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
exhibit tour & cocktail hour
A Community Evening at Anne Frank The Exhibition – In-Person Program
Join the Center for Jewish History and the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan for a special evening at the Center for Jewish History designed for individuals in their 20s and 30s. The event begins with an immersive visit to Anne Frank The Exhibition, offering a powerful look into her life, legacy, and the historical context of her story. After the exhibit, enjoy a cocktail hour with drinks and light refreshments, followed by a talkback session with the President of the Center for Jewish History. This is a unique opportunity to engage with the exhibit on a deeper level, connect with peers, and reflect on the enduring impact of Anne Frank’s voice.
Ticket Info: $18 general; $9 CJH members
Access to the exhibition is complimentary and ticket proceeds support the Center for Jewish History
Presented by:
exhibit tour & cocktail hour
lecture
Postcards From the Past: Bringing Deltiology to Jewish Genealogy – In-Person and Live on Zoom
Postcards can be an overlooked and occasionally invaluable means of peering further into the lives of our ancestors. Not only can they illuminate microhistory (in ways that may otherwise be lost to the ages), but both the front and the back of postcards can contribute mightily to any genealogical study. Images on the front of a card can offer illustrations of long-demolished places of interest, while messages on the back may shed light on an ancestor’s travels and happenings, giving the researcher a clearer sense of the writer’s concerns of a long-forgotten moment. These are only a few of the many ways in which genealogy and deltiology (the study and collection of postcards) can intersect. This talk will include unique imagery and case studies to demonstrate the special role postcards can play in Jewish genealogy.
About the Speaker
Michael Cassara is a professional genealogist and lecturer based in New York City, specializing in Italian/Sicilian genealogy, New York and New Jersey research, and genealogical technology. He has frequently presented at regional societies as well as national conferences, including six years of presentations at RootsTech, the 2018 Association of Professional Genealogists Professional Management Conference, a popular 2019 APG Webinar on genealogical technology, as well as talks at FGS, OGS, the New York State Family History Conference, Allen County Public Library, and more. Michael holds a Certificate in Genealogical Research from Boston University (OL19) and is a graduate of the ProGen Study Group (ProGen 43). He is the Past President of the Italian Genealogical Group (ItalianGen.org) and currently serves as President of the Metropolitan Postcard Club, the oldest continuously operated deltiological organization in the United States. In his "other life" he is a leading New York City-based casting director, specializing in musical theatre projects worldwide. He blogs about his research at http://www.digiroots.net and you can find him on Facebook at @DigiRoots.
Ticket Info:
In Person: RSVP to program@jgsny.org; $5 at the door for non-JGS members; free for JGS members
Zoom (non-JGS members): $5; click here to register
JGS members will receive an email with Zoom link.
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
concert
The Gypsy and the Trout: Phoenix Chamber Ensemble Performs Bach, Haydn, and Schubert – In-Person Program and Live on YouTube
Join Phoenix Chamber Ensemble pianists Vassa Shevel and Inessa Zaretsky with guest artists Risa Schuchter and Joyce Hammann (violin), Daniel Panner (viola), Jarden Blajian (cello), and Jeffrey Carney (bass) and for an evening of Bach, Haydn, and Schubert.
Program:
Johann Sebastian Bach, Concerto No1 in D minor for Piano and Strings, BWV 1052
Joseph Haydn, The Gypsy Trio: Piano Trio No.39 in G Major, Hob. XV/25
Franz Schubert, The Trout Quintet: Piano Quintet in A Major, D.667
Founded in 2005 by pianists Vassa Shevel and Inessa Zaretsky, and celebrating their 20th anniversary this year, the Phoenix Chamber Ensemble has become a vital part of the New York classical community, presenting more than 70 public concerts at the Center for Jewish History. The ensemble has garnered a devoted following with its innovative programming and sensitive interpretations, earned an international reputation presenting concerts in Russia, Poland, Italy, and other European venues, and collaborated with numerous acclaimed guest artists, including clarinetist David Krakauer, the Grammy-nominated Enso Quartet, the Tesla Quartet, members of the Jasper String Quartet, the New York Little Opera Company, the Metropolitan Opera, and New York City Ballet.
Made possible by the Stravinsky Institute Foundation through the generous support of the Blavatnik Family Foundation.
Ticket Info:
In person: $15 general; $10 senior/student; $8 CJH member; click here to register
YouTube: Pay what you wish; click here to register
Presented by:
concert
book club
LBI Book Club: Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum - Live on Zoom
Professor Noah Isenberg will join the LBI Book Club in early December to discuss with us the novel Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum.
About Grand Hotel
To eavesdrop on real life, writer Vicki Baum began working in luxury hotels in Berlin. Grand Hotel was the outcome. Published in 1929, it became a global best-seller.
A wide variety of characters appear in the novel, among them a neurotic dancer whose best years are already behind her, and a baron who makes his living from performing reckless thefts. Fatally ill bookkeepers and besotted secretaries make appearances as well. An illustrious crowd of people come and go in the foyer of the hotel. It becomes their stage, as well as a reflection of society.
"Marvelous. Always something going on. One man goes to prison, another gets killed. One leaves, another comes. They carry off one man on a stretcher by the back stairs, and at the same moment another man hears he has a baby. Very interesting actually! But that's life!"
Grand Hotel became a massive success, with Vicki Baum's fame spanning to the United States. The novel was turned into a Broadway play as well as a Hollywood movie starring Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford in 1932. That success led the author to settle in the US, emigrating just in the nick of time in 1932, one year before the Nazis seized power. They burned the Jewish author's books, scorning them as shallow, amoral, sensationalist novels. Apparently, it didn't concern them that just a few years before during the Weimar Republic, Vicki Baum's works were among the most widely read.
Hedwig Baum, the real name of the musician and author, was born in Vienna in 1888. She was one of the Weimar Republic's most significant authors. Baum had already immigrated to the United States when her books were burned by the Nazis in 1933. She published newspaper articles and essays, novels, short stories and plays in English. Many of her works were turned into films. She died in Los Angeles in 1960.
(Description taken from Deutsche Welle).
About Our Guest
Noah Isenberg is the Charles Sapp Centennial Professor of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin and Executive Director of the university’s two study-away programs, UTLA (Los Angeles) and UTNY (New York City), where he’s based. Author of the Los Angeles Times bestseller We’ll Always Have ‘Casablanca’: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood’s Most Beloved Movie(W.W. Norton, 2017), his recent anthology Billy Wilder on Assignment(Princeton, 2021) was selected by Tom Stoppard as a TLS 2021 Book of the Year. He’s currently completing a cultural history of Some Like It Hotfor Norton and writing a short interpretive biography of Wilder for the Yale Jewish Lives series.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
Presented by:
book club
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
film and discussion
The Family Oppenheim: A Banned Anti-Nazi Film Rediscovered - In-person Program
Join us for the long-lost US premiere of The Family Oppenheim (Semya Oppengeym) (1938) – a powerful Soviet-made anti-Nazi film written by acclaimed German-Jewish novelist Lion Feuchtwanger (The Oppermanns) in collaboration with visionary Soviet Jewish filmmakers Grigorii and Serafima Roshal.
Conceived in exile, censored in Britain, and banned in the United States, The Family Oppenheim, based on Feuchtwanger’s 1933 novel, stands as one of the earliest cinematic warnings against Hitler’s rise to power and fascism’s brutal reshaping of Germany. Premiering internationally in the spring of 1939 but soon banned and forgotten for nearly nine decades, the film now returns to US screens – newly restored, translated, and subtitled through a remarkable student-led research project at the University of Oregon led by Miriam Chorley-Schulz. Experience a rediscovered masterpiece once banned by American censors – a work of resistance, vision, and urgency that still echoes powerfully today.
Accompanying the screening, join Miriam Chorley-Schulz (University of Oregon) and Rossen Djagalov (NYU) for an illuminating conversation tracing the film’s extraordinary journey from its complex conception to its celebrated 1938 Moscow premiere to decades of suppression, and finally, to its revival today.
About the Speakers
Miriam Chorley-Schulz is Assistant Professor and Mokin Fellow of Holocaust Studies at the University of Oregon. Her work explores German Jewish and Yiddish diasporic histories, cultures, and thought; Jewish left-wing and internationalist traditions; Jewish resistance to fascism; and the intertwined histories and theories of racism, antisemitism, and genocide. She is particularly interested in the lives and legacies of self-identified Jewish antifascists from the 1920s through the Cold War – among them, a figure to whom she often returns: Lion Feuchtwanger.
Chorley-Schulz is the author of numerous publications, including her award-winning first monograph, Der Beginn des Untergangs: Die Zerstörung der jüdischen Gemeinden in Polen und das Vermächtnis des Wilnaer Komitees (Berlin: Metropol, 2016), recipient of both the Hosenfeld/Szpilman Memorial Award and a Special Mention of the Scientific Award of the Ambassador of the Republic of Poland in Germany. She is also co-founder of the EU-funded project We Refugees. Digital Archive on Refugeedom, Past and Present, which documents global histories of displacement and refugeedom – with Feuchtwanger serving as one of its key historical interlocutors.
Rossen Djagalov is Associate Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University. His work focuses on the intersections of culture and Marxism, Soviet and Eastern Bloc internationalism, and the global history of the left.
He is the author of From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema between the Second and the Third World (2020), which reconstructs the Soviet roots of postcolonial literature, film, and theory. His current projects include a study of multinational Soviet literature through the Friendship of the Peoples literary magazine and The People’s Republic of Letters: Towards a Media History of Socialist Internationalism, exploring how left-wing movements used media – from novels and theater to song and film – to connect publics worldwide. He is a member of the editorial collective of LeftEast and the provisional committee of the Black Sheep.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
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film and discussion
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.
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concert
film screening and discussion
Hannah Arendt: Facing Tyranny – In-Person Program
Hannah Arendt: Facing Tyranny takes a closer look at one of the most fearless political writers of modern times. It originally aired on PBS as part of the American Masters series.
Arendt came of age in Germany as Hitler rose to power, before escaping to the United States as a Jewish refugee. Through her unflinching capacity to demand attention to facts and reality, Arendt’s time as a political prisoner, refugee and survivor in Europe informed her groundbreaking insights into the human condition, the refugee crisis, and totalitarianism.
Her major works, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), On Revolution (1963), and Crises of the Republic (1972) remain among the most important and most-read treatises on the development and impact of totalitarianism and the fault lines in American democracy. Arendt’s reports on the trial of Adolph Eichmann also caused a firestorm of controversy, and its impact is still felt today.
The screening will be followed by a conversation between director Jeff Bieber and Leon Botstein, President of Bard College.
About the Speakers:
Jeff Bieber’s films and social impact campaigns have focused on the transformation of America’s identity through The Pilgrims (2015), The Jewish Americans (6-hours, 2008), Latino Americans (6-hours, 2013), Italian Americans (4-hours, 2015), and Asian Americans (5-hours, 2020). Bieber has received two national EMMY Awards, a duPont-Columbia Award, and three Peabody Awards. As Executive Producer of Washington Week on PBS, Jeff produced nightly coverage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and covered the Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden presidencies. His other public affairs work includes Executive Producer for Avoiding Armageddon (2003), an eight-hour series about weapons of mass destruction; America at a Crossroads (2007), a 12-hour series about America’s role post-9/11, and Korea: The Never-Ending War (2019). Jeff Bieber Productions was created in 2022. Projects include Dante, a 4-hour series directed by Ric Burns (April 2024), The Harvest, a 2-hour film for American Experience (September 2023); Julia Alvarez: A Life Reimagined (September 2024); Weaving Nature (April 2024), and Hannah Arendt – Facing Tyranny (broadcast June 27, 2025 and now streaming); Projects in development include Liz Diller: Making Space for the Future for American Masters and a history of the Maryland State House, both slated for 2026.
Leon Botstein is president and Leon Levy Professor in the Arts of Bard College. Founder of Bard High School Early College, Dr. Botstein put into practice a vision of high school as a public space where young adults, with the guidance of a college level faculty, explore their intellectual potential. He has published widely in the fields of education, music, and history and culture and is the author of several books including Jefferson's Children: Education and the Promise of American Culture, and editor of The Compleat Brahms and The Musical Quarterly. He is the music director of the American Symphony Orchestra and The Orchestra Now (TON), and conductor laureate and principal guest conductor of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, where he served as music director. He is the founder and artistic co-director of the Bard Music Festival. His work has been acknowledged with awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Harvard University, government of Austria, and Carnegie Foundation. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2011.
Ticket Info: Pay what you wish; register here
Presented by:
film screening and discussion
celebration
A Hanukkah Celebration for Our Members: Light, Laughter, and Latkes! – In-Person Program
Join us for a festive evening honoring our members! We’ve planned a night full of holiday cheer and exclusive experiences just for you: Delicious Hanukkah treats – Enjoy traditional favorites like latkes and sufganiyot. Cookie decorating – Unleash your creativity and make sweet, festive memories. Special photo memento – Capture the evening with a keepsake photo. Member-only discounts – Take advantage of an additional discount at Ruth’s Bookstore for your Hanukkah shopping. Exclusive preview performance – Be among the first to see a work-in-development scene from the new Hanukkah opera Herschel and the Hanukkah Goblins by Marianna Mott Newirth and Gerald Cohen. It’s our way of saying thank you for being part of our community. Don’t miss this joyful celebration!
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
Presented by:
celebration
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
film screening
Swedishkayt: YidLife Crisis in Stockholm - In-person Program
Jamie Elman and Eli Batalion travelled to the last place on earth they'd expect Yiddish to be a protected minority language: Sweden(?!), inspiring their funny and fascinating chronicle of the Swedish Jewish community, Swedishkayt: YidLife Crisis in Stockholm. In this special New York City premiere, the boychiks from Montreal will not just present the film but perform their patented comedy duo shtik, followed by a Q&A with YIVO Senior Academic Advisor & Director of Exhibitions, Eddy Portnoy. Expect to learn, laugh, and be inspired… not necessarily in that order.
About YidLife Crisis
Eli Batalion and Jamie Elman — the duo of cultural comedians known as YidLife Crisis — are filmmakers and performers from Montreal. With over 25 years of credits across television, theater, music, and film including Mad Men, House MD, and Curb Your Enthusiasm, their work has been showcased at prominent film festivals, including Sundance, Toronto, Berlin, and SXSW. A shared passion for Jewish comedy led them to create “YidLife Crisis,” the first Yiddish-language sitcom, which humorously explores the complexities of modern Jewish life. The show has received several awards and amassed over four million online views, inspiring live performances across North America and Europe. Their documentary works, including the Global Shtetlseries, Narishkayt: YidLife Crisis in Krakow, Chewdaism: A Taste of Montreal, and Swedishkayt: YidLife Crisis in Stockholm, continue to explore and celebrate Jewish identity and humor worldwide.
Ticket Info: $10; YIVO members & students: $5
Presented by:
film screening
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
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concert
book club
LBI Book Club: Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum - Live on Zoom
Dr. Joanna Sliwá will join the LBI Book Club in January to discuss the book It Will Yet Be Heard: A Polish Rabbi's Witness of the Shoah and Survival by Leon Thorne.
It Will Yet Be Heard: A Polish Rabbi's Witness of the Shoah and Survival
Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer once described Dr. Leon Thorne’s memoir as a work of “bitter truth” that he compared favorably to the works of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Proust. Out of print for over forty years, this lost classic of Holocaust literature now reappears in a revised, annotated edition, including both Thorne’s original 1961 memoir Out of the Ashes: The Story of a Survivor and his previously unpublished accounts of his arduous postwar experiences in Germany and Poland.
Rabbi Thorne composed his memoir under extraordinary conditions, confined to a small underground bunker below a Polish peasant’s pigsty. But, It Will Yet Be Heard is remarkable not only for the story of its composition, but also for its moral clarity and complexity. A deeply religious man, Rabbi Thorne bore witness to forced labor camps, human degradation, and the murders of entire communities. And once he emerged from hiding, he grappled not only with survivor’s guilt, but also with the lingering antisemitism and anti-Jewish violence in Poland even after the war ended. Harrowing, moving, and deeply insightful, Rabbi Thorne’s firsthand account offers a rediscovered perspective on the twentieth century’s greatest tragedy.
(Rutgers University Press)
Leon Thorne was a rabbi from Schodnica, near Drohobycz, in Austrian Galicia. He trained at the Breslau Seminary. Following the Holocaust, he served the post-war Jewish community of Frankfurt as a rabbi before immigrating to the United States, settling in Brooklyn, New York.
About Our Guest
Dr. Joanna Sliwá is a historian at the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) where she also administers academic programs. Joanna is a historian of the Holocaust and modern Polish Jewish history. She is the author of the award-winning book, Jewish Childhood in Kraków: A Microhistory of the Holocaust(Rutgers University Press, 2021) and, with Elizabeth (Barry) White, of The Counterfeit Countess: The Jewish Woman Who Rescued Thousands of Poles during the Holocaust (Simon and Schuster, 2024), which has been translated in several languages. A new volume that Joanna co-edited with Christine Schmidt and Elizabeth Anthony, Older Jews and the Holocaust:Persecution, Displacement, and Survival, will be published in 2026 (Wayne State University Press). She previously worked at the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, and at the Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. She has taught Holocaust and Jewish history at Kean University and at Rutgers University and has served as a historical consultant and researcher, including for the PBS film In the Name of Their Mothers: The Story of Irena Sendler
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
Presented by:
book club
lecture
Klezmer and Other Displaced Musics in America - Live on Zoom
In this lecture, scholar and performer Walter Zev Feldman explores the vibrant, yet largely concealed, background of the klezmer revitalization in New York, Philadelphia and other American cities in the 1960s, decades after the period when America served as a crucible for immigrants and their diverse musical expressions. Drawing from his new memoir, From the Bronx to the Bosphorus, (Fordham University Press) Feldman will reflect on how he was instrumental in creating the klezmer revitalization in the US after learning from Greek immigrant musicians and then from the eminent klezmer Dave Tarras (1897-1989).
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
Walter Zev Feldman is a leading researcher in Ottoman Turkish and Jewish music, instrumental in the 1970s Klezmer Revival. His notable works include Klezmer: Music, History, and Memory (2016) and Music of the Ottoman Court: Makam, Composition and the Early Ottoman Instrumental Repertoire (1996; 2024, revised edition). Feldman has extensively studied the instrumental traditions of Moldova’s klezmer and lautar communities. He is the Academic Director of the Klezmer Institute.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
The Cantorial “Golden Age” in America - Live on Zoom
In this lecture demonstration, scholar-musician Jeremiah Lockwood discusses some of the major stars of the cantorial “golden age” and takes a deeper look at the emergence of khazones (the Yiddish word for cantorial music) as a form of popular culture in the US in the early 20th century. Taking over from Europe as the center point of cantorial culture after World War I, cantors in America were major stars of radio, concert, Yiddish theater, and even the emerging sound film industry. Alongside the popularity of cantors as artists and public representatives of Jewish culture there developed a discourse of critique of cantors and their populist art, sometimes referred to as hefker khazones (cantorial music of abandonment) by critics. This lecture will explore the phenomenon of cantorial music as popular culture and will include samples of historic recordings of American cantors of the Jewish immigrant era.
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
Jeremiah Lockwood is a scholar and musician, working in the fields of Jewish studies, performance studies, and ethnomusicology. He is the founder of the band, The Sway Machinery, and is currently a Fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at UPenn. His work engages with issues arising from peering into the archive and imagining the power of “lost” forms of expression to articulate keenly felt needs in the present. His book Golden Ages: Hasidic Singers and Cantorial Revival in the Digital Era was published by University of California Press in 2024.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
Yiddish Theater, George Gershwin, and the Birth of an American Sound - Live on Zoom
As a teenager, George Gershwin attended Yiddish theater regularly. Khantshe in Amerike, by family friend Joseph Rumshinsky, featured a working-class woman asserting her rights and her desires. But not only did the show include a Suffragette Parade—it has also been described as the first Yiddish musical to incorporate American rhythm. This lecture by scholar Ronald Robboy will explore the idea that Gershwin’s internalization of Black Americans’ music was influenced by his early immersion in Yiddish theater.
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
Ronald Robboy is a musician and independent scholar based in San Diego, where he was a professional cellist for many years and, beginning in the 1970s, an early West Coast experimentalist in the klezmer revival. He has written and lectured extensively on Yiddish theater music, and in 1998 was named Senior Researcher for Michael Tilson Thomas’s Thomashefsky Project. Robboy is leading YIVO Institute’s reconstruction of the score to composer Joseph Rumshinsky’s operetta Khantshe in Amerike (1912), to be performed in New York at the Center for Jewish History in May 2026.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
Presented by:
lecture
concert
Khantshe in Amerike — An Operetta by Joseph Rumshinsky - In-person Program and Live on Zoom
Join YIVO for a performance of the music of Khantshe in Amerike, a 1912 operetta with music by Joseph Rumshinsky, play by Nokhem Rakov, and lyrics by Isidore Lillian.
Premiered in New York City, Khantshe in Amerike was subsequently performed around the world. The show was a turning point in Rumshinsky’s output, noted for having put “American rhythm” on the Yiddish stage for the first time according to Yiddish theater historian Zalmen Zylbercweig (1894–1972). Khantshe was also a star vehicle which marked a pivotal moment in the career of singer, actor, and impresario Bessie Tomashefsky.
Khantshe in Amerike is a musical comedy whose action revolves around an independent minded young woman named Khantshe who dresses as a man and becomes the chauffeur for the wealthy Rubin Goldhendler. The show touches on serious topics including love, gender, women's suffrage and the changing social status of women in turn-of-the-century America.
Reconstructed from a variety of archival materials collected at YIVO—including from the recently donated Tomashefsky Archive from Michael Tilson Thomas—the operetta will be performed by students of the Bard Conservatory Vocal Arts Program.
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:
In Person: $15; YIVO members & students: $10
Livestream: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
concert