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 ...

The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research announces The YIVO Vilna Collections project, a seven-year international project to preserve, digitize and virtually reunite YIVO’s prewar archives located in New York City and Vilnius, Lithuania, through a dedicated web portal. The project will also digitally reconstruct the historic Strashun Library of Vilna, one of the great prewar libraries in Europe. Project partners are The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, The Central State Archives of Lithuania and the National Library of Lithuania.

YIVO’s Director of Education, Jennifer Young, sat down with Gennady Estraikh, YIVO’s inaugural Albert B. Ratner Visiting Scholar in East European Jewish Literature, to ask him about the evening class he will be teaching at YIVO, “Modernism and the Yiddish Imagination.” The class will meet for six sessions on Tuesday evenings, 6:30-8:30, beginning October 28th. Click here for more information, and to register.

There has been little attention paid to the history of letterhead, the pre-printed stationery used almost everywhere by companies, institutions, organizations, and individuals for correspondence. According to "The History of Letterhead,"the first use of the term in English was in 1890, as a new commercial term for printed letter paper. ...

In this episode, originally broadcast on March 14, 1965, host Sheftl Zak sits down with Wolf Mercur, who helped YIVO acquire the papersof famed Yiddish actor, Maurice Schwartz (1890 - 1960). The collection includes 150 scripts by Sholem Asch, Abraham Goldfaden, Jacob Gordin, Peretz Hirshbein, Y.L. Peretz, I.J. Singer, and ...

by JENNIFER YOUNG Let’s get one thing straight: Yiddish is not a dying language. While UNESCO officially classifies Yiddish as an “endangered” language in Europe, its status in New York is hardly in doubt. According to some estimates, Yiddish is the fifth most commonly spoken language in Brooklyn, behind English, Spanish, ...

"A woman’s path extends from the stove to the door. / Here in the USSR without God, the woman’s path leads everywhere." Bezbozhnik u stanka (The Godless at the workplace), 1927. On June 16, 2013, Elissa Bemporad spoke at YIVO about her book, BecomingSoviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (Indiana University Press), a ...

by ROBERTA NEWMAN

On August 29, we posted an article about how YIVO founder Max Weinreich and his son were stranded in Copenhagen in the early days of World War II. In it, the author, Bent Blüdnikow, wrote also about the small community of Yiddish-speaking Jews who took the Weinreichs in and about how these Jews, including Blüdnikow’s grandfather, Abraham Krakowsky, stayed in touch with YIVO over the years.

After the war, when the Danish Jews returned from Sweden, where they had been evacuated by the Danish underground and thus saved from death at the hands of the Nazis, Krakowsky and others began sending documents chronicling the social, cultural, and religious revival of the community to YIVO. They were zamlers (collectors), members of the worldwide network of volunteers who helped build the collections of the YIVO Archives and Library both before and after World War II.

Here are a few examples of what they sent to YIVO in the late 1940s and 50s, and which can now be found in RG 116 Territorial Collections – Denmark.

Digitization of images by Vital Zajka, YIVO Archives.

Every month, the YIVO Library receives complimentary copies of books whose content has been drawn in part from research done by the authors in the YIVO Archives and Library. Below is a partial list of books published in 2011-2014. Brin Ingber, Judith. Seeing Israeli and Jewish Dance. Detroit: Wayne State University ...

In 2013, Isaac Bleaman launched Leyenzal (Reading Room), a website that commissions original biweekly Yiddish-language video lectures about Yiddish literature, which can be downloaded for free along with the texts being discussed.

Bleaman is a first-year doctoral student in the Department of Linguistics at New York University, with interests in sociolinguistic variation, language contact, and language shift. He earned an MSt in Yiddish Studies at Oxford, and a BA in Linguistics and Comparative Literature at Stanford. Earlier this year, he was profiled in “36 Under 36: Three Dozen Millenials And Gen-Xers Reinventing The Jewish Community” in The Jewish Week.

He is interviewed here by Yedies Editor Roberta Newman.