News & Features

Concert by the Klezmatics at YIVO's 88th gala benefit. "The Klezmatics' deep relationship with YIVO goes all the way back to 1987, when I first started working here. The oytsers (treasures) in YIVO's collections continue to be gems of creative inspiration to us as we approach our 28th year as a ...

by LEAH FALK

Curt Leviant is an esteemed translator, Yiddish scholar, and fiction writer. Among his translations are five volumes of Sholem Aleichem’s work, Chaim Grade’s The Agunah and The Yeshiva, and books by Avraham Reisen, Lamed Shapiro, I.B. Singer, and fabulist Eliezer Shteynbarg. Several of his seven critically acclaimed novels have been translated into major European languages.

For YIVO’s Winter Program, Leviant will teach a course on Yiddish Romantic poet Chaim Grade (1910-1982), “Chaim Grade and the World of Lithuanian Jewry.” In 2013, YIVO acquired Grade’s archive, including 20,000 volumes in multiple languages. (For more information on this acquisition, click here).

by LEAH FALK

Curt Leviant is an esteemed translator, Yiddish scholar, and fiction writer. Among his translations are five volumes of Sholem Aleichem’s work, Chaim Grade’s The Agunah and The Yeshiva, and books by Avraham Reisen, Lamed Shapiro, I.B. Singer, and fabulist Eliezer Shteynbarg. Several of his seven critically acclaimed novels have been translated into major European languages.

For YIVO’s Winter Program, Leviant will teach a course on Yiddish Romantic poet Chaim Grade (1910-1982), “Chaim Grade and the World of Lithuanian Jewry.” In 2013, YIVO acquired Grade’s archive, including 20,000 volumes in multiple languages. (For more information on this acquisition, click here).

On Monday, December 9, 2013, YIVO and the Center for Jewish History will host French and Jewish: Defining a Modern Jewish Identity in the 19th Century, in conjunction with anexhibition, a conference and two other public programs celebrating the pinkas (register) of the bet din (rabbinic court) of the Jewish community of Metz, France, two leather-bound volumes preserved in the YIVO Archives. Brimming with details of commercial transactions involving Jews and non-Jews, family law, inheritance, modes of jurisprudence, and recourse to civil courts, the pinkas is a monument to an extraordinary community and its remarkable rabbinical court.

Jay Berkovitz talks about how the Pinkas of Metz paints a portrait of a Jewish community in the era of the French Revolution.

by SARAH PONICHTERA New York will play host to a brilliant array of Yiddish events this winter, with offerings in music, theater, art, and education. With the recent loss of Chana Mlotek, z”l, music is very much on our minds here at di Nyu-yorkerin, and there is no lack of opportunities to ...

Kazimir Malevich (1879-1935) was a pioneer of abstract art and a founder of the avant-garde Suprematist movement in Russia. His painting, Black Square, was the quintessence of his Suprematist project and an outstanding breakthrough in the history of modern art, anticipating the development of geometrical abstraction in the West in ...

This episode of YIVO’s program on WEVD was originally broadcast on May 3rd, 1964. Ossip Walinsky (1887-1973), an active trade unionist and Labor Zionist, was born in Grodno (now in Belarus, close to the borders of Lithuania and Poland) and lived in London before immigrating to America. He served on ...

by ROBERTA NEWMAN

Fifty years ago today, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. In December 1963, Yedies marked the tragedy with death notices in both Yiddish and English.

On Tuesday, November 26th, Tony Michels, George L. Mosse Associate Professor of American Jewish History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will discuss his upcoming book on Communism, anti-Communism, and American Jews at YIVO's Ruth Gay Seminar in Jewish Studies, with moderator Daniel Soyer, Professor of History at Fordham University.

The outbreak of the Second World War precipitated an ideological-political crisis among Marxists in the United States. For much of the 1930s, Marxian intellectuals—specifically, those hostile to the Communist Party—had struggled to understand the rise of Nazism and the consolidation of Stalinism, but did so within Marxism's parameters. However, Germany's invasion of Poland, the systematic killing of Jews that followed, and the Soviet invasion of Finland raised questions about Marxism itself. Against the backdrop of totalitarianism, war, and genocide, intellectuals undertook a thorough reconsideration of Marxism. This process of rethinking Marxism entailed a new engagement with things Jewish: religion, Yiddish literature, Zionism, and the meaning of Jewish identity. This paper explores the turn to Jewishness by intellectuals during the 1940s and 1950s through the examples of Will Herberg and Irving Howe. Herberg rejected Marxism in the early 1940s, but over the next dozen years attempted to recast socialism on a theological basis, before he moved to the political right. Howe, who remained a socialist his entire life, negotiated a partial "reconquest" of Jewishness as an interpreter of Yiddish literature and the Jewish immigrant experience. Both individuals reflected larger political and cultural trends among American Jews in the post-World War II period.

Tony Michels is the author of A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Harvard, 2005) and editor of Jewish Radicals: A Documentary History (NYU, 2012). He is interviewed here by Yedies Editor Roberta Newman.