reviving Jewish Life in Contemporary Poland,” a roundtable discussion with leading activists, scholars, and writers.

Attend the event.

Helena Gindi, Public Programs Director at YIVO, interviewed one of the panelists, Konstanty Gebert, a foremost Jewish activist in Poland.

Konstanty Gebert is an international reporter and columnist for Polish and international media; associate fellow for the European Council on Foreign Relations; and media consultant for the Media Development Investment Fund. Gebert was a democratic opposition activist in the 1970s, and underground journalist (pen name: Dawid Warszawski) in the 1980s. He has covered the Polish Round Table negotiations in 1989, the wars in Bosnia, the Middle East, and the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda. Gebert was also co-founder of the underground Jewish Flying University and the Polish Council of Christians and Jews, and founder of the Polish Jewish intellectual monthly Midrasz. He is author of eleven books, in Polish, about Poland’s Round Table negotiations in 1989, the Yugoslav wars, Israeli history, commentaries on the Torah, and a panorama of the European twentieth century. Gebert has served as Visiting professor at UC Berkeley, Grinnell College, and Hebrew University.

In Fall 2013, Professor Jay Berkovitz of the University of Massachusetts presented a series of programs at YIVO and the Center for Jewish History about the Pinkas (register) of Metz, two leather-bound volumes preserved in the YIVO Archives.

His book on the topic has now been published by Brill Academic Publishers. Presented here to the public for the first time in print, the Pinkas of the Metz Beit Din is the official register of civil cases that came before the Metz rabbinic court in the two decades prior to the French Revolution. Brimming with details of commercial transactions, inheritance disputes, women’s roles in economic life, and the interplay between French law and Jewish law, the Metz Pinkas offers remarkable evidence of the engagement of Jews with the surrounding society and culture. The two volumes of Protocols of Justice comprise the complete text of the Metz Pinkas Beit Din, which is fully annotated by the author, and a thorough analysis of its significance for history and law at the threshold of modernity.

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 ...

This episode, originally broadcast on April 4, 1965, presents excerpts from a speech delivered by Dr. Max Weinreich at a staff luncheon on the occasion of YIVO’s 40th anniversary. The talk covers the founding of YIVO, influential individuals in its history, and sources of funding in the earliest days of ...

by ROBERTA NEWMAN

“No one has ever written about it. No one has ever known about it." Swedish labor historian Håkan Blomqvist pointed to the documents from the Bund Archives spread out in front of him in the YIVO Archives. “This is an aspect of Swedish history that has gone unexamined.”

Blomqvist, a professor of philosophy in history and the director of the Institute of Contemporary History at Södertörn University in Flemingsberg (a suburb of Stockholm), Sweden was at YIVO last week on one of the research trips he has been taking for several years, since he first learned of the existence of materials at YIVO documenting the Jewish Labor Bund in Sweden. A scholar who has written several books on Swedish labor history with a focus on nationalism and antisemitism related to the Swedish labor movement, he initially came to YIVO in 2010 to research those topics and was then alerted to the Bund materials by YIVO archivist Leo Greenbaum. This most recent trip was funded by a grant from The Foundation for Baltic and Eastern European Studies. He is being assisted in his research by Dr. Paul Glasser, former Dean of YIVO’s Max Weinreich Center.

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's seven-year project to digitize prewar Vilna collections

The project continues to garner media attention with a piece in JSTOR Daily, "YIVO Vilna Project Will Digitize Jewish History," that also discusses in detail YIVO’s 1942 autobiographical essay contest. “Why I Left Europe and What I Have Accomplished in America.”

The project was also noted in a Jerusalem Post article, “On My Mind: Heritage Protection.” (YIVO is also mentioned in another article there, a piece by the son of Seymour Pomrenze, a Monuments Man who was instrumental in helping YIVO recover its looted archives at the end of World War II.)

Letters to Afar

The YIVO/Museum of the City of New York installation, Letters to Afar, received prominent attention in the media, beginning with a story in The New York Times on October 22. There were also thoughtful pieces in The Daily Beast and two articles in the  The Jewish Week, "Letters from Afar Close Up” and a piece by George Robinson. The exhibition is also the subject of a feature in Jewniverse.

On October 21, 2014, Letters to Afar, an exhibition commissioned by the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in 2013, opened at the Museum of the City of New York. This unique multimedia installation by award-winning artistsPéter Forgács and The ...