members only event
Meet the Fellows: Maytal Mark and Jonathan Green - In-person Program and Live on Zoom
Join us for a meet-and-greet with our fellows, Maytal Mark and Jonathan Green, who will share insights from their research on Middle Eastern intellectual history and the evolution of luxury and consumer culture. Light refreshments will be served.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required - registration is limited to CJH members.
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members only event
conversation
At Lunch with Margalit Fox – Live on Zoom
Julie Salamon, New York Times best-selling author, sits down with author and journalist Margalit Fox. Considered one of the foremost explanatory writers and literary stylists in American journalism, Margalit (mar-gah-LEET) Fox retired in 2018 from a 24-year-career at the New York Times, where she was most recently a senior writer. As a member of the newspaper’s celebrated obituary news department, she has written the Page One sendoffs of some of the best-known cultural figures of our era, including the pioneering feminist Betty Friedan, the writers Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison, the poet Adrienne Rich, the children’s author Maurice Sendak and the advice columnists Dear Abby and Ann Landers. She has also written the obituaries of many of the unsung heroes who have managed, quietly, to touch history, among them the inventors of the crash-test dummy, the bar code and the pink plastic lawn flamingo. In 2016, the Poynter Institute named her one of the six best writers in the New York Times’s history. The recipient of the William Saroyan International Prize for Nonfiction, Margalit is the author of four previous narrative nonfiction books: Talking Hands, The Riddle of the Labyrinth, Conan Doyle for the Defense and The Confidence Men. Originally trained as a cellist, she holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in linguistics from Stony Brook University and a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She lives in Manhattan with her husband, the writer and critic George Robinson. margalitfox.com
Ticket Info: Free; register online for a Zoom link
Presented by:
conversation
exhibit opening
And That's True Too: The Life and Work of Lore Segal - In-person Program and Live on YouTube
On January 22, LBI will open its first exhibition of 2026 And That's True Too: The Life and Work of Lore Segal. Aside from the unveiling of the exhibition, the opening event will feature renowned actor Toni Kalem (The Sopranos) reading from Lore Segal’s autobiographical novel Other People’s Houses.
About the Exhibition
And That’s True Too: The Life and Work of Lore Segal presents a richly documented exploration of the life and literary legacy of Lore Segal (1928–2024). Born in Vienna, Segal survived Nazi persecution as a child when she escaped on one of the earliest Kindertransports to England. Her subsequent life—marked by displacement, reinvention, and a lifelong engagement with language—shaped a body of work distinguished by moral clarity, wit, and intellectual rigor.
The exhibition features photographs, manuscripts, rare books, and archival materials that trace Segal’s journey from prewar Vienna to New York and examine how exile informed her novels, short stories, translations, and children’s books, as well as her influential career as a teacher.
The title And That’s True Too reflects Segal’s commitment to complexity and multiple perspectives—an ethos that runs through her writing and her reflections on memory, identity, and human connection.
About our guest
Toni Kalem has an extensive background as an actress in film, television, and theater. Although known for her portrayal of Italian characters in iconic films such as Philip Kaufman’s, THE WANDERERS, PRIVATE BENJAMIN, and Angie Bonpensiero on THE SOPRANOS, for which she also wrote, Ms. Kalem is of Jewish descent. When she read Lore Segal’s autobiographical novel, OTHER PEOPLE’S HOUSES, she discovered the deeply personal story she’d always wanted to tell. Like Lore, her mother was also on the Kindertransport, but unlike Lore, she barely spoke of her experience. Ms. Kalem, who now has her German citizenship, has adapted OPH as a screenplay and plans to shoot in Vienna and the UK.
Some other film credits include adapting and directing Anne Tyler’s, A SLIPPING-DOWN LIFE, which was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, and an adaptation of Lisa Zeidner’s novel, LAYOVER, which she will direct starring Guy Pearce.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
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exhibit opening
book discussion
New Perspectives on the History of Antisemitism: A Roundtable Discussion With Mark Weitzman, Susannah Heschel, Maurice Samuels, and Samuel Freedman – In-Person Program
As concern over antisemitism has grown in recent years, so too have debates over how to understand and combat it. The Routledge History of Antisemitism, now in paperback, offers fresh perspectives into what has been called the oldest hatred. It explores antisemitism’s history and manifestations, ranging from its origins to the internet.
In the years following the Holocaust, many in North America and Europe viewed antisemitism as a historical issue with little current importance. However, recent events show that antisemitism is not just a matter of historical interest or of concern only to Jews. Antisemitism has become a major issue confronting and challenging our world. This volume starts with explorations of antisemitism in its many different shapes across time and then proceeds to a geographical perspective, covering a broad scope of experiences across different countries and regions. The final section discusses the manifestations of antisemitism in its varied cultural and social forms.
Join us for this critically important and illuminating discussion about the book’s insights into antisemitism featuring co-editor Mark Weitzman (World Jewish Restitution Organization) and contributors Susannah Heschel (Dartmouth) and Maurice Samuels (Yale). Samuel Freedman (Columbia) will moderate. A reception will follow the program. The book will be available for purchase and signing.
About the Speakers
Mark Weitzman is co-editor of The Routledge History of Antisemitism. He is Chief Operating Officer of the World Jewish Restitution Organization, the lead NGO working toward restitution of Jewish private and communal property seized during World War II. He is also the senior NGO member of the official U.S. delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Authority (IHRA), where he chaired the Committee on Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial and the Museums and Memorials Working Group. He was the architect of IHRA’s adoption of the Working Definition of Antisemitism and the lead author of IHRA’s Working Definition of Holocaust Denial and Distortion. He wrote the monograph Jews and Judaism in the Political Theology of Radical Catholic Traditionalists, and his chapter on “Holocaust Denial and Distortion” will be published in the forthcoming Cambridge University Press History of Antisemitism.
Susannah Heschel is Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor and chair of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College. Her books include Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus; The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany; Jüdischer Islam: Islam und jüdisch-deutsche Selbstbestimmung; Jewish Studies and the Woman Question, written with Sarah Imhoff, and several edited books. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, grants from the Carnegie Corporation and the Ford Foundation, and five honorary doctorates from universities in the United States, Canada, Germany, and Switzerland.
Maurice Samuels is the Betty Jane Anlyan Professor of French at Yale University, where he also directs the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Cullman Center Fellowship at the New York Public Library, he is the author of five books, including The Right to Difference: French Universalism and the Jews; The Betrayal of the Duchess; and Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair, published in Yale's Jewish Lives Series.
Samuel Freedman (above photo: credit Gabriela Bhaskar) has been an award-winning author, columnist, and professor. A former columnist for The New York Times and a professor emeritus at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, he is the author of the ten acclaimed books. The most recent of them, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights, won the 2024 Hillman Prize for Book Journalism. Freedman’s previous books include Upon This Rock: The Miracles of a Black Church; The Inheritance: How Three Families and America Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond; and Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry. Four of his books have been listed among The New York Times’ Notable Books of the Year. Jew vs. Jew won the National Jewish Book Award for Non-Fiction and made the Publishers Weekly Religion Best-Sellers list.
Ticket Info: Pay what you wish; registration is required
Presented by:
book discussion
talk
Summer Program Information Session - Live on Zoom
Have you always wanted to study Yiddish at the YIVO-Bard Summer Program? Are you wondering what it would be like to spend six weeks studying at YIVO in New York City? Join faculty and staff of the Summer Program for one of our brief information sessions. These 45-minute sessions will cover the program’s structure, admissions process, and more, with time for questions from prospective Summer Program students. The sessions will be conducted in English and are entirely optional (prospective students are not required to attend).
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
Presented by:
talk
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
panel discussion
Holocaust Remembrance Today - a Living Responsibility: A Panel Discussion in Conjunction With the Exhibition "Between Life and Death: Stories of Rescue During the Holocaust" at the United Nations - In-person Program and Live on Zoom
Join us for a panel exploring how societies remember and reinterpret the Holocaust in the 21st century, and what meaning International Holocaust Remembrance Day holds today.
Inspired by the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity (ENRS) exhibition Between Life and Death: Stories of Rescue during the Holocaust, on view at the United Nations from January 15 to February 20 as part of remembrance and education outreach organized by the Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme, the discussion will focus on acts of rescue, individual moral choices, and the legacy of human solidarity during one of the darkest periods in history.
Moderated by Jayashri Wyatt, the panel comprising Elzbieta Ficowska, Mordecai Paldiel, Jay Winter (Charles J. Stille Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University), and Daniel Blatman (Max and Rita Haber Professor Emeritus of Contemporary Jewry and Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) will discuss how remembrance has evolved over the decades, how stories of rescuers and survivors can be communicated to younger generations, and how to respond to new challenges such as disinformation and the rapid development of AI, as well as the fading of living memory. The conversation will highlight why remembrance remains essential for shaping empathy, civic responsibility, and resilience in today’s world.
The panel discussion will take place at 7:00pm ET and will be preceded by a reception for the in-person audience at 6:00pm ET.
Co-presented by YIVO, Center for Jewish History, European Network Remembrance and Solidarity, the Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme, and the Sousa Mendes Foundation
About the Panelists
Jayashri Wyatt is the Chief of Education Outreach, in the UN Department of Global Communications. She is a seasoned communications professional with a wealth of experience in the United Nations System producing high-level events, advocacy campaigns, and films for the Department of Global Communications, UNICEF, and the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). She also has nearly a decade of experience as an educator championing women’s empowerment and gender equality.
Elzbieta Ficowska was born in the Warsaw ghetto in 1942 to Henia and Jossel Koppel. She survived because she was smuggled to the "Aryan side" and was hid from Germans by Stanislawa Bussold, a 56-year-old midwife and member of the underground who helped Jews. The only thing left from her Jewish parents is a little silver spoon bearing the girl's name and birth date. Her story is among those presented at the travelling exhibition Between Life and Death. For many years, she has been active in the Association of Children of the Holocaust, sharing her personal testimony of rescue and remembrance.
Dr. Mordecai Paldiel headed the Righteous Among the Nations Department at Yad Vashem from 1982-2007 and he serves on the Board of the Sousa Mendes Foundation. His books include Remembrance and Meaning: Dialogues and Thoughts on the Significance of Holocaust Rescuers; The Path of the Righteous: Gentile Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust; Sheltering the Jews: Stories of Holocaust Rescuers; Churches and the Holocaust: Unholy Teaching, Good Samaritans and Reconciliation; Whosoever Saves One Life: The Uniqueness of the Righteous Among the Nations; Saving the Jews: Amazing Stories of Men and Women Who Defied the Final Solution; Diplomat Heroes of the Holocaust; German Rescuers of Jews: Individuals versus the Nazi System; Polish Rescuers of Jews: Selected Stories of Amazing Acts of Goodness; Poland, the Jews and the Holocaust: Promised Beginnings and Troubled Past; Saving One’s Own: Jewish Rescuers During the Holocaust and Righteous or Not: The Honoring of Rescuers of Jews. He serves on the B’nai B’rith Commission to honor Jewish rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust. Thanks to his efforts, there is now a square named for Aristides de Sousa Mendes in Jerusalem. He provided the list of 60 diplomat-rescuers honored by the US Congress in 2024 in the Forgotten Heroes of the Holocaust Congressional Gold Medal Act.
Jay Winter is the Charles J. Stille Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University and a leading scholar of 20th-century European history. A specialist on the World War I, he has profoundly influenced the study of memory, mourning, and the cultural consequences of modern conflict. He is the author of numerous seminal works, including Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (1995), The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century (1996), René Cassin and Human Rights (2013), The Cultural History of War in the Twentieth Century and After (2022), and most recently The Day the Great War Ended, 24 July 1923: The Civilianization of War (2022). He holds honorary degrees from the universities of Graz, Leuven, and Paris.
Daniel Blatman is the Max and Rita Haber Professor Emeritus of Contemporary Jewry and Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He previously served as director of the University’s Institute of Contemporary Jewry and of the Center for the Study of the History and Culture of Polish Jewry. His research focuses on twentieth-century Polish Jewry, the Jewish labor movement in Eastern Europe, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto, Polish–Jewish relations during the Holocaust and its aftermath, and Nazi extermination policy. Among his major publications are For Our Freedom and Yours: The Jewish Labor Bund in Poland, 1939–1945; Reportage from the Ghetto: The Jewish Underground Press in the Warsaw Ghetto; The Death Marches: The Final Phase of Nazi Genocide; and Conflicting Histories and Coexistence: New Perspectives on the Jewish–Polish Encounters. He is the recipient of the Jacob Buchman Memorial Prize, the Yad Vashem International Prize in Holocaust Studies, and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
Presented by:
panel discussion
talk
Summer Program Information Session - Live on Zoom
Have you always wanted to study Yiddish at the YIVO-Bard Summer Program? Are you wondering what it would be like to spend six weeks studying at YIVO in New York City? Join faculty and staff of the Summer Program for one of our brief information sessions. These 45-minute sessions will cover the program’s structure, admissions process, and more, with time for questions from prospective Summer Program students. The sessions will be conducted in English and are entirely optional (prospective students are not required to attend).
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
Presented by:
talk
talk
Summer Program Information Session: Advanced Levels - Live on Zoom
Are you thinking of returning to the Summer Program to continue your advanced studies? Join Summer Program faculty and staff for a brief information session about YIVO’s advanced levels. Open to graduates of YIVO’s intermediate levels and those with comparable proficiency, this session will cover the structure of YIVO’s advanced levels, the admissions process, and more, with time for questions from prospective Summer Program students.
The session will be conducted in Yiddish and is entirely optional (prospective students are not required to attend).
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
Presented by:
talk
book talk
Sounds of Survival: Polish Music and the Holocaust - In-person Program
Sounds of Survival explores the central role played by Jews in creating classical music in Poland. It examines an integrated Polish and Polish Jewish musical community as its members contended with antisemitism in the 1930s, attempted to survive the Nazi occupation, and established a renewed musical culture amid the ashes of World War II and the Holocaust. Reconstructing these musicians' lives from the 1920s into the 1950s, Mackenzie Pierce argues that despite nearly unimaginable violence, many Polish musicians treated the war as a time of reinvention and cultural preservation. Their faith that music was a source of cultural continuity, however, also marginalized experiences of wartime loss, especially those of Jewish victims and survivors of the Holocaust. Sounds of Survivalnot only reveals that the Holocaust was a central event within musical culture in Poland; it also shows why its musical aftermath has been difficult to hear.
About the Author
Mackenzie Pierce is assistant professor of musicology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and author of Sounds of Survival: Polish Music and the Holocaust (University of California Press, 2025). He is a scholar of twentieth-century musical culture in Eastern Europe, with a focus on Polish-Jewish relations and classical music. Active in both the US and Europe, his research has been supported through fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
Presented by:
book talk
book talk
Confronting Representations of Black People in Yiddish Culture - Live on Zoom
Scholars have long argued that the Yiddish press consistently condemned discrimination against African Americans and emphasized parallels between Jewish oppression in Eastern Europe and Black life in the United States. In Crude Creatures, Gil Ribak challenges this view, showing that it reflects only a narrow portion of Jewish representations of Black people during the immigration era.
Drawing on previously unexplored Yiddish newspapers, theater, and literature from Eastern Europe and the United States through 1929, Ribak exposes a gap in existing scholarship. Although Jewish writers frequently denounced lynching, racial violence, and segregation, they often portrayed Black Africans and African Americans using crude stereotypes. Many Eastern European Jews encountered Black people only after immigrating, yet brought with them preconceived images shaped by rabbinic exegesis, pious advice, travel narratives, folklore, scientific explorations, pulp literature, press reports, political rhetoric, and educational materials. These depictions cast Black people as cannibals, oversexed, prone to violence, childlike, or just happy-go-lucky people. Crude Creatures revises the overly optimistic narrative of Black-Jewish relations and reveals how immigrant cultures adapted to America’s racial hierarchy.
Join us for a discussion about this book with Ribak, led by Clinical Assistant Professor at University of South Carolina Devin Randolph.
About the Speakers
Gil Ribak is the Shirley D. Curson Associate Professor at The Arizona Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Arizona. Born and raised in Israel, Ribak came to the U.S. on a Fulbright Fellowship and completed a Ph.D. in history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He held several academic positions, such as the Director of the Institute on Israeli-American Jewish Relations at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles. His book, Gentile New York: The Images of Non-Jews among Jewish Immigrants, was published by Rutgers University Press in 2012. In 2021-2022, Ribak served as the European Union's Marie S. Curie Senior Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies at the Albert-Ludwig University in Freiburg, Germany.
Devin Randolph is Clinical Assistant Professor in the College of Education at the University of South Carolina. He studies the everyday experiences of targeted youth and systemic inequities. His research includes work with Jewish and African American-understanding the historical alliance, divergence and convergence and contours of racism and racial antisemitism. Randolph earned his Ph.D. in Foundations of Education from the University of South Carolina.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
Presented by:
book talk
book talk
Pathways: Seven Short Stories by I. L. Peretz - In-person Program
The new graded reader Afn veg: Zibn dertseylungen fun Y.-L. Perets (Pathways: Seven Short Stories by I. L. Peretz), consists of seven classic short stories by the great author, I. L. Peretz, abridged and adapted for students by Moishele Alfonso.
Afn Veg features a side-by-side glossary, discussion questions, and audio recordings. This collection of adapted Peretz short stories gives the reader access to the very best that Yiddish literature has to offer, yet at such a level that even advanced beginners can comprehend it.
Every short story is divided into smaller chapters, with discussion questions at the end of each chapter. One feature that makes this reader so useful for students is the side-by-side glossary. The more difficult words and expressions appear in bold letters; right next to the Yiddish text is a glossary containing their translation, and in some cases, also the pronunciation. The book is a tremendous contribution to the learning materials available to today’s Yiddish students.
Join YIVO and League for Yiddish for a celebration of this new publication. Light refreshments will be served during the program.
This lecture will be held in Yiddish in person only.
About the Speaker
Moishele Alfonso received his B.A. in German, French and Italian from the University of Memphis. He attended the YIVO-Bard Uriel Weinreich Summer Program in 2018 and participated in the Yiddish Book Center’s Yiddish Pedagogy Fellowship (2018-19) and the Yiddish Pedagogy Practicum (2021-22). He has taught Yiddish at the Yiddish Book Center, the Workers Circle, and at Kadimah in Melbourne, Australia. In 2021-2022, Moishele transcribed Isaac Bashevis Singer’s book, Sonim: di geshikhte fun a libe (Enemies: a Love Story) into standardized Yiddish from the orthography used in its original serialized publication in the Forverts (1966). Moishele’s version was published in 2022 by Olniansky Farlag in Sweden and is the first time Sonim has ever appeared in book form in Yiddish.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
Presented by:
book talk
the blavatnik chamber music series at cjh
Keyboard Kaleidoscope: Three Pianists on Two Pianos: Phoenix Chamber Ensemble Performs Mozart, Rachmaninoff, Schnittke, and Bizet – In-Person Program and Live on YouTube
Join Phoenix Chamber Ensemble pianists Vassa Shevel and Inessa Zaretsky with guest artist Ellen Braslavsky (piano) for an evening of Mozart, Rachmaninoff, Schnittke, and Bizet.
Program:
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Sonata in D Major, K. 448, for Two Pianos, Four Hands
Sergei Rachmaninoff, Suite No.1. Op.5 for Two Pianos, Four Hands
Alfred Schnittke, Gogol Suite, arranged for two pianos by Valery Borovikov
Georges Bizet, Carmen Suite for Piano Six Hands, arranged by J. Kowalewski
Founded in 2005 by pianists Vassa Shevel and Inessa Zaretsky, 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:
the blavatnik chamber music series at cjh
discussion
Horace Cayton: Black Renaissance Man and Raconteur - Live on Zoom
In this talk, writer Jeffery Allen will discuss the historical significance of Horace Cayton, who became the romantic partner to Lore Segal soon after the end of World War II. Allen will position Cayton, a well-known intellectual and political figure known for his quips and colorful personality, within the larger framework of the Harlem Renaissance, as a member of the generation termed the “New Negro” and as a part of the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement. Cayton served as the inspiration for Lore's character of Carter Bayoux in her best-known novel, Her First American.
About the Speaker
Jeffery Renard Allen is the award-winning author of six books of fiction and poetry, including the celebrated novel Song of the Shank, which was a front-page review in both The New York Times Book Review and The San Francisco Chronicle. Allen’s other accolades include The Chicago Tribune's Heartland Prize for Fiction, The Chicago Public Library’s Twenty-First Century Award, the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, a grant from Creative Capital, a Whiting Writers' Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, a NYFA grant, residencies at the Bellagio Center, Ucross, The Hermitage, VCCA, Monson Arts, and Jentel Arts, and fellowships at The Center for Scholars and Writers, the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Studies, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. He was a finalist for both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Allen is the founder and editor of Taint Taint Taint magazine and is the Africa Editor for The Evergreen Review. His latest books are the short story collection Fat Time and the memoir An Unspeakable Hope, the latter co-authored with Leon Ford. Allen is at work on several projects, including a memoir entitled Mother-Wit, a book of poems called No Borders, and the short story collection Try Me. Allen makes his home in Johannesburg and New York. Find out more about him at www.writerjefferyrenardallen.com.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
Presented by:
discussion
lecture
The Shtetl: Myth and Reality - Live on Zoom
Even those who do not know much Yiddish have probably heard the word shtetl,” but what does that word mean exactly? Can we just say that it was a small town in Eastern Europe with a lot of Jews—and leave it at that? Or was the shtetl that nostalgic world of “tradition” so lovingly celebrated in Fiddler on the Roof? How are we to understand imaginary shtetls like Sholom Aleichem’s Kasrilevke, where the “little people” ran around, talked non stop, and tried to make sense of a world they could no longer understand understand or control?
Indeed the “shtetl” meant many things to many people. For many Zionists and Jewish leftists, the shtetl was a pathetic symbol of Jewish backwardness. Others cherished it as a place of real Jewishness, that fixed point that gave Jews in the diaspora the feeling of being home. The destruction of the Holocaust encouraged this nostalgia for the lost shtetl, especially as many Jews in the post-war world, newly comfortable and secure in their new homes, showed a new interest in their ethnic roots.
In this lecture, YIVO Visiting Research Historian Samuel Kassow will explore the “real shtetl” and the “imagined shtetl,” which both formed an integral part of Eastern European Jewish peoplehood.
About the Speaker
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:
lecture
conversation
At Lunch with Joshua Zecher-Ross – Live on Zoom
Julie Salamon, New York Times best-selling author, sits down with Broadway conductor and musical director Joshua Zecher-Ross. Currently, the music director and conductor of Operation Mincemeat, now playing at The Golden Theatre and the score supervisor for The Queen of Versailles at the St. James Theatre. Previous Broadway credits include Water for Elephants, Be More Chill, and Once Upon a One More Time. Joshua has worked as a music director, conductor, arranger, and electronic music designer for dozens of shows across the country. He has performed in New York City at 54 Below, Joe’s Pub, Green Room 42, The Laurie Beechman, Birdland, The Duplex, and Feinstein’s at Nikko. He also works as a music supervisor, instructor, and accompanist at NY Film Academy Musical Theatre Program & Actor Therapy. He is a graduate of NYU: Steinhardt.
Ticket Info: Free; register online for a Zoom link
Presented by:
conversation
book talk
A Woman Is Responsible for Everything: Jewish Women in Early Modern Europe – In-Person Program
In small villages, bustling cities, and crowded ghettos across early modern Europe, Jewish women were increasingly active participants in the daily life of their communities, managing homes and professions, leading institutions and sororities, and crafting objects and texts of exquisite beauty. A Woman Is Responsible for Everything marshals a dazzling array of previously untapped archival sources to tell the stories of these women for the first time.
Join us for this important and illuminating discussion with authors Debra Kaplan and Elisheva Carlebach about the kehillah, a lively and thriving form of communal life that sustained European Jews for three centuries. They paint vibrant portraits of Jewish women of all walks of life, from those who wielded their wealth and influence in and out of their communities to the poorest maidservants and vagrants, from single and married women to the widowed and divorced. We will follow them into their homes and learn about the possessions they valued and used, the books they read, and the writings they composed. Speaking to us in their own voices, these women reveal tremendous economic initiative in the rural marketplace and the princely court, and they express their profound spirituality in the home as well as the synagogue. Mirjam Thulin, Director of Research and Associate Director of the Institute for Advanced Research at the Center for Jewish History, will moderate. A reception will follow the program, and the book will be available for purchase and signing.
About the Speakers
Debra Kaplan holds the Samuel Braun Chair for the History of the Jews in Germany at Bar-Ilan University. A social historian of premodern Ashkenaz, she is the author of Beyond Expulsion: Jews, Christians and Reformation Strasbourg (Stanford University Press, 2011) and The Patrons and their Poor: Jewish Community and Public Charity in Early Modern Germany (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020) and with Elisheva Carlebach, A Woman is Responsible for Everything: Jewish Women in Early Modern Europe (Princeton University Press, 2025). Kaplan is on the board of directors of the Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem and the Historical Society of Israel.
Elisheva Carlebach is Baron Professor of Jewish History, Culture and Society at Columbia University. Her books include The Pursuit of Heresy; Divided Souls: Converts from Judaism; Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture, and Confronting Modernity, volume 6 in The Posen Library. She served as Editor of AJS Review and President of American Academy for Jewish Research. Carlebach was awarded Columbia’s Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award, and recently, a mentorship award by the Association for Jewish Studies. Her most recent book is A Woman is Responsible for Everything, a new approach to the study of Jewish women, co-authored with Debra Kaplan. She is an officer on the Center for Jewish History’s Board of Directors.
Ticket Info: Pay what you wish; registration is required
Presented by:
book talk
lecture
Denialism: Polish Style - Live on Zoom
Elzbieta Janicka focuses on the case of the former German Nazi death camp Treblinka, the place of murder and (un)rest of nearly one million Jews from several European countries, the majority from Poland. While keeping in mind that “Treblinka” is as an umbrella term for the forced labor camp Treblinka I (1941-1944), the extermination camp Treblinka II (1942-1943), and a railway station at Treblinka the village, Janicka examines symbolic topography, such as the symbols and narratives that are imprinted into these sites under the auspices of the Treblinka Museum. Regarding the unrestricted Polish bottom-up and top-down fight to “conquer the space” of the Holocaust and make it symbolically profitable for Poland, Janicka raises the question: Why doesn’t the present Polish strategy of “promoting Polish martyrdom upon the Jewish one” trigger an international scandal and condemnation?
Janicka argues that while Polish cultural institutions do not deny the Holocaust itself, they practice a form of denialism by obscuring the reality of Polish involvement in the Holocaust. This lecture fits into a broader debate about Polish public institutions that promote a counter-history of the Holocaust and have at their disposal extraordinary means of propaganda both within Poland and abroad.
About the Speaker
Elzbieta Janicka is a historian of literature, cultural anthropologist, and visual artist. She received her M.A. at the Université Paris VII Denis Diderot and her Ph.D. and postdoctoral degree at Warsaw University. Janicka is the author of Sztuka czy Narod? [Art or the Nation?] (Krakow: Universitas, 2006) and Festung Warschau [Forteress Warsaw] (Warszawa: Krytyka Polityczna, 2011). She co-authored Philo-Semitic Violence. Poland’s Jewish Past in New Polish Narratives(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021; with Tomasz Zukowski) and This Was Not America: A Wrangle Through Jewish-Polish-American History (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2022; with Michael Steinlauf). Her individual exhibitions are: Ja, fotografia(1998); Miejsce nieparzyste [The Odd Place] (2006); and Inne Miasto[Other City] (2013, with Wojciech Wilczyk). Her research pertains to the identity and community building function of Polish antisemitism as well as the place and role of the Polish majority in the structure of the Holocaust. She works at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
Presented by:
lecture
concert
Leo Zeitlin and the Music of His World - In-person Program and Live on Zoom
Leo Zeitlin (1884–1930) was a composer, violinist, violist, and conductor born in Pinsk who specialized in classical works infused with Jewish themes. Best known for his Eli Zion for cello and orchestra, Zeitlin was an active member of the St. Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music and spent formative years teaching and conducting in Ekaterinoslav and Vilna before emigrating to New York, where he worked as an arranger and violist for the Capitol Theatre.
After his death, Zeitlin’s music fell into obscurity until cellist and musicologist Paula Eisenstein Baker (1939–2024) began studying and championing his work in the late 1980s. Eisenstein Baker’s publications in YIVO Annual and other journals, as well as her critical edition of Zeitlin’s complete chamber music for A-R Editions, were instrumental in reviving his legacy. This concert celebrates Eisenstein Baker’s scholarship and the recent donation of her archival collection to YIVO.
Performances by Julian Schwarz (cello), Marika Bournaki (piano), Peter Sirotin and Daniel Kurganov (violins), Colin Brookes (viola), and Ori Marcu (mezzo-soprano) will feature a variety of chamber and vocal music by Zeitlin, alongside works by composers with whom he was in dialogue, including Joseph Achron, Alexander Krein, Joachim Stutschewsky, Mikhail Gnesin, Lazare Saminsky, Joel Engel, Alexander Zhitomirsky, and Michael Lewin.
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; registration is required.
Presented by:
concert
book club
LBI Book Club: The Artificial Silk Girl - Live on Zoom
Professor Didem Uca will join LBI to discuss The Artificial Silk Girl
This enthralling tale of a “material girl” in 1930s Berlin is the masterpiece of a literary icon, rediscovered and restored to the same heights as such luminaries as Isherwood and Brecht.
In 1931 a young woman writer living in Germany penned her answer to Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and the era of cinematic glamour: The Artificial Silk Girl. Though a Nazi censorship board banned Irmgard Keun’s work in 1933 and destroyed all existing copies, the novel survived, as fresh and relevant today as the day it was written.
The Artificial Silk Girl is the story of Doris, beautiful and striving, who vows to write down all that happens to her as the star of her own life story. But instead of scripting what she hopes will be a quick rise to fame and fortune as either an actress or the mistress/wife of a wealthy man, she describes a slow descent into near prostitution and homelessness. Prewar Berlin is not the dazzling and exciting city of promise it seems; Doris unwittingly reveals a bleak, seamy urban landscape.
(Description: Penguin Random House).
Author Irmgard Kuen
Irmgard Keun (1905 – 1982) was a (non-Jewish) German novelist. She is noted for her portrayals of the life of women in the Weimar Republic as well as the early years of the Nazi Germany era. She was born into an affluent family and was given the autonomy to explore her passions. After her attempts at acting ended at the age of 16, Keun began working as a writer after years of working in Hamburg and Greifswald. Her books were eventually banned by Nazi authorities but gained recognition during the final years of her life. She was a romantic partner to the Jewish author Joseph Roth.
About Our Guest
Didem Uca is Assistant Professor of German Studies and associated faculty in the Departments of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies at Emory University. With a focus on intersectional approaches to post/migration cultures, Dr. Uca’s research has appeared in journals including Gegenwartsliteratur, Die Unterrichtspraxis / Teaching German, Seminar, and Monatshefte, for which she wrote about how the protagonist of Irmgard Keun's novel Child of All Nations can be interpreted as an adaptation of the character of Mignon from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. As a literary translator from German and Turkish, her work has appeared in venues such as TRANSIT, Konturen, SAND Journal, and Turkish German Studies. A dedicated pedagogue, Dr. Uca's teaching has been honored with the Goethe-Institut/American Association of Teachers of German Certificate of Merit (2020) and the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages German Special Interest Group's Early Career Award (2024).
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
Presented by:
book club
film screening
Outsider: Freud - In-person Program
Join YIVO for the New York premiere of Outsider: Freud, a journey into the life and work of Sigmund Freud in four acts, combining animation, dreams, and insights from leading psychoanalysts. The film explores Freud’s experiences of marginalization as a Jew in Vienna during Hitler’s rise and how these shaped his theories and personal life. Through an intimate lens, the film reveals new dimensions of Freud’s legacy, focusing on his impact on psychoanalysis, Judaism, and the power dynamics of being an outsider.
A Q&A with director Yair Qedar will follow the screening.
About the Speaker
Yair Qedar is an Israeli documentary filmmaker, social activist and former journalist. In his project “the Hebrews,” he has been chronicling the lives of Jewish and Israeli figures of the modern Hebrew literary canon. Qedar’s 19 feature-length documentaries have all premiered at film festivals and have won the director over 30 prizes. Qedar is also a leading LGBTQ activist and created the first Israeli LGBTQ newspaper.
Ticket Info: $15; YIVO members: $10
Presented by:
film screening
lecture
Educating for an Uncertain Future in Interwar Poland - Live on Zoom
In the two decades between the First and Second World Wars, Jewish parents in Poland faced a proliferation of choices when it came to educating their children. Each choice offered a vision of what future Polish Jews desired, what they expected, and the gap between the two. State schools taught in Polish (sometimes with a schedule to accommodate traditional religious observance), secularist Yiddish schools with strong ties to Jewish socialism and the labor movement, Hebraist schools promoting political and cultural Zionism, and religious schools that retained--or innovated upon--traditionalist educational models reflected different opinions for what Jewish children in interwar Poland would need in the present to secure their future. In this lecture, Elena Hoffenberg draws upon materials held by YIVO to explore how projections about the future in terms of work, culture, and politics guided parents, educational activists, and young people themselves. Choices as reflections of competing political and religious commitments, as well as material constraints, to better understand what Polish Jews expected for their individual and communal futures.
About the Speaker
Elena Hoffenberg is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Chicago and proud alumna of the YIVO zumer-program. Her work focuses on the Jews of interwar Poland to better understand how individual experiences and communal discourses that link family and futurity in periods of uncertainty and crisis. She is the 2024-2025 recipient of the The Aleksander and Alicja Hertz Memorial Fellowship and the Samuel and Flora Weiss Research Fellowship in Polish Jewish Studies at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
Presented by:
lecture
discussion
Tell Me a Lore: Revisiting the Children’s Books of Lore Segal - Live on Zoom
In addition to penning four novels and numerous short stories, Lore Segal received acclaim for her work for children. Tell Me a Mitzi and The Story of Mrs. Lovewright and Purrless, Her Cat are two of her well-known works. Professor Ellen Handler Spitz (Yale University) will give scholarly insights into Lore Segal's work for children. Sarah Lynn Baker, Executive Director of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, as well as artists Paul O. Zelinsky, Sergio Ruzzier, and Sophie Blackall will join the conversation.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
Presented by:
discussion
lecture
‘Making a Scene’: Returning a Jewish Comic Opera Star to the Stage - Live on Zoom
Leonora Braham (1853-1931), creator of five principal soprano roles in Gilbert and Sullivan’s operettas between 1881 and 1887 (including Yum-Yum in The Mikado, 1885), first appeared in my research during a visit to the West London Synagogue archives in 2015. As Leonora Abraham, she sang in the Synagogue’s choir between 1870 and 1874, prior to her first professional engagement with the German Reed Entertainments. Having featured Braham’s life and work in two further pieces of scholarship, I was inspired by her opening words in a 1930 interview, ‘So someone has found me at last’, to write The Honour: a new 45-minute play with music which returns Braham to the environment in which she was happiest and best known.
This presentation gives an overview of Braham’s life on- and off-stage, and describes the reasons for and methods involved in giving her a platform beyond traditional scholarly materials. Danielle Padley will discuss the challenges of incorporating the subject of a performer’s Jewish background into theatre intended to appeal to and educate a wide and varied audience, and will look ahead to plans for incorporating more performative media into her research on Jewish music-making in Victorian England.
About the Speaker
Dr. Danielle Padley is a musicologist specialising in Jewish music-making in nineteenth-century England. She investigates musical activities within geographically and socially diverse Jewish communities to enhance and challenge accepted narratives about Jewish life in England. She is a Research Fellow at the Woolf Institute and an Affiliated Lecturer at the Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge, where she teaches the module ‘Music at the Margins of Victorian Society’. Danielle has an interdisciplinary publication and research record which explores Jewish musical activity in a variety of contexts, including synagogue worship, education, theatre, concert and drawing-room entertainments, and literary fiction. She is a trained singer and theatre performer, regularly performing both established and new writing within Cambridge’s local theatre scene. She grew up singing in and conducting synagogue choirs, and for nearly 12 years was Musical Director of Cambridge’s Hebrew choir, Kol Echad. Danielle also sings and plays violin, keys, and folk harp with folk-rock band Once Again.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
67th Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture by Marsha Rozenblit - Was New York Like Vienna? - In-person Program
Jews who fled Nazi Austria after the Anschluss in 1938 went to many places, but primarily to the United States, where they tried to make new homes for themselves. In so doing, many of them imagined that democratic America resembled the old Habsburg Monarchy, with its tolerance for ethnic diversity. They even imagined that the American president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was like the beloved Habsburg Emperor Franz Joseph, and New York was like Vienna. This talk will explore how Jews from Austria coped with American realities and used nostalgia for the Habsburg Monarchy as a way to adjust to their new lives in America.
About our 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
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
book talk
Songs of Translation: Bene Israel Performance from India to Israel - Live on Zoom
The Bene Israel are a Jewish community from western India who, over centuries, developed a distinctive identity in relation to other Jewish and non-Jewish communities, translating their sounds, words, and practices to have uniquely Marathi Jewish meanings. Some men sing Marathi Jewish songs, but over the past half century, women have assumed the important cultural role of stewarding these songs for the future. As author Anna C. Schultz demonstrates in her new book Echoes of Translation: Audibility and Relationally in Indian Jewish Women’s Songs, the Bene Israel women are translators who creatively mediate the worlds around them through song; while they may not always be visible, they are audible, and this book amplifies their relational soundings.
Schultz explores sonic translation among the Bene Israel through the metaphor of the echo: a resonant, transformative, relational phenomenon. The voices of Bene Israel women today, like Ovid's Echo, resonate empathically with loved ones they have survived, and, faintly, with those they never knew. Singing this repertoire teaches singers and listeners not only how to be Jewish, but also how to be Bene Israel. It also fosters sociality, providing a medium through which women echo one another, sharing cultural expertise while securing affective ties. But women also echo with one another; that is, they collectively and audibly translate sacred texts as embodied experience in the here and now. Women's repertories and practices were shaped in a richly diverse context, colored by interlinguistic translation between Hebrew, Marathi, Hindi, and English, as well as by other forms of cultural translation: translations from Cochin and Baghdadi Jewish to Bene Israel practice, Christian and Hindu religious discourse to Jewish religious discourse, from one ritual context to another, from men to women, from the written page to embodied performance, and from the past to the present.
About the Speaker
Anna C. Schultz is Professor and Chair of Music at the University of Chicago. As an ethnomusicologist and cultural historian, the twin issues animating her research are music’s power to activate profound religious experience and suture communities, and music as power, that is, music’s role in structuring and dismantling caste, race, gender, nation, and class. Her first book is Singing a Hindu Nation: Marathi Devotional Performance and Nationalism(Oxford University Press, 2013), and her second book is Echoes of Translation: Audibility and Relationality in Indian Jewish Women’s Song (Oxford University Press, 2026). Schultz also writes on race, place, and gender in American country music. With Sumanth Gopinath, she was awarded the H. Colin Slim Award by the American Musicological Society, and she received Honorable Mention for the Society of Ethnomusicology’s Jaap Kunst Prize. Dr. Schultz’s research has been supported by Fulbright-Hays, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Association of University Women, the Franke Institute of the Humanities, and the Neubauer Collegium, among other organizations.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
Presented by:
book talk
concert
Musical Memoir - In-person Program
Join us for a special concert of the New York premiere of Muriel’s Songs (2023) by Eric Chasalow and a performance of Alex Weiser's Coney Island Days (2022), two song cycles that commemorate the composers’ grandmothers and detail how they navigated 20th century American Jewish life in New York City. The program will open with Joan Tower’s Petroushskates (1980).
Muriel’s Songs traverses the tumult of 20th century America from the very personal, intimate, and primarily domestic perspective of Chasalow’s grandmother, Muriel, with each song inhabiting its own musical world with stylistic points of departure from Baroque to Tin Pan Alley, The Beatles, Latin Jazz and Disco to Milton Babbitt. The songs describe Muriel’s experiences coming of age and through adulthood, including piano lessons, marriage, and family vacations.
Coney Island Days sets to music words from an oral history interview with Weiser’s grandmother, Irene, about childhood in the bilingual immigrant world of Coney Island in the 1930s and ‘40s. Irene would buy penny candies, spend days at the movies, explore Coney Island’s rides and beaches, eat at Nathan’s, and spend summers living behind her family’s knish store.
Both song cycles serve as love letters to the composers’ grandmothers and invoke the nostalgia of 20th century New York Jewish life.
This concert will be performed by the Talea Ensemble, followed by a discussion with Chasalow and Weiser.
About the Participants
Drawing from every corner of the soundworld, Eric Chasalow creates genre-defying music. As a mentor and long time arts advocate, he works tirelessly to nurture developing composers and encourage a community with the greatest respect for the arts and artists. Part of the last generation of composers to work at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, Eric has received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Koussevitzky Music Foundation, Fromm Foundation at Harvard, and the American Academy of Arts & Letters. Eric’s music has been commissioned and performed by numerous soloists and ensembles in the US and abroad including Talea Ensemble (New York), Ensemble Phoenix (Basel), and California EAR Unit (Los Angeles). Eric is the Irving Fine Professor of Music at Brandeis University where he directs the Brandeis Electro-Acoustic Music Studio (BEAMS). He is a proud alumnus of Bates College, studied at New England Conservatory of Music, and earned the DMA from Columbia University, studying primarily with Mario Davidovsky.
Alex Weiser is the Director of Public Programs at the YIVO Institute where he curates programs that explore history with an eye to contemporary Jewish culture. As a composer, Weiser’s debut album and all the days were purple, was named a 2020 Pulitzer Prize Finalist. The album features songs in Yiddish and English sung by Eliza Bagg. A second album, in a dark blue night, features two song cycles which explore Jewish New York history sung by Annie Rosen. Other projects include operas Tevye’s Daughters with librettist Stephanie Fleischmann (American Lyric Theater), andState of the Jews and The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language with librettist Ben Kaplan (American Opera Projects).
Recipient of the Chamber Music America/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming, the Talea Ensemble has brought to life at least 80 commissions of major new works since it was founded in 2008, including bold and inventive productions combining music and other genres. In addition to a robust NYC performance season, festival engagements have included the Lincoln Center Festival, Donaueschingen Musiktage, Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt, Warsaw Autumn, Wien Modern, Vancouver New Music, Time of Music Finland, TIME:SPANS, NY Philharmonic Artist Spotlight Series, and many more. Talea’s recordings have been distributed worldwide on the KAIROS, Wergo, Gravina Musica, Tzadik, Innova, and New World Records labels. Talea supports early-career composers through US school residencies, a commissioning program, and a composer recording workshop.
Ticket Info: $18; ASJM & YIVO members: $12; Seniors & students: $9
Presented by:
concert
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