News & Features

Adam Kirsch is a senior editor at The New Republic and contributing editor for Tablet magazine. He is the author of Why Trilling Matters (Yale, 2011), The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry, a Nextbook biography of Benjamin Disraeli, and two collections of poems, The Thousand Wells and Invasions.

For YIVO’s Winter Program (January 6-23rd, 2014), Kirsch will teach a course entitled “New York Intellectuals Revisited.” From the 1930s through the 1980s, a small group of mainly Jewish writers and thinkers known as the New York intellectuals helped to set the agenda for political and literary thought in America. In magazines like Partisan Review and Commentary, they charted their generation's complex relationship with Communism and Modernism. Many started on the far left and ended up as champions of neoconservatism. The class will explore the work of this seminal group.

Leah Falk spoke with Kirsch about the ideas behind the course, and why we should consider revisiting these writers today.

פֿון איציק גאָטעסמאַן

Parisian Yiddish singer Noemi Waysfeld visited New York and discussed her multilingual musical project on the subject of exile.

נאָך דעם ווי זי און איר מוזיקאַלישע גרופּע „בליק" זענען אויפֿגעטראָטן בײַ אַן אויסשטעלונג פֿונעם קינסטלער באָריס אַראָנסאָן אין פּאַריז, האָט אַראָנסאָנס זון, מאַרק, זיך פֿאַרליבט אין זייער פֿאָרשטעלונג און זיי פֿאַרבעטן קיין אַמעריקע צו שפּילן אויף זײַן זונס בר־מיצווה. דאָס האָט אונדז געגעבן די מעגלעכקייט זיך צו באַקענען און אַרומצורעדן נעמי ווײַספֿעלדס איצטיקע פּראָיעקטן.

Excerpts from an interview with YIVO Executive Director Jonathan Brent in the Forward’s online video, Philip Roth: Angst of a Retiring Novelist, exploring how Roth’s work both reflected and influenced American Jewish identity and culture.

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 2011-2013.

In September 1950, YIVO announced plans for a new, focused effort to collect artifacts, documents and other materials documenting American Jewish history, specifically the history of the mass immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries and the impact that the immigrants were continuing ...

YIVO, in cooperation with the National Library of Lithuania and the Lithuanian Central State Archives (LCSA), is developing a detailed plan for the digitization of its collections in Lithuania, including newly discovered materials at the LCSA.

As we have reported earlier here, on Monday, November 4, 2013, YIVO’s longtime music archivist and Jewish cultural treasure Chana Mlotek passed away. But YIVO also lost another dear friend, Dr. Alfred Moldovan, who died that same day. Many in the Jewish world knew Dr. Moldovan as a major Judaica collector ...

This third episode, which originally aired on April 19, 1964, features host Sheftl Zak interviewing Michael Zylberberg, journalist and YIVO representative in London. Zylberberg, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, discusses Jewish life and Yiddish in London and his work collecting documents and other historical materials. His collection, which deals extensively with Polish and Jewish anti-Nazi resistance, is in the YIVO Archives (Michael Zylberberg, Papers, RG 493).

פֿון איציק גאָטעסמאַן

In Yiddish literature the building of the sukkah was often portrayed with humor - suddenly every Jew becomes an architect! But Dr. Gabrielle A. Berlinger's research on Sukkot in contemporary southern Tel-Aviv shows how the sukkot structures in a struggling community display individual creativity and a variety of expressions of the ritual; all going on as political and social issues of the day intersect with vernacular religion.

דער ענטפֿער אויף דעם העברעיִשן קינדערליד „למה סוכּה זו?" איז מער קאָמפּליצירט ווי מען וואָלט זיך פֿאָרגעשטעלט, לויט דער פֿאָרשונג פֿון ד״ר גבריאלה בערלינגער, אַ מומחה אין פֿאָלקלאָר און פֿאָלק־אַרכיטעקטור, און אַן „אַנדרו־מעלאָן נאָך־דאָקטאָראַט־חבֿר" בײַם „באַרד־גראַדויִר־צענטער". זי האָט עטלעכע יאָר פֿאַרבראַכט אין ישׂראל און עטנאָגראַפֿיש געקוקט אויף די סוכּות אין לאַנד: ווי אַזוי מען בויט זיי, ווער בויט זיי, און וואָס פֿאַר אַ ראָלע זיי שפּילן אין דער משפּחה און קהילה.

As YIVO mourns the passing of our longtime music archivist Chana Mlotek, we look back at what may be the first mention of her in Yedies: News from YIVO, in June 1948, four years after she arrived at YIVO to be secretary to YIVO’s research director Max Weinreich. This article from ...