conversation
At Lunch with Jacob Kornbluh – Live on Zoom
Julie Salamon, New York Times best-selling author sits down with the Forward’s Senior Political Reporter Jacob Kornbluh. Kornbluh is a British-American who covers events related to New York City and the Jewish Community. He received attention for his coverage of Jewish responses to COVID-19, notably in New York’s Orthodox population. Kornbluh was profiled in the New York Times for his coverage of recently inaugurated NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his administration.
Ticket Info: Free; register online for a Zoom link
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conversation
exhibit opening
Jews Are Magic: Occult Practices from Palmistry to Professional Psychic – In-person Program and Live on Zoom
From palm and face reading to phrenology; from reading tea leaves and coffee grounds to lead and wax pouring practices; through to mind-reading, hypnosis, and mentalism, the Jewish experience with the occult is a rich field for exploration that continues into the present.
The opening of YIVO’s latest exhibit, Jews Are Magic: Occult Practices from Palmistry to Professional Psychics, will include a panel discussion featuring specialists on the Jewish occult, Samuel Glauber and Rokhl Kafrissen, moderated by YIVO Senior Academic Advisor & Director of Exhibitions, Eddy Portnoy. The discussion will consider the history and nature of Jewish occult practices, as well as their modernization and professionalization.
About the Speakers
Samuel Glauber is the Miriam Barr Librarian for Jewish & Near Eastern Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. A scholar of modern Judaism specializing in East European Jewry and its diaspora communities, he is currently completing a PhD in the Department of Jewish Thought at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, where he is writing a dissertation exploring Jewish engagement with modern occult currents in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth century Eastern Europe. His work has appeared in, among other journals, Nashim, Jewish Historical Studies, In geveb, Polin, and East European Jewish Studies, and he is the co-editor of four collections of Hebrew essays published by Blima Books. In 2021–2022, he held the Fellowship in American Jewish Studies at YIVO, where he worked on the archive of Yiddish writer and occultist B. Rivkin, and in 2026–2027 he will be the inaugural recipient of the YIVO Ben-Gurion University Fellowship in Jewish Studies.
Rokhl Kafrissen is a journalist, teacher, and playwright and the winner of the prestigious 2022 Adrienne Cooper Dreaming in Yiddish prize. Between 2017 and the end of 2024, her “Rokhl’s Golden City” column appeared 150 times in Tablet magazine, covering the length and breadth of Yiddish culture. In the fall of 2023 and 2024, she designed and taught courses for the Yiddish Book Center focusing on Ashkenazi women's folk magic. Her ongoing series of “Everyday Ashkenazi Magic” classes have developed a cult following online, covering topics such as the evil eye, Yiddish incantations, spirit intercession work, and recovering embodied spiritual practices of the shtetl.
Eddy Portnoy is the Senior Academic Advisor and Director of Exhibitions at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. The exhibitions he has created for YIVO have won plaudits from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, VICE, The Forward, and others. He has written numerous articles on topics relating to Jewish popular culture and is also the author of Bad Rabbi and Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press (Stanford University Press, 2017).
Ticket Info: Free; register for an email reminder.
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exhibit opening
book talk
Malka Owsiany Recounts by Mark Turkow - Live on Zoom
First published in Yiddish in 1946 and translated into Spanish in 2001, Malka Owsiany Recounts...: A Chronicle of Our Time by Mark Turkow is now available for the first time in English. Malka Owsiany was only 20 years old when she described the horrors of the Holocaust to Yiddish writer and Jewish community leader Mark Turkow. Malka’s account was among the first Holocaust testimonies available in the immediate postwar years. She discusses rebuilding her life and marrying a fellow survivor, Meir, as well as her memories of the rich Polish Jewish communal life from her youth that was destroyed by the Nazis.
Join us for a talk with translator Sandra Chiritescu about this English translation, in a discussion led by Rachelle Grossman.
About the Speakers
Sandra Chiritescu is Clinical Assistant Professor of Yiddish at New York University. She has previously taught Yiddish at Columbia University and the Worker’s Circle. She holds a BA in German philology from the University of Zurich and a PhD in Yiddish Studies from Columbia University. Her dissertation “Bubbes, Mames and Daughters: Uncovering Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century American Jewish and American Yiddish Feminist Genealogies” brings together her research interests in Yiddish literature and culture, American Jewish literature, feminist and queer theory, and translation theory. Her translation of an early Holocaust survivor testimony from 1946 by a woman is available under the title Malka Owsiany Recounts (Cherry Orchard Press, 2025).
Rachelle Grossman is an assistant professor of comparative literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her work focuses on the intersection of Yiddish and its transnational connections with other literatures, languages, and cultures. In her research, she develops a geopolitical approach to literature, focusing especially on the transformation of literary centers and peripheries in the postwar period. She is also interested in technologies of print and how they impact literature as material culture.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
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book talk
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.
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concert
workshop
Community Read: The Yiddish Sherlock Holmes - Live on Zoom
Meet Max Spitzkopf: legendary private eye, undefeated foe of villains, and passionate defender of the Jewish people. No matter how hopeless or dangerous the case, when “the investigatory profession’s greatest artist” is summoned, justice is assured. Aided by his trusty assistant, Fuchs, super-sleuth Spitzkopf deploys equal parts physical bravery and intellectual ingenuity—not to mention a knack for stealthy disguise—to unpick evil conspiracies, outwit the canniest of criminals, and restore moral order to the world. Giving a unique twist to a beloved literary genre, Spitzkopf’s mysteries are a vibrant testament to Jewish life, in all its variety, during the last years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Join us for a beshutfesdike leyenung, or a “Community Read.” Led by translator Mikhl Yashinsky, attendees will read selections of the original Yiddish text from Adventures of Max Spitzkopf: The Yiddish Sherlock Holmes by Jonas Kreppel.
Read a selection of the text in Yiddish, transliteration, and English translation.
About the Speaker
Mikhl Yashinsky is a writer, singer-actor, and teacher in Manhattan. He was born in Detroit and graduated with a degree in modern European history and literature from Harvard. His “Di psure loyt khaim” (The Gospel According to Chaim), put on by New Yiddish Rep in 2024, was hailed as the first new full-length Yiddish-language drama produced professionally in the United States, outside of the Hasidic world, for many decades and “jolted the repertoire with a work that is both traditional and delightfully subversive” (Forward). His Yiddish-language erotic one-act “Vos flist durkhn oder” (Blessing of the New Moon) premiered at 2022’s Lower East Side Play Festival. With National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, he has performed in “Fidler afn dakh” (Fiddler on the Roof) directed by Joel Grey, “Tsvishn falndike vent” (Amid Falling Walls) and “Di kishef-makherin” (The Sorceress), in which Mikhl brought a “keen, if malevolent, psychology” to the title role (New York Times). In 2023, Yashinsky made his Carnegie Hall début, singing the anthem of the Vilna Partisans in the Holocaust memorial concert “We Are Here.” He has taught Yiddish at Columbia, University of Michigan, Tel Aviv University, UMass Amherst, the Yiddish Book Center, YIVO, and The Workers Circle, and co-authored the award-winning textbook In eynem. His translations of the memoirs of Ester-Rokhl Kaminska, the “Mama of Yiddish Theatre,” and the detective stories of Max Spitzkopf, the “Yiddish Sherlock Holmes,” were published in 2025 by Bloomsbury and the Yiddish Book Center, respectively. More information on his website: www.yashinsky.com
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
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workshop
lecture
Tradition in Installments: Rabbinic Periodicals and the Making of an Orthodox Public Sphere, 1850–1940 – Live on Zoom
Between 1850 and 1940, a remarkable transformation occurred in the world of traditional Jewish learning: the emergence of a vibrant "periodical culture." This period witnessed the publication of dozens of distinct titles of "professional" rabbinic journals that reshaped Orthodox intellectual circles. Neither newspapers nor popular magazines, these were specialized scholarly periodicals devoted to Talmudic debate and halakhic reasoning—published in installments and read by scholars from Odessa to Chicago. However, the significance of this medium extends far beyond narrow legal discussions; it both reflected and catalyzed profound shifts within the social and religious landscapes of Orthodox Judaism, playing a pivotal role in forging a cohesive identity within an increasingly interconnected world.
Despite its impact, this phenomenon has remained almost entirely unstudied, falling between the cracks of historians focused on popular press and traditional scholars focused on legal content rather than media form. This lecture introduces a major research project that draws on YIVO’s unparalleled holdings to recover these journals as a historical phenomenon – one that transformed how rabbinic scholars argued, published, and understood themselves as a community. By adopting modern attributes and serial formats, these publications transformed private correspondence into a public, interactive, and transnational rabbinic public sphere, generating a new type of intellectual "buzz."
In this lecture, Elad Schlesinger will discuss how these journals served as a stage for intense halakhic and ideological polemics, simultaneously challenging and reinforcing traditional structures of authority; examine how they provided a unique hybrid space where tradition and innovation coexisted without rigid boundaries; and show how they fostered global connectivity and a sense of scholarly universality. Ultimately, these modern journals did not merely document Orthodox life; they actively shaped it.
About the Speaker
Elad Schlesinger studies Jewish and European history, rabbinic culture, and Jewish law. His work examines the sociology of knowledge production, the evolution of scholarly practices, and the intersection of law and print culture from the late Middle Ages to the modern era. His current research focuses on rabbinic periodicals as a phenomenon of media and intellectual history. He received his PhD from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and is currently a postdoctoral visiting scholar at the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. Prior to that, he was the Gruss Scholar-in-Residence at NYU Law School. He is the 2025-2026 recipient of the The Professor Bernard Choseed Memorial Fellowship and the Natalie and Mendel Racolin Memorial Fellowship in East European Jewish Studies.
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lecture
book talk
The Interracial Left and the International Workers Order, 1930–1954 - Live on Zoom
From Popular Front to Cold War tells the story of the International Workers Order (IWO), an organization founded in 1930 to provide life, burial, and health insurance to its members. The IWO broadened its mission to promote interracial solidarity, support labor unions, combat racism and antisemitism, and champion progressive social programs from the Great Depression into the postwar era.
At its height, the IWO had almost two hundred thousand members drawn from a broad ethnic and racial spectrum of the working class. It operated summer camps, published foreign-language newspapers, and supported a wide range of cultural activities. An early advocate for the United States' entry into World War II, the IWO was also ahead of its time in championing the nascent civil rights movement. After the war, it was declared a subversive organization due to its ties to the Communist Party and disbanded in 1954, though its legacy as a model for working-class cooperation across racial and ethnic differences endures to this day.
Join editor Elissa Sampson and contributors Jennifer Young and Felicia Bevel about this book, in a discussion led by Kate Rosenblatt.
About the Speakers
Elissa Sampson is a Research Associate in Cornell University's Jewish Studies Program. She is an urban geographer who studies how the past is actively used to create new spaces of migration, memory, heritage, and activism. Her life-long interest in migration, diaspora, re-diasporization, and culture has been pursued in the Lower East Side, Brooklyn, Jerusalem, Paris, and elsewhere and points to the dynamic interactions among diasporas in shared spaces/places.
Jennifer Young is the Education Program Manager at the Yiddish Book Center. Jennifer served as the Director of Education at the YIVO Institute, where she also worked as Digital Learning Curator to produce YIVO's first online class, Discovering Ashkenaz. She has also worked at the Tenement Museum, the Lower East Side Jewish Conservancy, and the New York Historical Society. Jennifer received a B.A. in Anthropology and Jewish Studies from McGill University and an M.A. in Anthropology from the University of Illinois. After completing doctoral studies in Jewish history at NYU, she received an M.Ed in Museum Curriculum and Pedagogy from the University of British Columbia. She also serves as part of a scholars' working group dedicated to research and scholarship of the Yiddish Left, sponsored by Cornell University.
Felicia Bevel is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Florida. Her research and teaching interests include African American history, twentieth century U.S. history, cultural history, and childhood studies. Her current research examines early twentieth century American cultural productions that romanticized the Old South and circulated outside the U.S. within the larger Pacific world, specifically in Canada and Australia. Her work has been supported over the years by the Ford Foundation, ACLS, and Florida Education fund. At UNF, she teaches courses such as the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Pacific, and Blackness in Archives and has served on the advisory boards of the Digital Humanities Institute and Africana Studies. She is also a faculty member on the Red Hill Cemetery Project, a collaboration between UNF and the Okefenokee Heritage Center and Black Hertiage Committtee to document the history of an African American cemetery in Waycross, GA.
Kate Rosenblatt is the Jay and Leslie Cohen Assistant Professor of Religion and Jewish Studies at Emory University. She is a historian of American religion with a focus on the history and experience of American Jews. She earned a BA in American history from Columbia University (2006), a BA in Bible and Ancient Semitic Languages from the Jewish Theological Seminary (2006), and both an MA in Jewish Studies (2009) and a PhD in American history (2016) from the University of Michigan. Her first book, Cooperative Battlegrounds: Farmers, Workers, and the Search for Economic Alternatives (under contract, History of American Capitalism series, Columbia University) details the efforts of a coalition of Americans – workers, farmers, religious clergy and their laities, labor activists, reforms, state and federal bureaucrats, and others – to put forward an alternative expression of American capitalism by way of producer and consumer cooperatives across the twentieth century. She is also at work on a second book project, a reappraisal of the post-World War II American Jewish left.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
Presented by:
book talk
book talk
Eastern European Jewish Immigrant Bankers and the Shaping of American Finance, 1873–1930 - Live on Zoom
What are immigrants to do when business opportunities abound in their new home, but banks refuse essential financial support? How could they make the journey in the first place without helping hands? In this lively history, Rebecca Kobrin chronicles the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Jewish immigrants who stepped up by doing the lending themselves. Arriving from the Russian Empire and settling primarily in New York, they made livelihoods by assisting fellow Jews, so they could purchase passage to the United States and, after arriving, obtain credit that other lenders would not dare provide. Drawing on previously unexamined archival materials in Russian, Yiddish, German, and English, Credit to the Nation traces the novel practices of bankers who not only enabled the flourishing of American Jewry, but also revolutionized the US financial industry.
Join us for a discussion with Kobrin about this book, led by Annie Polland.
About the Speakers
Rebecca Kobrin is the Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History at Columbia University. She works in the fields of immigration history, urban studies, business history, Eastern European history and American Jewish History, specializing in modern Jewish migration. She received her B.A. (1994) from Yale University and her Ph.D. (2002) from the University of Pennsylvania. She served as the Blaustein Post-Doctoral Fellow at Yale University (2002-2004) and the American Academy of Jewish Research Post-Doctoral Fellow at New York University (2004-6). Her book Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora (Indiana University Press, 2010) was awarded the Jordan Schnitzer prize (2012). She is the editor of Chosen Capital: The Jewish Encounter with American Capitalism (Rutgers University Press, 2012), Salo Baron: Using the Past to Shape the Future of Jewish Studies in America (Columbia University Press, 2022), and is co-editor with Adam Teller of Purchasing Power: The Economics of Jewish History (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).
Annie Polland is a public historian, author, and President of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, where she served as Vice President for Programs and Education from 2009 to 2017. Prior to her return to the Tenement Museum, she served as Executive Director of the American Jewish Historical Society. She is the co-author, with Daniel Soyer, of Emerging Metropolis: New York Jews in the Age of Immigration (New York University Press, 2013). She served as Vice President of Education at the Museum at Eldridge Street, where she wrote Landmark of the Spirit: The Eldridge Street Synagogue (Yale University Press, 2008).
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
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book talk
book talk
Polish-Jewish Masculinities and the Challenge of Modernity - Live on Zoom
At the turn of the twentieth century, Jewish men in Eastern Europe lived in a social reality in which both Jewish and non-Jewish men and women tested, debated, and redesigned masculinities. Men of Valor and Anxiety by Mariusz Kalczewiak explores how religion, class divisions, antisemitism, new domesticity, and militarization changed masculine ideas and practices in Eastern Europe between the 1890s and 1930s. Kalczewiak’s study ventures into the military barracks, yeshivot study halls, fraternity parties, and Jewish homes to demonstrate how complex Jewish masculinities were between orthodoxy, acculturation, Polish and Jewish nationalisms, and changing notions of domesticity and profession. Men of Valor and Anxiety is the first book to demonstrate how the links between ethnicity and gender were constructed within both global and local contexts.
Join YIVO for a discussion with Kalczewiak about this book, led by Miriam Mora.
About the Speakers
Mariusz Kalczewiak is a Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland. He is a social and cultural historian of modern Jewish history, with a focus on Latin America and Eastern Europe. His award-winning book Polacos in Argentina: Polish Jews, Interwar Migration, and the Emergence of Transatlantic Jewish Culture was published in 2020 with the University of Alabama Press. His second book Men of Valor and Anxiety: Polish-Jewish Masculinities and the Challenge of Modernity came out in 2025 with Indiana University Press.
Miriam Mora is a historian of American immigration and ethnic history, with a focus on Jewish American gender identity. Her areas of research interest and specialization include modern Jewish history, gender and antisemitism, genocide studies, Holocaust memory and representation in pop culture, masculinity, history of Irish conflict, and American Jewish acculturation. Her first book, Carrying a Big Schtick: Jewish Acculturation and Masculinity in the Twentieth Century was released from Wayne State University Press in 2024. She previously served as Academic Director at the Center for Jewish History in New York City.
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book talk
celebration
Shmooze & Booze
Celebrate the start of summer at Shmooze & Booze Shabbat, an elevated Shabbat dinner experience for young Jewish adults at the Center for Jewish History. Join NYC’s vibrant Jewish community for a stylish evening of connection and culture featuring curated cocktails, a buffet dinner, and exclusive after-hours access to CJH’s galleries.
As the foremost repository of Jewish history in the United States, the Center for Jewish History offers a truly distinctive setting to celebrate Jewish heritage while forging new connections with fellow young Jewish New Yorkers.
Blending the warmth of Shabbat with the energy of summer in the city, this special evening is the perfect opportunity to raise a glass and enjoy community connection in one of New York’s most extraordinary cultural spaces.
Optional Shabbat service at 6:30 pm.
Ticket Info:
In celebration of CJH’s 25th anniversary, we are offering $25 early bird tickets through May 25th.
Standard: $36
By registering, you may be contacted by the event sponsors.
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celebration
lecture
The Drama of Russian Jewry in the Long Twentieth Century – Live on Zoom
Zvi Gitelman | Delivered in English.
In 1900, there were five million Jews in the Russian Empire, more than in any other country in the world. Today, there are only about 300,000 Jews in the Former Soviet Union. For hundreds of years, Yiddish was the dominant language among the Ashkenazi Jews of Russia, but in 1989, only 11 percent claimed Yiddish was their “mother tongue.” The past 150 years have seen turbulent, sometimes tragic, changes among “Russian Jews.” At one time, they enjoyed dramatic educational, professional, and social upward mobility. But they also experienced two revolutions, two world wars, a civil war, drastic changes in their culture, including Yiddish, and the near-disappearance of Judaism. Their massive emigration, mostly to Israel, North America, and Western Europe, had a profound influence on the countries and cultures of their new homes. This lecture by Zvi Gitelman will explore the transformation of Russian Jewry during the twentieth century.
About the Speaker
Zvi Gitelman is the Preston R. Tisch Professor Emeritus of Judaic Studies and Professor Emeritus of Political Science at University of Michigan. He studies ethnicity and politics, especially in former Communist countries, as well as Israeli politics, East European politics, and Jewish political thought and behavior. His most recent edited book is The New Jewish Diaspora: Russian-speaking Immigrants in the United States, Israel and Germany (Rutgers University Press, 2016). In 2012, Cambridge University Press published his Jewish Identities in Postcommunist Russia and Ukraine: An Uncertain Ethnicity which drew on two large surveys that he conducted with two colleagues in Russia. Gitelman is co-editor of a forthcoming volume on Jewish thought, politics and literatures in the interwar (1918-1939) period (Yale University Press). He is writing a book on ethnic relations in the Soviet armed forces and the partisans during the war, and Soviet policy regarding the Holocaust.
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lecture
lecture
The Red Jews: Intertextuality in a Yiddish Myth – Live on Zoom
Rebekka Voß | Delivered in English.
Envisioned as a tribe of ruddy-faced, redheaded, and red-bearded Jewish warriors clad in red attire, the legendary Ten Lost Tribes of Israel are referred to as “Red Jews” (royte yidlekh) in Yiddish. This unique figure is a creation of late medieval vernacular culture in Germany and became a shared motif among both Jews and Christians, circulating in both Yiddish and German. These two linguistic communities interpreted the Red Jews in different ways, each contesting their significance and viewing them through varying shades of red.
This lecture by Rebekka Voß will trace the journey of the Red Jews through both Jewish and Christian imaginations, from their medieval origins to their presence in Old Yiddish and modern Yiddish literature. Focusing on select stories of the Red Jews, the lecture will explore their intertextuality, illustrating how this popular literary motif engaged with canonical texts, including the Bible, works of Hebrew and Yiddish literature (such as Toledot Yeshu, the polemical counter-story of the life of Jesus, and the romance Viduvilt), as well as medieval German literature.
About the Speaker
Rebekka Voß is an associate professor at Goethe University in Frankfurt. Her research focuses on Jewish cultural history in early modern Europe, with special attention to cultural transfer between Jews and Christians.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required.
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lecture
lecture
Welcome to Otwock: A Virtual Visit to the Warsaw Suburb Before the War – Live on Zoom
Benny Mer (Majersdorf) | Delivered in Yiddish.
“Every Jewish street in Warsaw was a city unto itself,” wrote Isaac Bashevis Singer, and all the more so each suburb of Warsaw. Otwock was quite different from its neighbors. The crown suburb of the “Otwock Line” was, on its western side, a typical Polish-Jewish shtetl, with synagogues, craftsmen, charitable women, and Hasidim – the latter including the Lubavitcher Rebbe and the musical Modzhitser Rebbe whose homes were there. On its eastern side, Otwock was a Warsaw resort town, with refined villas, gardens, forests, and boarding houses. All that attracted distinguished guests, painters, and writers such as Alter Kacyzne, Kadya Molodowsky, Zusman Segalovitsh, Julian Tuwim, Janusz Korczak, and many others. This virtual visit will acquaint the public with the various facets of old Otwock through poems, short stories, and images. This lecture tour by Benny Mer (Majersdorf) is based on the speaker’s newly published Guide to Yiddish Warsaw, 1938.
About the Speaker
Benny Mer (Majersdorf) was born in Tel Aviv in 1971. He is the author of Smocza: A Biography of a Jewish Street in Warsaw (2018), as well as A Guide to Jewish Warsaw, 1938 (2025), and several other works. He has translated into Hebrew from Yiddish the works of Sholem Aleichem, Avrom Sutzkever, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Alexander Spiegelblat, Rivke Basman Ben-Hayim, among others, and has published an anthology of Yiddish poetry in Hebrew translation. Mer served as editor of the literary supplement of Haaretz and of the journal Dafke: Yiddishland and Its Culture. In 2015 he was awarded the Mendele Prize.
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lecture
lecture
On Early Yiddish Literature in Italy – Live on Zoom
Claudia Rosenzweig | Delivered in Yiddish.
In 1982 the celebrated Yiddish scholar Khone Shmeruk published a descriptive catalogue of Yiddish prints from Italy (from 1545 to 1663), listing thirty-five books (including desiderata). Two decades later, in 2003, Chava Turniansky and Erika Timm published a catalogue of old Yiddish manuscripts and printed books that numbered ninety-nine items. Since then, additional manuscripts and printed books have come to light. Claudia Rosenzweig will present some of these newly discovered items, along with the suggestion that, given evidence from written sources, the history of Yiddish in Italy is far more extensive than previously thought and has yet to be evaluated in terms of its richness and variety, as well as its connections with both Hebrew and non-Jewish prints of the time. Most of the works composed, copied, and printed in Italy during this period had a wide reception throughout “Yiddishland.” This suggests that, although the flourishing of Yiddish literature in 16th century Italy isn’t detachable from its local cultural context, the works that were created there became an intrinsic part of general Yiddish culture tout court.
About the Speaker
Claudia Rosenzweig graduated in Classical Studies from the University of Milan and later specialized in Old Yiddish Literature, with an emphasis on Yiddish Literature in Italy. Her PhD thesis, supervised by Prof. Chava Turniansky (Hebrew University, Jerusalem) and Prof. Erika Timm (University of Trier, Germany), focused on the chivalric poem Bovo d’Antona, a Yiddish rewriting of an Italian work composed in ottava rima. Rosenzweig worked with Prof. Erika Timm and Prof. Chava Turniansky on the volume Yiddish in Italia (Milan 2003), a broadly comprehensive presentation of Yiddish Literature in Italy covering more than one hundred texts. In October-November 2011 and February-March 2012 she took part in the European Seminar on Advanced Jewish Studies titled Old Yiddish: Old Texts, New Contexts at the Oxford Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies.
Rosenzweig is the author of a critical edition of the Yiddish work Bovo d’Antona (Leiden – Boston 2015) and she is preparing a critical edition of the Mayse-bukh (Basel 1602) together with prof. Avidov Lipsker. She has taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Università degli Studi di Milano, the Università degli Studi di Venezia, the Università degli Studi di Verona, the Charles University in Prague and Tel Aviv University. Rosenzweig is Associate Professor in the Department of Literature of the Jewish People at Bar-Ilan University (Ramat-Gan).
Ticket Info: Free; registration required.
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lecture
lecture
On the Threshold of a New Yiddish Language – Live on Zoom
Daria Vakhrushova | Delivered in Yiddish.
“We may be standing at the threshold of a new Yiddish language – Yiddish-Russian,” proclaimed Ayzik Zaretski in 1930. This claim sparked heated debates among Soviet Yiddish linguists. Indeed, Soviet Yiddish is still best known today for its major influence from Russian, but was Russification the only driving force behind the linguistic developments in the Soviet Union? In that country, Yiddish received state support for the first time in its history and officially became a “national language,” even though the term carried rather different implications than it did at the Czernowitz language conference (1908). How does a former zhargon, as it was widely and derisively referred to, become a national language? How does one develop a kulturshprakh (‘language of culture’, i.e., one with widely recognized standards that is accepted as an adequate medium for all levels of communication – from “high culture” downward)? What is to be retained? What should be changed? What should be borrowed from neighbors? Apart from addressing concepts such as folkshprakh, kulturshprakh, and literarishe shprakh, Daria Vakhrushova will also examine the practical means in the Soviet setting to employ language policy (via language learning, linguistic conferences, research projects); in so doing, several samples of characteristic features of Soviet Yiddish will be presented.
About the Speaker
Daria Vakhrushova is a Yiddish lecturer at Ludwig Maximilian University Munich. She studied Translation and Translation Theory at Nizhny Novgorod State Linguistics University and received her PhD in Yiddish Culture, Language, and Literature in Düsseldorf in 2022. Her research focuses on Soviet Yiddish culture, literature, and translation. One of her particular interests is Yiddish grammar, in both its practical and theoretical dimensions. Her recently published book, Red Jews: Soviet Yiddish Culture, 1917–1934, examines Yiddish literary manifestos, literature, and translation projects in the Soviet Union.
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lecture
lecture
More than Dates: Yiddish Calendars as Cultural Agents, 1870-1914 – Live on Zoom
Nathan Cohen | Delivered in Yiddish.
Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and until the outbreak of WWI, some Yiddish calendars / almanacs began to change their traditional character and broaden their scope. Political, social, economic, and cultural changes in both non-Jewish and Jewish societies, motivated publishers, editors, and writers to make use of the familiar and accessible format of the calendar in order to disseminate Maskilic and utilitarian ideas, as well as to bring Yiddish readers new literary works, both original and translated (at a higher or more popular level), alongside instructive insights in various fields of knowledge. All of this transformed the almanac into a kind of condensed encyclopedia and presented Yiddish as a “normal” language of culture rather than a "mere jargon.” In this presentation Nathan Cohen will provide an overview of several aspects of this highly interesting phenomenon.
About the Speaker
Nathan Cohen is a full Professor at the Rena Costa Center for Yiddish Studies at the Department of Literature of the Jewish People at Bar-Ilan University. Since 1998, he has been Associate Editor of the bi-annual journal Yad Vashem Studies. His main fields of research and teaching include the cultural history of the Jews of Eastern Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the history of the book and reading in Yiddish, modern Yiddish literature, the Jews of Poland between the two world wars, and Yiddish literature and culture during the Holocaust period. He is the author of Books, Writers and Newspapers: The Jewish Cultural Center in Warsaw, 1918-1942 (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2003, Hebrew; translated into Polish and published by the Jewish Historical Institute in 2021) and Yiddish – The Linguistic Leap from a Common Dialect to a Cultural and Literary Language (Jerusalem: The Zalman Shazar Center, 2020, Hebrew; translated into English under the title Yiddish Transformed: Reading Habits in the Russian Empire, 1860-1914, New York and Oxford: Berhahn, 2023), as well as tens of articles in peer-reviewed periodicals.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required.
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lecture