lecture
"Yiddish Pills" and Summer Thrills: Reconstituting Yiddishism at Camp Hemshekh - In-person Program & Live on Zoom
In the decades directly following the Holocaust, Jewish leaders anxiously debated how to preserve and produce what they considered authentic Jewish culture, fearful that upward mobility and suburbanization threatened the integrity of Jewish life in America. In their searches for solutions to the problem of cultural decline, post-war Jews came to see residential summer camps as panaceas to their communal ills, constructing deeply educational and ideological camp programs with an eye towards collective transformation. Yiddishists — Jews who dedicated their efforts to the future of Yiddish culture and speech in America — not only set the groundwork for Jewish educational camping to take off, but also participated in this wider phenomenon of anxiety over the state of post-war Jewry. And yet despite their vital roles, Yiddishists are often left out of the story of Jewish camping, education, and identity-building in post-war America. In this talk, Sandra Fox will discuss how the founders and leaders of Camp Hemshekh embraced the sleepaway camp as a potential cure for Yiddish cultural and linguistic decline, and how the generations at the camp created a new purpose for and style of Yiddishism for the post-war moment.
This evening’s program is the second in a series of programs held in conjunction with YIVO’s current digitization of the Jewish Labor and Political Archives (JLPA). Consisting of nearly 200 collections encompassing 3.5 million pages of archival documents that were collected by the Bund Archives, the JLPA forms the world’s most comprehensive body of material pertaining to Jewish political activity in Europe and the United States.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
About the Speaker
Sandra Fox is the incoming Robert S. Rifkind Chair in American Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary. She was previously a Goldstein-Goren Visiting Assistant Professor of American Jewish History at New York University and director of the Archive of the American Jewish Left in the Digital Age. Her research interests include American Jewish history, the history of youth and childhood, Yiddish culture, and the history of sexuality. Her book,The Jews of Summer: Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America (Stanford University Press) addresses the experiences of youth in post-war Jewish summer camps and the place of intergenerational negotiation in the making of American Jewish culture.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
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lecture
lecture
Lunchtime Lecture: Jonathan R. Zatlin on Economics in German-Jewish History - Live on Zoom
On October 22 at 12:00 PM EDT, Jonathan R. Zatlin will discuss economics in German-Jewish historiography over the past decades.
As we look back at the last 70 years of German-Jewish historiography since the founding of the Leo Baeck Institute, LBI presents a series of seven events focusing on the most important topics in German Jewish history. Each generation of historians witnesses the appearance of different approaches to historical writing. After decades of focusing on the main political events in German-Jewish history and biographies of political leaders, there has been a turn to microhistory, the role of common people, women and children, minorities, stories dominated by struggles and failures, etc. In the new series, the LBI will present a comprehensive view of seven overarching topics in German Jewish history and ask how their historiography has changed over the decades.
About the Speaker
Jonathan R. Zatlin is Associate Professor of History at Boston University. His early work explored the history of German communism, focusing on the social construction of value in East Germany to understand the terms of German unification. He is the author of The Currency of Socialism. Money and Political Culture in East Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and co-edited Selling Modernity: Advertising in Twentieth-Century Germany (Duke University Press, 2007) with Jonathan Wiesen and Pamela Swett and New Directions in East German Historiography. German Yearbook for Contemporary History, vol. 9 (Munich and Lincoln: Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History and University of Nebraska Press, 2025) with Dierk Hoffmann and Hermann Wentker.
More recently, Zatlin has written about popular conflations of Jews with injustice and the market in German history. He co-edited Dispossession. Plundering Germany Jewry, 1933-1945 (University of Michigan Press, 2020) with Christoph Kreutzmüller and is currently completing Fantasies of Jewish Wealth, 1790-1990, which will appear in the University of Chicago Press’s Intellectual History series. His articles and essays have been translated into French, German, and Hebrew. He is the recipient of fellowships from the DAAD, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, and the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung. He has been active in professional organizations related to German and Jewish history, including the Leo Baeck Institute-New York.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
Presented by:
lecture
conversation
At Lunch with Julia Ioffe – Live on Zoom
Julie Salamon, New York Times best-selling author, sits down with Russian-born author and American journalist Julia Ioffe. Her articles have appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the New Yorker, Foreign Policy, Forbes, Bloomberg Businessweek, The New Republic, Politico, and The Atlantic. Ioffe has appeared on television programs on MSNBC, CBS, PBS, and other news channels as a Russia expert. She is a founding partner and Washington correspondent at Puck. Her book Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, From Revolution to Autocracy from Harper Collins, can be found in bookstores starting October 21st, 2025.
Ticket Info: Free; register online for a Zoom link
Presented by:
conversation
book talk
The Tourist's Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City - Live on Zoom
The Tourist's Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City offers a new look at over a century of Yiddish culture in New York City. Author Henry H. Sapoznik focuses on theater, music, architecture, crime, Black-Jewish cultural interactions, restaurants, real estate, and journalism to tell the history of New York’s Yiddish popular culture from 1880 to the present. Culled from over five thousand Yiddish and English newspaper articles of the period, and thanks to new research from previously inaccessible materials, the book reveals fresh insights into the influence of Yiddish culture on New York City and showcases the culture’s persistent resiliency.
Join YIVO for a discussion with Sapoznik about this new book, led by Eddy Portnoy.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
About the Speakers
Henry H. Sapoznik is an award winning producer, musicologist, performer, and writer in the fields of traditional and popular Yiddish and American music and culture. Sapoznik, a native Yiddish speaker and child of Holocaust survivors, is one of the founders of the klezmer revival, the founder of the Max and Frieda Weinstein Archive of YIVO Sound Recordings, and a five-time Grammy nominated producer and winner of the 2002 Peabody award for his 10 part NPR series “The Yiddish Radio Project.” The collection upon which it was based contains over 10,000 unique items and is housed at the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress in Washington DC.
Eddy Portnoy is the Senior Academic Advisor and Director of Exhibitions at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. The exhibitions he has created for YIVO have won plaudits from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, VICE, The Forward, and others. He has written numerous articles on topics relating to Jewish popular culture and is also the author of Bad Rabbi and Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press (Stanford University Press, 2017).
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
Presented by:
book talk
book talk
Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children's Literature - Live on Zoom
As migration carried Yiddish to several continents during the twentieth century, an increasingly global community of speakers and readers clung to Jewish heritage while striving to help their children make sense of their lives as Jews in the modern world. In Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children’s Literature, Miriam Udel traces how the stories and poems written for these Yiddish-speaking children underpinned new formulations of secular Jewishness. Udel discusses how Yiddish children’s literature espoused various political ideologies and constituted a project of Jewish cultural nationalism before the Holocaust. Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children’s Literature shows how Yiddish authors, educators, and cultural leaders, confronting practical limits on their ability to forge a fully realized nation of their own, focused instead on making a symbolic and conceptual world for Jewish children to inhabit with dignity, justice, and joy.
Join YIVO for a conversation with Udel about this new book, led by Marjorie Ingall.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
About the Speakers
Miriam Udel is Associate Professor of German Studies and Jewish Studies at Emory University, focusing on Yiddish language, literature, and culture. Udel’s academic research interests include twentieth-century Yiddish literature and culture, Jewish children’s literature, and American-Jewish literature. She is the author of Never Better!: The Modern Jewish Picaresque (University of Michigan Press, 2016), winner of the 2017 National Jewish Book Award in Modern Jewish Thought and Experience, and Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children’s Literature (Princeton University Press, forthcoming 2025). She is also the editor and translator of Honey on the Page: A Treasury of Yiddish Children’s Literature (New York University Press, 2020).
Marjorie Ingall is the author of Mamaleh Knows Best: What Jewish Mothers Do to Raise Successful, Creative, Empathetic, Independent Children and Sorry Sorry Sorry: The Case for Good Apologies (with New York Times-bestselling author Susan McCarthy), as well as co-creator of the website SorryWatch, which analyzes apologies in the news, in history, and in the arts. She is also the author of Hungry (with Crystal Renn), The Field Guide to North American Males, and Smart Sex (with Jessica Vitkus). She often writes about children’s books for the New York Times Book Review. She has been a columnist for Tablet Magazine and The Forward; a contributing writer for Glamour and Self; and Senior Writer at Sassy, where she was also the books editor.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
Presented by:
book talk
panel discussion
The Jewish Inn in Polish Culture - Live on Zoom
The Jewish inn was a center of economic and social life in Polish lands before the World War II. While its primary role was to provide hospitality, it also functioned as a multifaceted hub for business, leisure, and religious festivities, reflecting its vital role in the community. In The Jewish Inn: Between Practice and Phantasm, editors Halina Goldberg and Bozena Shallcross present 11 articles that delve into the inn's significance as a symbolic incubator of Jewish cultural possibilities. From exploring the intricate connections between music, dance, and other arts within the inn, to highlighting the increasing prominence of women in the inn's family dynamics, this collection offers an interdisciplinary look at this central pillar of Jewish Polish culture.
Join YIVO for a panel discussion with Goldberg and contributors Glenn Dynner, Beth Holmgren, and Eliza Rose about this book.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
About the Speakers
Halina Goldberg is Professor of Musicology and Director of the Robert F. Byrnes Russian and East European Institute in the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. She is Director of the digital project, “Jewish Life in Interwar Lodz,” and the author of Music in Chopin's Warsaw.
Glenn Dynner holds the Jay Berkowitz Chair in Jewish History at the University of Virginia. A recent Guggenheim Fellow, he is the author of Men of Silk: The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society (Oxford University Press, 2006); Yankel’s Tavern: Jews, Liquor & Life in the Kingdom of Poland (Oxford University Press, 2014); and The Light of Learning: Hasidism in Poland on the Eve of the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2024). He is also Editor of the journal Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies.
Beth Holmgren, Professor Emerita of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at Duke University, has published widely on Polish literature, theater, popular culture, and film—scholarship ranging from the award-winning books Rewriting Capitalism: Literature and the Market in Late Tsarist Russia and the Kingdom of Poland to Starring Madame Modjeska: On Tour in Poland and America. Over the last decade, she produced a series of articles exploring the Polish Jewish foundations of sophisticated popular culture in the interwar period and the wartime and postwar diaspora. Holmgren is currently completing the final, separately published American chapter of the biography, Warsaw is My Country: The Story of Krystyna Bierzynska, 1928-1945 (2018). After Krystyna Bierzynska lost most of her Jewish family to Nazi round-ups, killing centers, and the razing of the Warsaw Ghetto, she served as a 16-year-old orderly in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising and emigrated to the United States in 1951 as co-combatant in the Allied forces.
Eliza Rose is Assistant Professor and Laszlo Birinyi Sr. Fellow of Central European Studies at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. She received her Ph.D. in Slavic languages at Columbia University in 2020. Her articles on visual cultures of state socialism have been published in journals such as Slavic Review and Studies in Eastern European Cinema. Her current research investigates an ambitious campaign in late-socialist Poland to integrate industry and the visual arts. Her translations of Polish scholarly and art writing have been published widely.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
Presented by:
panel discussion
film screening
The Last Musician of Auschwitz – In-Person Program
The Last Musician of Auschwitz is a feature-length documentary that tells the story of Jewish cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch and other musicians at the Auschwitz concentration camp who used music as a form of resistance and testimony. The film features first-person accounts from Holocaust survivors and includes new interpretations of musical works written by victims, highlighting themes of loss, cultural memory, and the resilience of the human spirit amidst the horrors of the camp.
Read a review of the film from The Guardian and watch the trailer.
Musicians from the Phoenix Chamber Ensemble of the Blavatnik Chamber Music Series will perform 45 minutes of music from the film, and other pieces played by prisoners at Auschwitz, before the screening.
Program:
J.S.Bach: Prelude from Cello Suite No.2 in D minor
F.Schubert: Andante con moto from Piano Trio Op. 100 in E flat Major
W.A.Mozart: Allegro from Sonata in E minor, K 304 for violin and piano
Joseph Achron: Stimmungen Op. 32 No. 1
W.A. Mozart: Romance from Eine Kleine Nacht Music, ttranscribed for violin, cello and piano
Adam Kopycinski: Kolysanka, trancribed for violin, cello and piano by Inessa Zaretsky
F. Schubert: March millitaire in D Major, D.733 for piano 4 hands (5 min) (music was played at the camp)
R.Schumann: Träumerei for cello
Performers:
Anna Elashvili - violin
Aaron Wolff - cello
Inessa Zaretsky - piano
Vassa Shevel - piano
Part of the Center’s programming series Anne Frank in History and Memory in connection with Anne Frank The Exhibition. Purchase your tickets to the exhibition here.
Ticket Info: Pay what you wish; register here
Presented by:
film screening
book club
LBI Book Club: The Castle by Seth Rogoff - Live on Zoom
Author Seth Rogoff will join the LBI Book Club in October to discuss his book The Castle.
A fictional return to the unsettling world of Franz Kafka’s iconic unfinished novel, The Castle
Seth Rogoff's masterful and mesmerizing novel, The Castle, draws inspiration from the enigmatic and incomplete final sentence of Franz Kafka's influential work of the same title. Follow renowned translator Sy Kirschbaum as he finds his way into the deserted landscape of Kafka’s world where the village of Z. lies eerily silent. The inhabitants vanished like phantoms leaving only remnants of their lives.
From these fragments, Kirschbaum pieces together a vision of a world in crisis triggered by the arrival of a stranger named K. To unravel this mystery, not just for the sake of the vanished village of Z. but for the world beyond, Kirschbaum is compelled to venture where K. could not—the deepest core of the castle.
The Castle is built upon lost documents, forgotten stories, and imagined histories. Unbound by the constraints of an authoritarian and doomed reality, Kirschbaum embarks on an extraordinary journey, seeking meaning through the fertile ground of imagination and embracing the inherent paradox of existence.
(Review: Alabama University Press).
About the Guest
Seth Rogoff is a novelist and scholar of media studies, literature, and cultural analysis. He is the author of the novel The Castle (FC2 2024), a fictional return to the unsettling world of Franz Kafka’s iconic unfinished novel. His other novels include First, the Raven: a Preface (2017), Thin Rising Vapors (2018), and The Kirschbaum Lectures (2023). With the former NBA player Kendrick Perkins, he co-authored the memoir The Education of Kendrick Perkins (St. Martin’s 2023), which explores the intersection of sports, race, history, and media. On the academic side, he published the book The Politics of the Dreamscape (Palgrave 2021), which focuses on the cultural history, literary theory, and politics of dreams and dream interpretation. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam’s Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA). He received a MA in European Intellectual History from Duke University and a BA in the interdisciplinary program Literature and History from Washington University in St. Louis. He teaches media studies at Anglo-American University in Prague, CZ.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
Presented by:
book club
symposium
The Past, Present, and Future of Jewish History – In-Person Program
The Past, Present, and Future of Jewish History will gather twenty prominent Jewish historians to discuss a series of pressing questions pertaining to the recent evolution and future development of Jewish history as a field of scholarly inquiry. Ranging from the metahistorical to the methodological, the questions address how Jews have navigated the vexed relationship between tradition and modernity, assimilation and dissimilation, place and mobility, radicalism and conservatism, acceptance and antisemitism, diaspora and nationhood, power and powerlessness, structure and agency, and universalism and particularism. In exploring these and other universal themes, the symposium seeks to underscore the importance of Jewish history to the study of the humanities.
The sessions include: “What is Jewish about Jewish History?,” “How Significant is Antisemitism in Jewish History?,” “Who Counts in Jewish History?,” “Is Israeli History Jewish History?,” and “What is the Future of Jewish History?”
The Past, Present, and Future of Jewish History is the latest symposium in the Center for Jewish History’s Jewish Public History Forum which, since its founding in 2023, has convened numerous public symposia on historical issues of contemporary relevance.
Organized with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and NYC Department of Cultural Affairs.
Ticket Info: $18 general; $9 CJH members; click here to register
Presented by:
symposium
lecture
Family History Today: A Moroccan Jewish Genealogical Journey - Live on Zoom
Upon discovering from a family member that her great-grandfather was born in Manchester, speaker Raquel Levy-Toledano undertook an immediate quest to uncover his origins. Did he belong to an Ashkenazi family that migrated to England from Prussia at the start of the 19th century? This hypothesis could elucidate certain Ashkenazi customs observed within her family. Alternatively, could he have been born in England by chance? This second possibility is plausible given that her family hails from Mogador (now Essaouira), a city with strong trade connections to England throughout the 19th century.
This marked the start of a long and arduous but enlightening journey for Raquel. Through both traditional document-based genealogy and genetic testing, she uncovers a new branch of her family, the Levy Belfsahi. Her research journey took her from Mogador in Morocco, to Manchester in England, Faro in Portugal, Ponta Delgada in the Azores, and finally to San Anton and Praia in Cape Verde. Along the way, she embarked many distant relatives now residing in various countries including Morocco, France, Israel, Canada, the United States, Switzerland, Portugal, England, and Cape Verde.
Raquel’s genealogical journey highlights the urgent need for more systematically organized research on Moroccan Jewish genealogy. While some rabbinic lineages are well-documented, information on other families remains either inaccessible or entirely absent. In numerous cases, oral tradition is still the primary -- sometimes only -- source of knowledge. To address this gap, she created the Jewish Moroccan Genealogy group on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/groups/genealogiedesjuifsdumaroc) aimed at reconnecting families and reconstructing a unified Moroccan Jewish family tree. Today, this tree includes over 400,000 interconnected profiles of Moroccan and Algerian Jews.
About the Speaker
Raquel Levy-Toledano was born in Morocco, then moved to France where she received her MD in gynecology and PhD in molecular endocrinology, followed by postdoctoral training at the NIH in Maryland. She is a board member of IAJGS, a board member of the Cercle de Généalogie Juive where she manages the Genetic Genealogy Group, a member of the General Assembly of the International Institute for Jewish Genealogy in Israel, president of NAJMA (Nos Ancêstres Juifs Marocains et Algériens) Genealogical Society, an expert curator of Geni’s Moroccan and Algerian Jewish family tree, co-administrator of the Avotaynu DNA project section involving North African Jews and founder of the Généalogie des Juifs Marocains Facebook Group, which has 13,000 members. She has published several articles in Généalo-J and other journals and has presented at numerous conferences and Zoom meetings.
Ticket Info: Pay what you wish; register here
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
Erich Fromm, Fascism, and the Holocaust: Psychoanalysis in German-Jewish History - In-person Program
On November 5, Roger Frie will kick off the series with a presentation of his book Erich Fromm, Fascism, and the Holocaust. Fromm is known for his bold stance against fascism and racism in his psychoanalytic practice and publications–Frie’s recent book uses previously unpublished correspondence to outline how Fromm’s personal family experience with the Holocaust shaped his views and work on trauma, social responsibility, and justice. Frie will engage in conversation with Michael Thompson, a professor of political theory and political philosophy.
About the Series:
This fall, the Leo Baeck Institute presents the Forum on Psychoanalysis and Society, a series of three conversations exploring the German-Jewish legacy of psychoanalysis and its echoes in both academia and popular psychology today. Our speakers will present their recent projects, all of which tell stories of German-speaking Jewish individuals who, in reacting and reflecting on their own changing social and political worlds, made an immeasurable impact on the study of psychoanalysis. As these authors engage in conversation with interlocutors, they will reflect on the ways these groundbreaking psychoanalytic strides in German-Jewish history fit in with drastic social changes throughout 20th century Europe.
About the Speakers:
Roger Frie is University Professor of Psychoanalysis in the Faculty of Philosophy and Education at the University of Vienna, Austria. He is also Professor Emeritus at Simon Fraser University and Affiliate Professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. He is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst as well as a historian and social philosopher. Author most recently of Edge of Catastrophe: Erich Fromm, Fascism and the Holocaust (Oxford 2024) and Not in My Family: German Memory and Responsibility after the Holocaust (Oxford 2017). His newest book, out next year, is Wounds of Silence: Legacies of Genocide and Racial Violence (also with Oxford). His most recent edited book is Culture, Politics and Race in the Making of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2022). www.rogerfrie.ca
Michael J. Thompson is Prof. of Political Theory at William Paterson University and is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Manhattan. HIs recent books include: Descent of the Dialectic: Phronetic Criticism in an Age of Nihilism (Routledge, 2025) as well as Twilight of the Self: The Decline of the Individual in Late Capitalism (Stanford University Press, 2022).
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
Presented by:
lecture
book talk
Crisis, War, and the Holocaust in Lithuania - Live on Zoom
Crisis, War, and the Holocaust in Lithuania is the first scholarly English-language study of Lithuania during World War II. The book utilizes previously inaccessible archives as well as academic works published in that country in the post-Soviet era. In the first chapters, the book examines the multifaceted relations of Lithuania’s national communities before World War II and the international and domestic crises which led to the destruction of the Lithuanian state in 1940. Author Saulius Suziedelis describes the process of the mass persecution and murder of the country’s Jews during the Holocaust, the role of Nazi and collaborationist forces, and acts of resistance, as well as the society’s responses. The book concludes with an examination of the postwar struggle within Lithuania to confront this legacy of unprecedented violence.
Join YIVO for a discussion with Suziedelis about this new book, led by Jonathan Brent.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
book talk
walking tour
Walking Tour: Social Activism in the Lower East Side – SOLD OUT
Join the Ackman & Ziff Family Genealogy Institute for a walking tour of the Lower East Side with Jonathan Goldstein! We'll visit locations that explore the intersection of the Jewish immigrant experience and social activism, including the Henry Street Settlement, The Forward Building, and the Educational Alliance. We'll also learn about what daily life was like for Jewish immigrants on Orchard Street and Allen Street. The tour runs about two hours, and includes a snack break stop to taste some delicious pickles!
The tour takes place using NYC sidewalks and is accessible to participants with various levels of mobility. There may be cracks and normal wear-and-tear present on the sidewalks.
The meeting location for the tour will be e-mailed to all registered participants.
This program is sponsored by the Ackman & Ziff Family Genealogy Institute and Ancestry.
Tour Guide Bio
After a stint in finance in NYC, Jonathan Goldstein made Aliya in 2006 and got his hands in the dirt, earning an MA in Land of Israel Studies and Archeology at Bar Ilan University as well as the Ministry of Tourism's Guiding Certification. Since then, he has been creating Jewish heritage travel experiences around the world focused on exploring questions of identity and our place in this complex world we live in. His primary areas of expertise include Israel, Central Europe, New York City, and the last 4,000 years of Jewish history.
Ticket Info: This event is sold out.
Presented by:
walking tour
concert
Kristallnacht Commemoration – In-person Program
Join us for a tribute to the artists who perished in the Holocaust, and whose music and poetry we keep alive today. This concert features important works by Hans Krása, Viktor Ullman, Pavel Haas, James Simon, Gideon Klein, and Erwin Schulhoff, performed by the young artists of the Mannes School of Music.
Ticket Info: $18; ASJM, YIVO, LBI & CJH members: $12 Seniors & students: $9
Presented by:
concert
book talk
Voices of Jewish Literary Giants: Hayim Nahman Bialik and Philip Roth - In-person Program and Live on Zoom
Philip Roth and Hayim Nahman Bialik are some of the most celebrated writers in contemporary Jewish literature. In his newly published biography of Roth (1933–2018), Philip Roth: Stung by Life, Steven J. Zipperstein explores the complex life and astonishing work of one of America’s most celebrated novelists. Born in Newark, New Jersey, Roth wrote with relentless ambition, producing a wide-ranging body of work—from Goodbye, Columbus to American Pastoral—that grappled with sex, identity, and American Jewishness. Simultaneously charismatic and reclusive, Roth lived, in his own words, like an “unchaste monk,” obsessively committed to the craft of writing.
In On the Slaughter, translated and introduced by MacArthur-winning poet Peter Cole, the poetry of Hayim Nahman Bialik (1873–1934) emerges with renewed force. Born in a Ukrainian village and hailed by Maxim Gorky as “a modern Isaiah,” Bialik transformed Hebrew literature, bridging traditional Jewish thought with modern humanism. This compact collection reveals a poet far more politically and psychologically unsettling than his image as a national icon suggests—ranging from furious responses to pogroms to luminous introspection and children’s verse.
Join YIVO for a conversation with Zipperstein and Cole about the enduring legacies of Roth and Bialik.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
book talk
panel discussion
YIVO Centennial Celebration - In-person Program and Live on Zoom
Join us for a Yiddish evening celebrating YIVO’s 100th anniversary! Panelists Zalmen Mlotek, David Roskies, Samuel Kassow, and others will reminisce about YIVO’s past and reflect on the organization’s enduring legacy, in a discussion led by Cecile Kuznitz. This event will take place in Yiddish. A celebratory reception will follow the panel discussion.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
About the Speakers
Zalmen Mlotek is an internationally recognized authority on Yiddish folk and theater music as well as creator of new musicals such as The Golden Land which toured Italy under the sponsorship of Leonard Bernstein and Those Were The Days, nominated for two Tony Awards. As the artistic director of the NYTF for the past twenty years, Mlotek helped revive Yiddish classics, instituted simultaneous English and Russian supertitles at performances and brought leading creative artists of television, theatre and film, such as Itzhak Perlman, Mandy Patinkin, Sheldon Harnick, Ron Rifkin and Joel Grey to the Yiddish stage. His vision has propelled classics, including NYTF productions of the world premiere of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Yentl in Yiddish (1998), Di Yam Gazlonim (The Yiddish Pirates of Penzance, 2006) the 1923 Rumshinky operetta The Golden Bride (2016), and the critically acclaimed Fidler Afn Dakh (Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish, 2018). During his tenure at the NYTF, the theatre company has been nominated or received over ten Drama Desk Awards and four Lucille Lortel Awards.
David G. Roskies is the Sol and Evelyn Henkind Chair emeritus in Yiddish Literature and Culture and a professor emeritus of Jewish literature at The Jewish Theological Seminary. He also served as the Naomi Prawer Kadar Visiting Professor of Yiddish Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Dr. Roskies was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012. Dr. Roskies is a cultural historian of Eastern European Jewry. A prolific author, editor, and scholar, he has published nine books and received numerous awards. In 1981, Dr. Roskies cofounded with Dr. Alan Mintz Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History, and served for seventeen years as editor in chief of the New Yiddish Library series, published by Yale University Press. A native of Montreal, Canada, and a product of its Yiddish secular schools, Dr. Roskies was educated at Brandeis University, where he received his doctorate in 1975.
Samuel Kassow, Charles H. Northam Professor of History at Trinity College, holds a PhD from Princeton University and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Jewish Research. From 2006 until 2013, he was the lead historian for two galleries of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, which opened in 2014. Professor Kassow is the author of Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum and the Secret Ghetto Archive (Indiana University Press, 2007), which received the Orbis Prize of the AAASS; was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award; and has been translated into eight languages. A child of Holocaust survivors, Professor Kassow was born in a displaced-persons camp in Germany.
Cecile E. Kuznitz is Associate Professor and Patricia Ross Weis ‘52 Chair in Jewish History and Culture at Bard College. She is the author of YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture: Scholarship for the Yiddish Nation (Cambridge University Press, 2014; Lithuanian translation, 2025) as well as articles on the Jewish community of Vilna, the field of Yiddish Studies, and Jewish urban history. She has held fellowships at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
panel discussion
lecture
Lunchtime Lecture: Marsha Rozenblit on Austria in German-Jewish History - Live on Zoom
On November 12 at 12:00 PM EDT, Marsha Rozenblit will discuss Austria in German-Jewish historiography over the past decades.
As we look back at the last 70 years of German-Jewish historiography since the founding of the Leo Baeck Institute, LBI presents a series of seven events focusing on the most important topics in German Jewish history. Each generation of historians witnesses the appearance of different approaches to historical writing. After decades of focusing on the main political events in German-Jewish history and biographies of political leaders, there has been a turn to microhistory, the role of common people, women and children, minorities, stories dominated by struggles and failures, etc. In the new series, the LBI will present a comprehensive view of seven overarching topics in German Jewish history and ask how their historiography has changed over the decades.
About the Speaker
Marsha L. Rozenblit is the Harvey M.Meyerhoff Professor of Modern Jewish History at the University of Maryland, where she has been on the faculty since 1978. A social historian of the Jews of the Habsburg Monarchy and its successor states, she is the author of two scholarly books: The Jews of Vienna, 1867-1914: Assimilation and Identity (State University of New York Press, 1983); and Reconstructing a National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria during World War I (Oxford University Press, 2001). She has also co-edited two books: Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe(Berghahn Press, 2005); and World War I and the Jews: Conflict and Transformation in Europe, the Middle East, and America (Berghahn Press, 2017); and she has written over 35 scholarly articles on such topics as Jewish religious reform in nineteenth century Vienna, Jewish courtship and marriage in 1920s Vienna, and German-Jewish schools in Habsburg Moravia. She served as the president of the Association for Jewish Studies, 2009-2011.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
The Secret Mind of Bertha Pappenheim: Psychoanalysis in German-Jewish History - In-person Program
On November 12, Gabriel Brownstein will present his book, The Secret Mind of Bertha Pappenheim, in conversation with Abby Kluchin. Bertha Pappenheim, who became an outspoken feminist and social pioneer in Vienna, was treated for hysteria by Sigmund Freud’s mentor, Josef Breuer. Later, Freud appropriated many of Pappenheim’s ideas to form his theory of psychoanalysis.
About the Series:
This fall, the Leo Baeck Institute presents the Forum on Psychoanalysis and Society, a series of three conversations exploring the German-Jewish legacy of psychoanalysis and its echoes in both academia and popular psychology today. Our speakers will present their recent projects, all of which tell stories of German-speaking Jewish individuals who, in reacting and reflecting on their own changing social and political worlds, made an immeasurable impact on the study of psychoanalysis. As these authors engage in conversation with interlocutors, they will reflect on the ways these groundbreaking psychoanalytic strides in German-Jewish history fit in with drastic social changes throughout 20th century Europe.
About the Speakers:
Gabriel Brownstein is the author of two books of fiction and two books of non-fiction, most recently THE SECRET MIND OF BERTHA PAPPENHEIM. He is a Professor in the English department at St. John's University. For his short stories, he's won a PEN/Hemingway Award and a Pushcart Prize.
Abby Kluchin is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Ursinus College, where she also coordinates the Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies program. She is co-founder and Associate Director at Large of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and co-host of the psychoanalysis podcast Ordinary Unhappiness.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
The Third Reich of Dreams: Psychoanalysis in German-Jewish History - In-person Program
On November 19, filmmaker Amanda Rubin will discuss Charlotte Beradt’s groundbreaking book The Third Reich of Dreams, which collected the dreams of witnesses of the rise of Nazism and, ultimately, provided invaluable insight into the effects that authoritarianism has on the unconscious mind. Rubin is the force behind the republication of The Third Reich of Dreams, the lost rights of which she discovered while researching her forthcoming film about Beradt. She will be joined in conversation by Gal Beckerman, senior books editor of The Atlantic and author of the National Jewish Book Award-winning When They Come For Us We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry.
About the Series:
This fall, the Leo Baeck Institute presents the Forum on Psychoanalysis and Society, a series of three conversations exploring the German-Jewish legacy of psychoanalysis and its echoes in both academia and popular psychology today. Our speakers will present their recent projects, all of which tell stories of German-speaking Jewish individuals who, in reacting and reflecting on their own changing social and political worlds, made an immeasurable impact on the study of psychoanalysis. As these authors engage in conversation with interlocutors, they will reflect on the ways these groundbreaking psychoanalytic strides in German-Jewish history fit in with drastic social changes throughout 20th century Europe.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
Presented by:
lecture
gala
YIVO's Centennial Gala 2025 - In-person Event
Honoring
Sir Simon Schama and Ruth and David Levine
Venue
Tribeca 360
10 Desbrosses Street, New York City
Presented by:
gala
conversation
At Lunch with Jonathan Mahler – Live on Zoom
Julie Salamon, New York Times best-selling author, sits down with Jonathan Mahler, author of The Gods of New York. Mahler is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine and the author of the bestselling Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning, which was adapted as an ESPN miniseries, and The Challenge, a New York Times Notable Book. His journalism has received numerous awards and been featured in The Best American Sports Writing. He lives in Brooklyn.
Ticket Info: Free; register online for a Zoom link
Presented by:
conversation
concert
The Dave Tarras Legacy – In-person Program and Live on Zoom
Dave Tarras (1897-1989) was the individual most responsible for the development of a uniquely American style of Jewish klezmer music. Born into a large klezmer family in Podolia, central Ukraine, Tarras immigrated to New York in 1921. Here his talent was immediately recognized, and he was quickly conscripted into the local music scene. The year 2025 represents the centennial of Tarras’ initial recordings from 1925. His sparkling five-decade recording career documents his innovations — a new corpus of repertoire as well as a refined style that reflected musically the aesthetics of an upwardly-mobile and assimilating mid-century American Jewish community.
In the mid-1970s, Tarras mentored the young musicians Andy Statman and Walter Zev Feldman, and the three worked together to present a series of tours and an important recording sponsored by the Balkan Arts Center (now the Center for Traditional Music and Dance). The program sparked a revitalization of klezmer on the East Coast, which has blossomed into an international revival of Yiddish culture. Statman would follow in his mentor’s footsteps and become recognized as the first clarinet virtuoso produced by the klezmer revival.
Please join us for this special concert celebrating Tarras’ 100-year recording legacy and its impact on American klezmer featuring three of the contemporary Yiddish music scene’s leading performers — NEA National Heritage Fellow Andy Statman (clarinet), Dan Blacksberg (trombone) and Pete Rushefsky (tsimbl/cimbalom).
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Ticket Info:
In-person: $15; YIVO members & students: $10
Livestream: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
concert
panel discussion
Jewish Religious Life in Lithuania in the 18th-20th Centuries - Live on Zoom
Jewish Religious Life in Lithuania in the 18th-20th Centuries is a newly published volume that addresses the complicated issue of distinctive characteristics of Jewish religious life in Lithuania. Its authors and editors deal with the range of religious expressions, with the religious life of different sectors of the Jewish community of Lithuania, and with the dynamics of change in religious life in Lithuania over time. In this volume, Lithuania is more a historical and social concept than a geographical territory with clearly delineated borders and political identity. The authors deliberate how “Lithuanian” are the religious phenomena they discuss and what the historical agents understood as Lithuania in their given period, area, and historical circumstances.
Join YIVO for a panel discussion about this book led by Andrew Silow-Carroll, featuring editors Shaul Stampfer and Lara Lempertiene and contributors Tzipora Weinberg and Daniel Reiser.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
panel discussion
book talk
Vladka Meed's 'On Both Sides of the Wall' - Live on Zoom
Vladka Meed, born Feigele Peltel, was just a teenager when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939. Increasingly devastated by the deportation and murder of 300,000 Jews—including her mother, brother, and sister—who were sent from Warsaw to the death camp of Treblinka, she heeded the call for armed resistance, joining the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB), established in Warsaw in July 1942. With her typically “Aryan” looks and fluency in Polish, Vladka could pose as a Gentile, so the ZOB asked her to live on the Aryan side of the wall and serve as a courier. In this role, she smuggled weapons across the wall, helped Jewish children escape from the ghetto, assisted Jews hiding in the city, and established contact with both Jews in the labor camps and with the partisans in the forest.
In this newly revised translation of the original Yiddish memoir, which was published in 1948, Vladka’s son, Steven D. Meed, preserves the testimony and memory of his mother for a new generation of readers. Join YIVO for a discussion with Steven D. Meed about this translation, led by Samuel Kassow.
Buy On Both Sides of the Wall.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
About the Speakers
Steven D. Meed is a retired internist and rheumatologist who earned his medical degree from New York University, where he also later served as an assistant professor of medicine. A founder of the Second-Generation group in New York City, he has spoken widely on his parents’ experiences in the Warsaw ghetto.
Samuel Kassow, Charles H. Northam Professor of History at Trinity College, holds a PhD from Princeton University and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Jewish Research. From 2006 until 2013, he was the lead historian for two galleries of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, which opened in 2014. Professor Kassow is the author of Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum and the Secret Ghetto Archive (Indiana University Press, 2007), which received the Orbis Prize of the AAASS; was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award; and has been translated into eight languages. White Goat Press recently published his translation of Warsaw Testament by Rokhl Auerbach, which received a National Jewish Book Award. A child of Holocaust survivors, Professor Kassow was born in a displaced-persons camp in Germany.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
book talk
panel discussion
'Yiddish Voices': A Translation Series by YIVO and Bloomsbury - In-person Program and Live on Zoom
Join us for the launch of the latest two volumes in the Yiddish Voices series, a partnership between YIVO and Bloomsbury. The first, The Destruction of Dubova: Chronicle of a Dead City, is a searing account of pogrom violence by the writer and documentarian Rokhl Faygenberg, and the second, The Mother of Yiddish Theatre: Memoirs of Ester-Rokhl Kaminska, is the memoir of the Yiddish actress and diva Ester-Rokhl Kaminska. Extraordinarily, both of these works were published exactly a century ago, in Warsaw in 1926. Both Kaminska and Faygenberg were exceptional as women cultural pioneers, and both were witness to the vitality and fragility of Ukrainian Jewish life and interwar Polish culture. The event will explore these works through image, conversation, and readings, with Elissa Bemporad (editor, The Destruction of Dubova), Mikhl Yashinsky (translator and editor, The Mother of Yiddish Theatre), historian Glenn Dynner (University of Virginia), and a live performance. Book signing and cocktails will follow.
This program is supported by the family of Harriet Yassky and by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
panel discussion
lecture
Lunchtime Lecture: Deborah Hertz on Gender in German-Jewish History - Live on Zoom
On December 3 at 12:00 PM EDT, Deborah Hertz will discuss gender in German-Jewish historiography over the past decades.
As we look back at the last 70 years of German-Jewish historiography since the founding of the Leo Baeck Institute, LBI presents a series of seven events focusing on the most important topics in German Jewish history. Each generation of historians witnesses the appearance of different approaches to historical writing. After decades of focusing on the main political events in German-Jewish history and biographies of political leaders, there has been a turn to microhistory, the role of common people, women and children, minorities, stories dominated by struggles and failures, etc. In the new series, the LBI will present a comprehensive view of seven overarching topics in German Jewish history and ask how their historiography has changed over the decades.
About the Guest
Deborah's involvement with the Leo Baeck Institute began in Jerusalem in 1970, when she found the LBI Yearbooks and especially Hannah Arendt's biography of Rahel Varnhagen published by East and West Press in 1957. It was not until 1975 that she began to visit the East 73rd Street townhouse where the New York City Leo Baeck Institute office was located. And in the year 2002-03 she spent a year revising her How Jews Became Germans at the Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem on Bustani Street.
Deborah received a PhD in History at the University of Minnesota in 1979. She is currently the Herman Wouk Chair in Modern Jewish Studies at the University of California at San Diego. She taught at the State University of New York at Binghamton and Sarah Lawrence College before coming to UCSD in 2004. She has taught as a visiting professor at Harvard University, the Hebrew University, and Tel Aviv University. Her two major books are: Jewish High Society in Old Regime Berlin and How Jews Became Germans: The History of Conversion and Assimilation n Berlin, both published by Yale University Press and both translated into German. She is currently finishing a book called Visionaries, Lovers and Mothers: Jewish Women from Conspiracy to Kibbutz.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
Do You Believe in Miracles? Reviving the Trencin Synagogue - In-person Program
The synagogue in Trencin, Slovakia, built in 1912–1913 to designs by Berlin-based architects Richard Scheibner and Hugo Pal, is a landmark of synagogue architecture in Slovakia. With its striking domed form and blend of Art Nouveau and Oriental styles, it stands as an important monument of Jewish heritage in Central Europe.
Damaged during World War II and only partially restored in 1948, and then seized by the state in the 1950s, the synagogue survived threat of demolition in the 1970s. After decades of neglect, its interior has been restored in 2024—the most significant synagogue conservation project undertaken by the Slovak Jewish community. Today it serves the small but active revived Jewish community in Trencin.
On November 9, 2025, the building will be inaugurated as Synagogue Trencin – Space for Dialogue and Understanding. In 2026 it will also play a central role as one of the venues of the European Capital of Culture in Trencin. The synagogue is part of the Slovak Jewish Heritage Route, a nationwide network connecting important sites of Jewish history.
Maros Borsky will present both the history and the current activities of the Trencin Synagogue. He will also offer an update on the wider context of Slovak Jewish heritage and highlight new projects that are reshaping cultural memory and community life.
About the Speaker
Dr. Maros Borsky studied art history and Jewish studies in Bratislava, Regensburg, London, Jerusalem, and Heidelberg. He has worked for over 25 years on Jewish heritage in Slovakia. Since 2012, he has directed the Jewish Community Museum in Bratislava and from 2014 to 2025 also led the Jewish Cultural Institute of the Federation of Jewish Communities.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
Presented by:
lecture
book talk
Sugihara’s List - Live on Zoom
In the summer of 1940, Chiune Sugihara (1900–1986), a Japanese diplomat and spy, serving as consul of the Empire of Japan in Kaunas, issued several thousand Jews, mainly refugees from Poland, transit visas enabling them to travel through Japan on their way to the Dutch island of Curaçao in the Caribbean. It was all fiction; in reality, no one was going to Curaçao, and most of the Jews who were saved eventually found refuge in Japan, the Shanghai ghetto, Australia, or New Zealand. In Sugihara’s List, author Zofia Hartman analyzes the legacy of Sugihara and the thousands of Jews he saved during the Holocaust.
Join YIVO for a discussion with Hartman about this book, led by Agnieszka Legutko.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
book talk
concert
Jewish Songs and Dances for Piano: Juliusz Wolfsohn’s 'Paraphrasen' – Live on YouTUbe
Join YIVO for a YouTube premiere performance of Juliusz Wolfsohn’s Paraphrasen: a collection of 12 virtuosic piano fantasies based on Yiddish folksongs. Wolfsohn was a Warsaw- born pianist, critic, and composer who was active in the Association for the Promotion of Jewish Music in Vienna. Born in Warsaw in 1880, Wolfsohn later settled in the United States, where he died in 1944. Paraphrasen is one of multiple works Wolfsohn composed on Eastern European Jewish themes.
This collection of 12 pieces will be performed by Ryan MacEvoy McCullough.
The Sidney Krum Young Artists Concert Series is made possible by a generous gift from the Estate of Sidney Krum.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Ticket Info: Free; register for an email reminder.
Presented by:
concert
lecture
A Very Jewish Christmas: Jesus in Modern Jewish Literature - In-person Program and Live on Zoom
“Other, and indeed banned, and yet one of my brothers” was how the renowned Yiddish and Hebrew modernist, Uri Zvi Greenberg, expressed his ambivalence toward Jesus in one of his many poems about this towering figure. Greenberg’s contemporaries shared this sentiment. For them, Jesus was inextricably bound up with the history of violence towards Jews committed in his name. At the same time, he also embodied an “authentic national Jew,” whose suffering and resistance to the authorities of his time created a powerful image that played a significant role in rethinking Jewish identity.
In this talk, Neta Stahl will examine how Jewish writers portrayed Jesus during periods of significant transformations in Jewish life. She will demonstrate that Jesus serves a range of ideological, theological, aesthetic, political, social, and psychological functions that not only relate to the long history of Jewish-Christian relations in Europe but also reflect attempts to reframe Jewish national lives in the diaspora and Israel.
A kosher Chinese food dinner will follow the presentation.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Ticket Info:
In Person: $15; YIVO members & students: $10
Livestream: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
lecture
concert
Hanukkah Concert 2025 – In-person Program
Celebrating the joys of the season, the American Society for Jewish Music's Annual Hanukkah concert has been a popular mainstay for many years. Co-sponsored by YIVO, the performance celebrates this joyous holiday with songs and stories that charm and delight audiences.
Ticket Info: $18; ASJM & YIVO members: $12; Seniors & students: $9
Presented by:
concert