News & Features

A number of YIVO public programs received press coverage. YIVO’s February 14th roundtable discussion on Lithuanian-Jewish relations, “Unresolved History: Jews and Lithuanians After the Holocaust,” is reported on by Ralph Seliger in the 3-part article “Israel & Lithuania: Parallel Dueling 'Narratives',” on the Partners for Progressive Israel Blog. Part III of the article can be read here.

Watch video of the roundtable.

An article on Steven Zipperstein’s January 6 lecture at YIVO, “Rethinking Kishinev: How a Riot Changed 20th Century Jewish History,” appears on the blog Mondoweiss, where it sparked an extensive and lively exchange of comments by readers.

The Forverts reported on the February 6 Yiddish lecture by Michael Steinlauf and program moderated by Eddy Portnoy , “Y.L. Peretz in a Time of Revolution.”

by SARAH PONICHTERA As the heavy monotony of all the snow begins to be broken with longer and longer stretches of sun and warmth, it’s time to emerge from the cocoon, and there are plenty of options to choose from. March starts out with Ruth Wisse’s lecture on Jacob Glatstein, “A Yiddish ...

by ROBERTA NEWMAN In 1937, Yedies reported on its survey of pinkasim (Jewish communal registers), whose mission was the gathering of information about pinkasim in Jewish communities all over Poland. Over one hundred communities had responded to YIVO’s call for participation in the survey, yielding information on over 300 pinkasim, including several ...

“New York and the American Jewish Communal Experience” (NEW YORK, February 28, 2014) – The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is pleased to announce the publication of the Milstein Conference Proceedings, “New York and the American Jewish Communal Experience,” published with the generous support of the Howard and Abby Milstein Foundation ...

Yiddish literature and poetry took off in America on the crest of a huge Jewish immigrant wave at the beginning of the twentieth century. Yiddish writers kept ripening their talent as most other speakers of their language were swept into the English mainstream. Can individual genius flourish during its culture’s decline? Jacob Glatstein, or Yankev Glatshteyn, became an American original by turning that question into the driving force of his poetry and the concern of his prose. On Tuesday, March 4, 2014 at 7:00pm, Ruth Wisse, Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, will discuss Jacob Glatstein’s life and work and will read excerpts from his poetry in Yiddish.

Attend the program.

A Yiddishkayt of folk air
to prick the heart and pour
warm honey at the sight
of things that touch the cockles?
If that's the stuff we celebrate
we'd better do without.
Yiddish poets, are you bees
who close the feast
with honey-store
of song, and nothing more?

From "Yiddishkayt” by Jacob Glatstein
Translation by Cynthia Ozick

On Sunday, March 2, 2014, 1:00pm, a symposium at the Center for Jewish History (jointly sponsored by YIVO and the Center for Jewish History) will explore the resourceful ways that the Jewish women in Eastern Europe navigated modernity from the late nineteenth century through the Holocaust. The event will be ...

by LEAH FALK

Ri Turner, a rabbinical student at Hebrew College in Boston, might hold some sort of YIVO record: she’s a zumer-program (Uriel Weinreich Summer Program in Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture) graduate and a two-time YIVO-Bard Winter Program on Ashkenazi Civilization alum. This past January, as YIVO’s Ellen Fine scholar, she was among the few students who took four classes at once. Over email, Ri and Leah Falk discussed what brought her to YIVO, intersections between different Winter Program classes, and her “dual master’s degree.”

In this episode of YIVO’s program on WEVD, broadcast on November 22, 1964, host Sheftl Zak sits down with Dr. Shlomo Noble, historian and linguist, co-editor of YIVO Bleter and YIVO Annual, to talk about Ladino. Dr. Noble discusses the William Milwitzky Papers (RG 378), which includes linguistic, literary, and ...

On Tuesday, February 25, at 7:00pm, YIVO’s Rose and Isidore Drench Memorial Fellow/Dora and Mayer Tendler Fellow Markus Krah will deliver a lecture based on his research: YIVO, Freud, and American Jewry: Discourse on Eastern Europe as a “Talking Cure” for American Jewish Ambivalence.

In the 1940s and 1950s, American Jewish leaders voiced concerns about the suppression and fragmentation of Jewishness in modern mass society and the pressure to assimilate to mainstream American expectations. Guided by Max Weinreich, who was intellectually engaged with Freudian ideas, YIVO advocated for a more holistic, integrated Jewishness modeled after the East European ideal of yidishkayt. YIVO was a key voice in a larger discourse, as American Jews encountered different images of what the East European past was about: shtetls and pogroms, piety and poverty, religious tradition and political progressivism, Hasidism and Socialism, among others.

Markus Krah’s dissertation traces these competing narratives in magazines, sermons, radio shows, and popular literature. His lecture will discuss the idea that this discourse served as a “talking cure,” as American Jews consciously searched the complex East European past for meaning and grounding in the complex American present.

Attend the event.

Markus Krah is a Ph.D. candidate in Modern Jewish Studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) in New York and a lecturer at the Potsdam School of Jewish Theology in his native Germany. He is interested in American and European Jewish history, particularly in the cultural and intellectual engagement of Jews with the modern challenges and opportunities for Jewish identity. His dissertation focuses on the role of the East European past in 20th-century American Jewish explorations of new ways to understand their Jewishness. This week, he answered the following questions for Yedies.

Author Jeffrey Shandler talks about his book.