News & Features

Three men who made their mark on Jewish life and culture passed from this world in the last week. Judith Berg and Felix Fibich, in four different poses, New York (?), ca. 1950s. (YIVO) Simon Alperovitch (Simonas Alperavičius), who served as executive director ofthe Lithuanian Jewish Community in 1989, and later, as chairman ...

In this episode of YIVO’s radio program on WEVD, originally heard on December 12, 1964, host Sheftl Zak talks about the 39th Annual YIVO Conference, which would convene in January 1965 in New York. Many of the upcoming episodes of the series focus on the conference and present excerpts from ...

by ROBERTA NEWMAN In September 1965, Yedies proudly reported on the inclusion of a happy birthday message to YIVO in the Congressional Record. The speech was delivered by Indiana congressman John Brademas. John Brademas (1927-2013) was the first Greek-American to serve in Congress who later served as president of New York University. ...

YIVO publishes the Milstein Conference Proceedings, “New York and the American Jewish Communal Experience,” containing 8 scholarly papers based on the Milstein Conference which took place at the YIVO Institute in November 2009.

On March 25, YIVO Executive Director Jonathan Brent delivered a lecture at the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Washington, DC, “The Last Books: Recovering the East European Jewish Past,” on the dramatic story of YIVO’s collections in Vilna: looted by the Nazis, destroyed, hidden, and, in part, rescued.

YIVO Kronhill Scholar in Residence Steven J. Zipperstein will deliver a lecture entitled “Hayyim Nahman Bialik, Michael Davitt and the Burdens of Truth” on April 2 at the Columbia University Seminar in Jewish Studies. On April 7, he will be a roundtable participant at an international conference on Zionism and Jewish Culture at Brown University.

by LEAH FALK

On Sunday, March 30 at YIVO, at 2:00pm, Professors Steven Aschheim, Hasia Diner, David Fishman, and Anson Rabinbach will gather to discuss the encounters between Jews from Eastern and Western Europe during and after the upheaval of World War I. These Jews met on the war front in Germany and in Eastern Europe, and their intra-cultural exchanges and interactions with new, non-Jewish neighbors helped reshape notions of Jewish identity and community.

Attend the program.

We asked our panelists to recommend the best books to get acquainted with the stories of these Jews and the impact of World War I on these communities, focusing on three major pockets of immigration and exchange: Eastern Europe, Germany, and the United States.

Drawing depicting Red Army cadres ousting capitalists and other enemies of the Russian Revolution, from a handmade Yiddish book produced in a Jewish orphanage in Bershad (now Bershad’, Ukr.), 1924. (YIVO) YIVO’s Max Weinreich Center is proud to announce a special 6-session course on Jews and the Russian Revolution, which will be taught by ...

A Polish book on the Yiddish alphabet has won the main prize at one of the most important international events dedicated to the children’s publishing and multimedia industry around the world – the Bologna Children's Book Fair. The book, Majn Alef Bejs [My Alef Beys], with Yiddish poems written by Jehoszua ...

by SARAH PONICHTERA

Yiddish – an Eastern European visitor that arrived on these shores at the turn of the twentieth century – has made a home in America like no other. Yiddish has become a part of the English language, contributing flavorful words like shmooze, kvetch, and shlep. However, the embrace in which Yiddish has been enveloped can be so tight as to threaten its own vitality as a distinct language, with its own grammar, literature, and historical specificity.

On Sunday, December 6, 1964 Dr. Mordkhe Schaechter joined host Sheftl Zak to talk about College Yiddish, the textbook first published by YIVO in 1946. By the time of the program, a fourth edition of the book was in the works. Zak talks about which colleges and universities are using ...