lecture
Germany 1946: Safe Haven or Forbidden Land for Jews? - In-person Program
Shortly after the Holocaust a quarter million Jews lived in the four occupation zones of what was once Germany. Most of them were East European Holocaust survivors who found a temporary refuge on what many considered a cursed soil. Next to them was a much smaller group of German Jews who survived the Nazi terror or returned from exile to rebuild a “better Germany.” How did they relate to postwar Germany and what was the relationship between these two Jewish communities?
This event is part of Many Promised Lands, LBI's 2026 lecture series covering migration of German-Jewish refugees after 1946.
This programming is made possible through the generous support of the Levi-Thalheimer Fund for Research and Public History.
About the Speaker
Michael Brenner is Distinguished Professor of History and Seymour and Lillian Abensohn Chair in Israel Studies at American University in Washington DC, where he serves as director of the Center for Israel Studies. He also holds the chair of Jewish History and Culture at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. He is the International President of the Leo Baeck Institute for the Study of German-Jewish History and Culture and an elected member of the Bavarian Academy of Science, the Accademia Nazionale Virgiliana in Italy and the American Academy for Jewish Research. In 2014 he was awarded the order of merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. In 2020 he was the first recipient of the first Salo W. and Jeannette M. Baron Award for Scholarly Excellence in Research of the Jewish Experience. In 2023 he was awarded the Cultural Prize of Honor of the City of Munich.
He published 9 books, which have been translated in 12 languages, and edited 19 volumes. His latest publications are In Hitler’s Munich: Jews, the Revolution, and the Rise of Nazism (Princeton University Press 2022), In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea (Princeton University Press, 2018), and A Short History of the Jews (Princeton University Press 2010).
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
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lecture
book talk
I, Wandering Jew - In-person Program
Join the Leo Baeck Institute for an evening with National Jewish Book Award–winning historian Yair Mintzker as he discusses his latest book, I, Wandering Jew.
Originating from a mysterious 1602 pamphlet, the legend of the "Wandering Jew" has fascinated and fraught European history for over four centuries. Part historical detective story and part deeply personal memoir, Mintzker’s work traces the metamorphoses of this infamous antisemitic trope across five centuries. Moving backward in time from 1950s Israel to the myth's 17th-century origins, the author uncovers surprising affinities between his own life and this legendary figure.
About the Speaker
Yair Mintzker is a specialist in the history of early modern and modern Germany, and the author or editor of five books and many articles in the field. His latest monograph, I, Wandering Jew (Princeton University Press, 2026), combines history, detective story, and memoir to create a surprising and revealing account of the antisemitic myth of “the Wandering Jew.” His previous book, The Many Deaths of Jew Süss (Princeton University Press, 2017), is a retelling of the trial and execution of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, the notorious “Jew Süss.” The book won the National Jewish Book Award in History and was chosen by the Financial Times as one of the best books of 2017. Born and raised in Jerusalem, Mintzker received his M.A. in history from Tel-Aviv University (2003) and his Ph.D. from Stanford (2009). He is the recipient of many prizes, including the Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize (2010) and the Urban History Association best book prize (2014), as well as fellowships from the DAAD, the Whiting Foundation, the Stanford Humanities Center, the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He welcomes applications from prospective graduate students interested in working on topics related to central European history from 1648 to the mid-twentieth century.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
Presented by:
book talk
discussion
Ruth Rubin and the Study of Yiddish Folksong Today – Live on Zoom
Ruth Rubin was a renowned folklorist and singer, who spent decades preserving the rich musical tradition of Ashkenazi Jews. Gathering over 2,000 folksongs between 1946 and 1970, she captured the voice and memory of generations who had grown up in a flourishing Yiddish-speaking environment that they had seen annihilated by Nazi destruction and Stalinist repression. Her archive lives on through YIVO's digitized Ruth Rubin Legacy project and remains an invaluable resource for scholars and musicians.
Join us for a discussion featuring new scholarship drawing on Rubin's work by Isabel Frey and Miriam Borden, moderated by Mark Slobin, in honor of what would have been Rubin's 120th birthday.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
discussion
family history today
Family History Today: When a Goodman is Hard to Find, Let the GPS be Your Guide - Live on Zoom
When answers to our genealogical research questions do not come easily, the elements of Genealogical Proof Standard (GPS) can provide guidelines for evaluating the strength of our research and its conclusions. The GPS requires rigor in our research methodology.
In this case study, the parents of peddler Alexander Goodman, who first appeared in Lancaster (in the 1850s) and later in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, were unknown. No direct evidence of his origins was found in any USA records. No one record provided the answer. Efforts to solve this case involved utilizing many types of records for numerous people and several families in two countries over four generations. The solution lay in correlating evidence from many records and making the connections that the GPS requires. Now we have a family for Alexander Goodman!
About the Speaker
An archaeologist by training (B.A., and M.A.), Emily Garber is a Jewish family history researcher, writer and speaker. She holds a certificate from Boston University's Genealogical Research program and owns Extra Yad Genealogical Services.
Emily blogs at https://extrayad.blogspot.com/, has written two books and several articles that have appeared in Avotaynu and NGS Magazine. She has spoken at National Genealogical Society and IAJGS conferences and coordinated week-long Jewish genealogy seminars for the Genealogical Research Institute of Pittsburgh and the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy.
She is chair of the Phoenix Jewish Genealogy Group, Vice President of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies, and a director on the board of the Arizona Jewish Historical Society.
Ticket Info: Pay what you wish
Presented by:
family history today
book talk
Ausländer: an Evening with Michael Moritz – In-person Event
Join the Center for Jewish History for a special conversation with Michael Moritz, celebrated investor, philanthropist, and author of the newly released memoir Ausländer: One Family’s Story of Escape and Exile.
When sorting through family papers after his mother's death, Moritz uncovered the stories of relatives murdered during the Holocaust and embarked on a journey to understand the legacy of displacement that shaped his family for generations. In Ausländer, he traces his parents' escape from Nazi Germany, their lives as refugees in Britain, and his own enduring sense of being an outsider, even after achieving extraordinary success in Silicon Valley.
Moritz will be in conversation with Meredith Kopit Levien, President and Chief Executive Officer of The New York Times Company, for a discussion about family, memory, identity, and the lessons history continues to hold for our present moment.
At once a poignant family history and a powerful reflection on identity, belonging, and the fragility of democracy, Ausländerspeaks to some of the most pressing questions of our time. Praised by critics as "brilliant" (The Economist) and "a triumph" (Jewish Chronicle), the book offers a deeply moving exploration of memory, exile, and resilience.
Don't miss this opportunity to hear Michael Moritz discuss his family's remarkable story, the process of uncovering the past, and why the lessons of history remain so relevant today.
About Michael Moritz
Michael Moritz was born in Cardiff, Wales, in 1954. A formerTIME journalist and regular contributor to the FT, he is the author of several books, including The Little Kingdom, the story of Apple's years as a private business. He was a partner in Sequoia Capital for thirty-five years and led the business between 1995 and 2012, becoming one of the most successful investors of his generation. Together with his wife, the author Harriet Heyman, he formed Crankstart in 2001—a San Francisco-based foundation devoted to helping those who might otherwise be left behind.
About Meredith Kopit Levien
Meredith Kopit Levien is President and CEO of The New York Times Company. A driving force behind the company’s essential subscription strategy, she has steered The Timesinto a thriving digital business that fuels the curiosity and passions of a global audience.
A reception and book sales will follow the program. The book can be preordered at a discount; information will be sent to all registrants when the book is available.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required. Donations are welcome.
Presented by:
book talk
conversation
At Lunch with Daniel Okrent – Live on Zoom
Julie Salamon, New York Times best-selling author, sits down with author and editor Daniel Okrent to discuss his latest book Stephen Sondheim: Art Isn’t East. Daniel had careers as a book and magazine editor and was the first public editor of the New York Times. He is the prize-winning author of six books, including The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America, and Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. He lives in New York City and on Cape Cod.
Ticket Info: Free; register online for a Zoom link
Presented by:
conversation
book talk
Yiddish Scholarship Comes to America: The YIVO Institute at 100 – Live on Zoom
The book Yiddish Scholarship Comes to America: The YIVO Institute at 100 provides a comprehensive history of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, detailing its longstanding efforts to preserve Eastern European Jewish culture during a century of genocide and mass emigration. Founded in 1925, YIVO was a global organization with headquarters in Vilna until World War II. It represented the symbolic pinnacle of building a modern, secular Yiddish culture.
Yet post-war, YIVO struggled to establish itself on a new continent, to reclaim what had survived of its Vilna collections, to document a lost world, and to impart the value of Eastern European Jewish history and culture to new generations. Through the Institute's steady commitment to establishing itself in New York and beyond, Yiddish language learning and scholarship became a crucial part of post-Holocaust Jewish life in a time when Hebrew was increasingly promoted in Jewish communities. Drawing on extensive archival research and oral histories, Kalman Weiser focuses on the transitional period of the YIVO Institute from 1940 to 1970 and showcases how the Institute carved its own path toward scholarship and public engagement that remained true to its founding ethos—"from the folk, for the folk, and with the folk"—while acclimating to American society and mainstream Jewish culture.
Join YIVO for a discussion with Weiser about this new book, moderated by Andrew Silow-Carroll.
About the Speakers
Kalman Weiser is the Silber Family Professor of Modern Jewish Studies and the Director of the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York University. A native of NYC (BA, Yale; MA and PhD, Columbia), he is the author of several studies about Jewish nationalism and Jews’ relationship to language, especially in Eastern Europe. His study Jewish People, Yiddish Nation: Noah Prylucki and the Folkists in Poland won the 2012 Canadian Jewish Book Award for scholarship. He is also a contributor to and co-editor of Czernowitz at 100: the First Yiddish Language Conference in Historical Perspective (2010); a revised and expanded edition of Solomon Birnbaum's seminal work Yiddish: a Survey and a Grammar (2016); and Key Concepts in the Study of Antisemitism (2021). In 2018, he was the co-organizer of Teaching about Antisemitism in the 21st Century, an intensive summer institute for advanced graduate students and junior faculty that is scheduled to be renewed in 2023. He has recently completed the manuscript for a book about Nazi scholars of Yiddish and their relationships with Jewish colleagues before, during, and after World War II. Weiser regularly teaches courses about modern Jewish and general Eastern European history, antisemitism, Yiddish, and Jewish languages. He has lectured widely in the US, Europe, Japan, and Israel.
Andrew Silow-Carroll is New York Jewish Week's Editor at Large and Managing Editor for Ideas of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Previously he served as editor in chief of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, editor-in-chief and CEO of the New Jersey Jewish News and wrote an award-winning weekly column in the Times of Israel. He was also the managing editor of the Forward newspaper, editor of the Washington Jewish Week, senior editor of Moment magazine, and a reporter for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
book talk
book club
LBI Book Club: Place Envy - Live on Zoom
Michael Lowenthal will join the LBI Book Club to discuss his book Place Envy: Essays in Search of Orientation.
Growing up in places where his family had no past, and met mostly by silence from his Holocaust-refugee grandparents, Michael Lowenthal longed to be from somewhere. Then he realized he was gay and felt displaced from his own displaced family.
Place Envy—his first book of essays after five acclaimed books of fiction—chronicles his quest for orientation in the world: as an agnostic Jew, as a queer traveler and lover, and as a writer who can tell or twist the truth.
Yearning for a queer lineage, he obsesses about an uncle who perished at Bergen-Belsen but then finds, in his grandmother’s German hometown, a more surprising legacy. He lives with a Pennsylvania Amish family; accompanies blind gay men on a Mexican cruise; plays jazz with Sun Ra, the Afrofuturist who claimed to hail from Saturn; and pursues a clarifying love affair in Brazil. Collectively, these essays recount Lowenthal’s many journeys of dislocation and relocation: to foreign countries and subcultures and to the riskiest shores of family and self.
(Description from www.michaellowenthal.com)
About the Author
Michael Lowenthal is the author of a story collection, Sex With Strangers, and four novels: The Same Embrace; Avoidance; Charity Girl, which was a New York Times Book Review “Editors’ Choice” and a Washington Post "Top Fiction of 2007" pick; and The Paternity Test, an Indie Next selection and a Lambda Literary Award finalist. His short stories and essays have appeared in Tin House, Ploughshares, the Southern Review, Guernica, True Story, and the Kenyon Review, and have been widely anthologized, in such volumes as Lost Tribe: Jewish Fiction from the Edge, Bestial Noise: The Tin House Fiction Reader, and Best New American Voices 2005. He has also written for the New York Times Magazine, Boston Magazine, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, Out, and many other publications. His memoir-in-essays, Place Envy, was published in 2026.
The recipient of fellowships from the Bread Loaf and Wesleyan writers’ conferences, the MacDowell Colony, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, and the Instituto Sacatar, Lowenthal has also been awarded Lynchburg College's Thornton Residency and the James Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelists' Prize. He has taught creative writing at Boston College and Hampshire College, and as the Picador Guest Professor for Literature at Leipzig University in Germany. For more than twenty years he was a faculty member in the low-residency MFA program at Lesley University.
Before publishing his own work, Lowenthal was an editor at University Press of New England, where he founded the Hardscrabble Books imprint, publishing such authors as Chris Bohjalian, W.D. Wetherell, and Ernest Hebert. He graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in English and comparative religion.
A former board member of the literary human rights organization PEN New England, Lowenthal lives in Boston and Pittsburgh.
Where to Get the Book
The book can be found or ordered at many bookstores and at libraries. Here are some links:
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
Presented by:
book club
lecture
From Weimar to New York: Alfred Kerr’s Passion for America - In-person Program
Alfred Kerr was an influential writer and journalist before the Nazis seized power and subsequently declared him a target for his criticism against the party. In celebration of the publication of New York and London: A Journey After the Great War by Alfred Kerr, Ralph Blumenthal will join the Leo Baeck Institute and Berlinica Press to discuss Kerr's work as a Weimar author in exile.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
Presented by:
lecture
concert
Jewish Songs and Dances for Piano: Joseph Achron’s ‘Children’s Suite’ – Live on YouTube
Join YIVO for a YouTube premiere performance by Ryan MacEvoy McCullough of Joseph Achron’s Children's Suite (1923): a collection of 20 character pieces for piano depicting the world of children. Achron was a composer and virtuoso violinist as well as one of the founding members of the Society for Jewish Folk Music in St. Petersburg. Born in the Russian Empire in 1886, he ultimately settled in Los Angeles. Upon Achron's death in 1943, Arnold Schoenberg called him "one of the most underestimated of modern composers." The music of this Children's Suite provides an example of a style Achron pioneered, which incorporates motifs from biblical cantillation.
The Sidney Krum Young Artists Concert Series is made possible by a generous gift from the Estate of Sidney Krum.
About the Performer
Pianist Ryan MacEvoy McCullough has developed a rich musical life as soloist, vocal and instrumental collaborator, composer, recording artist, and pedagogue. His growing discography features many world premiere recordings, including solo piano works of Milosz Magin (Acte Prealable), Andrew McPherson (Secrets of Antikythera, Innova), John Liberatore (Line Drawings, Albany), Nicholas Vines (Hipster Zombies from Mars, Navona), art song and solo piano music of John Harbison and James Primosch (Descent/Return, Albany), and art song by Sheila Silver (Beauty Intolerable, Albany). He has also appeared on PBS’s Great Performances (Now Hear This, “The Schubert Generation”) and NPR’s From the Top. He has appeared as a concerto soloist with major orchestras including with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Toronto Symphony Orchestra and has collaborated with such conductors as Gisele Ben-Dur, George Benjamin, Fabien Gabel, Leonid Grin, Anthony Parnther, Larry Rachleff, Mischa Santora, and Joshua Weilerstein. He lives in Kingston, NY, with his wife, soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon.
Ticket Info: Free; register for an email reminder
Presented by:
concert
members only event
Keyboard Kaleidoscope Pre-Event Member Reception
Raise a glass and strike up the fun! Please join us for an exclusive members-only pre-concert reception with wine, light bites, and good company before an exceptional evening of music.
Mingle with fellow members over a glass of wine and light bites before taking your seat for the 7:30 p.m. concert. Then let the music take center stage as the Phoenix Chamber Ensemble performs works by Mozart, Rachmaninoff, Schnittke, and Bizet, in a program filled with musical conversation, virtuosity, and unexpected harmonies.
Ticket Info: This is an exclusive event for CJH members. To register, please email membership@cjh.org.
Presented by:
members only event
the blavatnik chamber music series at cjh
Keyboard Kaleidoscope - In-Person Concert & Live on YouTube
Join Phoenix Chamber Ensemble pianists Vassa Shevel and Inessa Zaretsky with guest artist Ellen Braslavsky (piano) for a memorable 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: $18 general, $10 seniors, $8 members click here to register
YouTube: Pay what you wish; click here to register
Presented by:
the blavatnik chamber music series at cjh
book talk
Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built – Live on Zoom
At midcentury, everyone knew Bennett Cerf: witty, beloved, middle-aged panelist on What’s My Line? whom TV brought into America’s homes each week. But they didn’t know that the handsome, driven, paradoxical young man of the 1920s had vowed to become a great publisher and, a decade later, was. With his best friend and lifelong business partner Donald Klopfer, and other young Jewish entrepreneurs like the Knopfs and Simon & Schuster, Cerf remade the book business: what was published, and how. In 1925, he and Klopfer bought the Modern Library and turned it into an institution, then founded Random House, which eventually became a home to Truman Capote, Ralph Ellison, Ayn Rand, Dr. Seuss, Toni Morrison, James Michener, and many more.
Join YIVO for a discussion with Gayle Feldman about her book Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built, in a discussion moderated by Jonathan Brent.
About the Speakers
Gayle Feldman has written for Publishers Weekly for forty years, including as a senior staff editor; since 1999, as U.S. correspondent for The Bookseller, she has analyzed the American book business for U.K. readers; and she has contributed features and reviews on books and culture to The New York Times, The Nation, The Daily Beast, and other publications. She is the author of You Don’t Have to Be Your Mother and Best and Worst of Times. She received a Public Scholars award from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Jonathan Brent is the Executive Director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City. From 1991 to 2009 he was Editorial Director and Associate Director of Yale Press. He is the founder of the world acclaimed Annals of Communism series, which he established at Yale Press in 1991. Brent is the co-author of Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953 (Harper-Collins, 2003) and Inside the Stalin Archives (Atlas Books, 2008). He is now working on a biography of the Soviet-Jewish writer Isaac Babel. Brent teaches history and literature at Bard College.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
book talk
family history today
Family History Today: Mining the Manifest - Live on Zoom
After 1906, immigration manifests offer a wealth of information, but what do you do if your family came over prior to that time? And how did they get from New York to the central United States? This presentation explores the immigration period from the early 1890s through 1906, a period which begins to offer useful information for a genealogical search. Using a case approach, we will look at derivative naturalization documents, trace contacts they were going to through the NY vital records and follow immigrants who found their route through Canada. Using paired surnames we will locate a birth record, join cousins on an ocean voyage to NY, find parents, their siblings and children and follow along on a journey to the Midwest. We will explore cases with name changes and variable spellings, work back from other documents, and resolve conflicting data.
About the Speaker
Susan Weinberg is an artist, author, professional genealogist and frequent speaker on genealogy topics. Her background bridges both creative and analytic work, both skills she draws on in genealogy. . Her creative work often involves storytelling and frequently explores family history themes. Having come out of a long career in finance, she often uses spreadsheets as an analytic tool in her genealogy research.
Susan is active in organizations within the world of Jewish genealogy, as president of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS), immediate past president of the Minnesota Jewish Genealogical Society (MNJGS), vice president of the Jewish Historical Society of the Upper Midwest(JHSUM) and a member of the Association of Professional Genealogists (APG).
Susan developed the Jewish Identity and Legacy Project, an oral history project with elders, then authored the book We Spoke Jewish: A Legacy in Stories that includes oral history, artwork, and history on three groups of Jewish immigrants who spanned the 1900s. Susan has created and manages websites for JewishGen on the former Jewish communities of several of her ancestral towns. She writes frequently for publications on genealogy topics and does genealogy research for clients around the world.
Ticket Info: Pay what you wish
Presented by:
family history today
cabaret performance
Dance on the Volcano: A Revue - In-person Program
A cabaret of the vibrant and contradictory Berlin of the 1920s.
We cordially invite you to a special series of events in cooperation with Elysium, which will transport you to the vibrant and contradictory Berlin of the 1920s. The production is so captivating that it will be performed three times on both sides of the Atlantic.Amid hyperinflation, social misery, and political street battles, a fascinating cultural flowering emerged: Dada, Bauhaus, jazz, cabaret – and an escape into the dazzling world of film and operetta. At its heart was Erwin Piscator, founder of political theater, who, shaped by his experiences at the front in the First World War, understood the stage as a site of social change.This eventful era comes alive in an impressive revue – with texts by Erich Mühsam, Erwin Piscator, Alfred Polgar, Kurt Tucholsky and others, accompanied by music by Paul Abraham, Hanns Eisler, Mischa Spolianski and others.
Ticket Info: General Admission: $33.85, Members/Students/Seniors: §17.85
Presented by:
cabaret performance
conversation
At Lunch with Joel Dinerstein – Live on Zoom
Julie Salamon, New York Times best-selling author, sits down with author Joel Dinerstein to discusses his latest book, The Last of the Ellis Island Jews: A Brooklyn Memoir. Dinerstein is the founding editor of a new series, Lost Classics of Jewish Literature, for the University of New Orleans Press. He is a Professor of English and a Sizeler Professor in Jewish Studies at Tulane University, where his courses focus on race and racism. He is also a well-known expert on the concept of cool, having written the first history of the subject (The Origins of Cool in Postwar America) and co-curated the first national exhibition on the subject (American Cool at the Smithsonian).
Ticket Info: Free; register online for a Zoom link
Presented by:
conversation
discussion
An Evening With Alex Weiser and Andrzej Cieplinski: A Celebration of “Tfiles” and Its Carnegie Hall Premiere – In-person Program
Join us for an intimate evening celebrating the American premiere of Tfiles, a clarinet concerto by composer Alex Weiser, to be performed at Carnegie Hall on October 27th by clarinetist Andrzej Cieplinski and the American Composers Orchestra led by conductor Kedrick Armstrong. The evening will feature a conversation between Weiser and Cieplinski - moderated by distinguished scholar Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett - exploring the work’s origins in Kadya Molodowsky’s poetic reflections on the idea of Jewish prayer, the partnership behind its realization, and the music's journey from its world premiere at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw to the stage of Carnegie Hall. The evening will also include a brief solo performance by Cieplinski, followed by a reception with food and the opportunity to meet the artists. Tfiles (Yiddish for "prayers") recasts the clarinet concerto as a set of musical prayers. Praised after its Warsaw premiere as “full of noble simplicity and warmth” (Polityka), the concerto follows Molodowsky's lead in reimagining the traditional collective Jewish ritual search for the divine as a personal, individual quest beyond the boundaries of traditional observance.
Andrzej Cieplinski's participation in this concert is generously supported by the Polish Cultural Institute New York, the American Friends of POLIN Museum (AFoPM) / Association of the Jewish Historical Institute (SZIH), and the Adam Mickiewicz Institute (IAM).
About the Participants
Alex Weiser is a composer described by The New Yorker as having "a knack for crafting music that is at once historically rooted and of its moment." His work meditates on cultural inheritance, sanctity, and the transience of life. Weiser's debut album and all the days were purple was named a 2020 Pulitzer Prize Finalist; a second album, in a dark blue night, was released by Cantaloupe Music in 2024. His compositions include the clarinet concerto Tfiles, premiered at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, and the operas Tevye's Daughters (American Lyric Theater) and The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language. Weiser serves as Director of Public Programs at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
Andrzej Cieplinski is a Polish clarinetist recognized as one of his generation's most compelling voices in contemporary music. A laureate of the 2015 European Broadcasting Union’s New Talent of the Year award, he has performed as soloist with leading orchestras across Europe - including the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra, and Aukso - under conductors including Krzysztof Penderecki and Elim Chan. A graduate of the Hochschule fur Musik Basel and the Karol Szymanowski Academy of Music in Katowice, Cieplinski is deeply committed to expanding the clarinet repertoire through collaboration with living composers, continuing a family legacy of championship for new music.
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is University Professor Emerita and Professor Emerita of Performance Studies at New York University, best known for her interdisciplinary contributions to Jewish studies and to the theory and history of museums, tourism, and heritage. Ronald S. Lauder Chief Curator of the Core Exhibition at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, she has had a lifelong relationship with YIVO, directing the YIVO Folksong Project from 1973–1975 and serving on its Advisory Board. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, awarded the Dan David Prize, and decorated with the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland.
The American Composers Orchestra (ACO) is a national discovery and development pipeline for new orchestral music, focused on bringing the full spectrum of American music to orchestral stages, providing a gateway to the orchestral composition and performance process, and amplifying the expressive power of orchestral music to enable a vibrant future for all Americans.
Ticket Info: Free
Presented by:
discussion
book talk
Jewish Women at Home in the World – Live on Zoom
Join author Melissa R. Klapper for a discussion of her new book Jewish Women at Home in the World: Gender, Judaism & American Identity in the Rise of Mass Tourism with AJHS historian Andrew Sperling.
While Americans have gone abroad for leisure and education since the early days of American history, the period between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of World War II saw the rise of mass tourism, with changes in the way travel operated opening up the world in new ways for millions of people. It was during this era that a wide range of American Jewish women began to travel more extensively, experiencing their journeys through their unique intersecting national, religious, and gender identities.
In Jewish Women at Home in the World, Melissa R. Klapper documents the remarkable number of American Jewish women who traveled abroad in the mid-19th to mid-20th century. These women went to school overseas, visited relatives and hometowns, worked abroad, attended international activist meetings, and took sightseeing trips alone, with family members or friends, or with organized tour groups. The volume looks specifically at the role that gender and Jewish identity, as well as their American background, played in the women’s choices of where to go, what to do, whom to see, and how to behave.
Ticket Info: Free; register online for a Zoom link
Presented by:
book talk
film screening
Diamonds of the Night – In-person Program
In winning the Grand Prix at the Mannheim-Heidelberg International Film Festival (IFFMH) in 1964, Jan Nemec’s drama Démanty noci (Diamonds of the Night) became the first Czechoslovak New Wave film to receive an internationally recognized award. The motion picture, based on a short story from the autobiographical book Darkness Casts No Shadow by Arnost Lustig, offers unusual and intensely attitudinal insight into the topic of war and resilience pushed to its limits. It tells the story of two young Jewish men who escape from a train taking them to their death. The film amounts to a naturalistic study of endangerment, repudiation, and uprootedness. The experiences of the desperate refugees in the Sudetenland forest merge with the memories, dreams, and visions of one of the men. Thus, the anatomy of a tortured human soul is projected into the sphere of existential drama.
More than five decades after its premiere, the film received renewed international recognition when a remastered version, prepared by the Czech National Film Archive, was selected for the prestigious Cannes Classics section of the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, alongside restorations of landmark films such as Vertigo and 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Join YIVO for a screening of this film followed by a panel discussion with Jonathan Brent, Eva Lustigová, Emily Tamkin, and Michael Feldman.
This event forms part of FestivAL100, an international celebration marking the 100th anniversary of the birth of the writer, journalist, screenwriter, and Holocaust witness Arnošt Lustig.
Watch the trailer:
Ticket Info: $15; YIVO members: $10
Presented by:
film screening
book club
LBI Book Club: The Director - Live on Zoom
Anjeana K. Hans will join the LBI Book Club to discuss The Director by Daniel Kehlmann
G.W. Pabst, one of cinema’s greatest directors of the 20th century, was filming in France when the Nazis seized power. To escape the horrors of the new and unrecognizable Germany, he fled to Hollywood. But now, under the blinding California sun, the world-famous director suddenly looks like a nobody. Not even Greta Garbo, the Hollywood actress whom he made famous, can help him.
When he receives word that his elderly mother is ill, he finds himself back in his homeland of Austria, which is now called Ostmark. Pabst, his wife, and his young son are suddenly confronted with the barbaric nature of the regime. So, when Joseph Goebbels—the minister of propaganda in Berlin—sees the potential for using the European film icon for his directorial genius and makes big promises to Pabst and his family, Pabst must consider Goebbels’s thinly veiled order. While Pabst still believes that he will be able to resist these advances, that he will not submit to any dictatorship other than art, he has already taken the first steps into a hopeless entanglement.
Kehlmann’s latest oeuvre explores the complicated relationships and distinctions between art and power, beauty and barbarism, cog and conspirator.
(Review: Amazon).
About the Speakers
Daniel Kehlmann was born in Munich and lives in Vienna, Berlin and New York
His novels include: Measuring the World, Me & Kaminski, Fame, F, You Should Have Left and Tyll, and he has won numerous prizes, including the Candide Prize, the Literature Prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, the Doderer Prize, The Kleist Prize, the WELT Literature Prize, and the Thomas Mann Prize.
Tyll, in a translation by Ross Benjamin, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2020. Measuring the World was translated into more than 40 languages and is one of the biggest successes in post-war German literature. The Director, his 14th novel, also translated into English by Ross Benjamin, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026.
Anjeana K. Hans is Professor of German Studies and affiliated faculty in Cinema and Media Studies at Wellesley College. Her research focuses on early silent film and on German and Austrian film of the 1930s, with emphases on questions of gender, identity, and subjectivity, on the representation of difference, and on exile and migration. Her publications include work on gender in Weimar cinema (Gender and the Uncanny in Films of the Weimar Republic, Wayne State UP, 2014), on the varied cultural anxieties and fascinations contextualizing Weimar film (Warning Shadows, Camden House, 2021), and on independent films in Austria (“‘Komisch ist die Welt, wie ein Traum:’ Franziska Gaal’s Verwechslungskomödien and the Exile’s Crisis of Identity,” in Rethinking Jewishness in Weimar Film, eds. Barbara Hales and Valerie Weinstein, Berghahn Books, 2021). She is currently working on a study of films produced in Austria between 1933 and 1938 by filmmakers forced out of the German film industry, in which she examines how they engage with the experience of exile and expulsion through narrative and aesthetic.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
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book club
concert
Music of the Third Seder: A Yiddish Passover Concert – In-person Program and Live on Zoom
Join us for an evening exploring the musical legacy of the Third Seder, the secular Passover celebration that became a vibrant feature of Yiddish cultural life in twentieth-century America. Presented in collaboration with the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, this concert brings together rarely heard works and newly revived repertoire from this rich tradition.
The program features the world-premiere of two-piano arrangements of music by Lazar Weiner and Gershon Kingsley. A highlight of the evening Der Farshterter Peysekh (The Ruined Passover), a short ballet with narration based on Sholem Aleichem’s beloved Passover story. Featuring Zalmen Mlotek and Joyce Rosenzweig, along with special guest artists, the performance will also include additional musical treasures from the Third Seder tradition.
Ticket Info: $10; YIVO members: $5
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concert