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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
book talk
Illuminated Scriptures: Reading the Torah Through the Qur'an - In-person Program
How can reading sacred texts side by side deepen our understanding of both traditions?
Join the Center for Jewish History and the American Sephardi Federation for a timely conversation marking the publication of Illuminating Scriptural Connections: A Qur'anic Commentary on the Torah, an ambitious new work by interfaith leaders and scholars Rick Sopher and Abdulla Galadari. Drawing on all fifty-four weekly Torah portions, the book places the Torah and the Qur'an in dialogue, illuminating shared narratives, prophetic traditions, ethical teachings, and theological questions while thoughtfully exploring where the two texts converge and diverge.
Sopher, a leading figure in Jewish-Muslim dialogue, and Galadari, a scholar of Qur'anic hermeneutics, invite readers to encounter these foundational scriptures not as isolated traditions but as texts that have long spoken to many of the same questions about faith, justice, prophecy, and human responsibility. Their collaboration demonstrates how close reading and rigorous scholarship can open new pathways for understanding across religious communities.
Moderated by Mehnaz M. Afridi, Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Interfaith Education Center at Manhattan University, this conversation will explore the origins of the project, the interpretive methods behind the book, and the enduring significance of scriptural study in fostering meaningful interfaith dialogue. Together, the panelists will consider how sacred texts can serve not only as objects of scholarship but also as bridges between communities in an increasingly interconnected world.
Whether you are interested in Jewish studies, Islamic studies, comparative religion, or the power of shared intellectual inquiry, this program offers a rare opportunity to hear from scholars working at the intersection of two of the world's great scriptural traditions.
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.
About the Speakers
Rick Sopher is an interfaith leader, educator, and author dedicated to advancing Jewish-Muslim understanding through scriptural dialogue and collaborative learning. Based in London, he has spent decades building relationships across faith communities and is a Fellow of the Woolf Institute at the University of Cambridge, where his work focuses on interreligious engagement among Jews, Christians, and Muslims. He is the co-author of Illuminating Scriptural Connections: A Qur'anic Commentary on the Torah, an innovative study that explores the Torah through the interpretive lens of the Qur'an.
Abdulla Galadari is Associate Professor of Islamic Studies at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi and an internationally recognized scholar of Qur'anic hermeneutics. His research examines the Qur'an through literary, historical, and comparative approaches, with particular attention to its relationship to biblical and rabbinic traditions. He is the author of several books on Qur'anic interpretation and co-author of Illuminating Scriptural Connections: A Qur'anic Commentary on the Torah. Dr. Galadari will join the program virtually.
Mehnaz M. Afridi (Moderator) is Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Interfaith Education Center at Manhattan University. An internationally respected scholar of Islam, Holocaust studies, and interfaith relations, her work explores the intersections of religion, memory, ethics, and genocide. Through her scholarship and public engagement, she has worked extensively to foster dialogue and understanding among Jewish, Muslim, and Christian communities.
Ticket Info: Pay what you wish; registration required.
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book talk
book talk
Modern Jewish Identity in the Age of Empire – Live on Zoom
Join YIVO for a conversation with Ofer Dynes and Svetlana Natkovich exploring two new books that examine the emergence of modern Jewish identity through literature, politics, and self-expression. Dynes’ The Fiction of the State: The Partitions of Poland and the Beginning of Modern Jewish Literature locates the origins of modern Jewish literature within the Partitions of Poland during the late eighteenth century and argues that literature became a central venue for reflecting on the new political order during a time when most forms of political expression were banned. Rather than as an internal Jewish struggle between tradition and modernity, he presents Hebrew and Yiddish literature as a field of negotiation among multiple local and imperial belongings.
Natkovich’s Questionable People: Inventing Modern Jewish Selves in the Russian Empire, 1860–1890 explores how the maskilim used self-expression, fashion, dress, and their artistic work to define themselves. Differentiating themselves from what came before, maskilim crafted Jewish identities within a modernizing Russia. Natkovich analyzes the maskilim as a group existing between social and economic classes in a time of change, a generation of thinkers forced to radically assert their selfhoods.
Moderated by Jeremy Dauber, this discussion will explore how Jewish writers and thinkers navigated shifting political and social landscapes.
Buy Questionable People: Inventing Modern Jewish Selves in the Russian Empire, 1860–1890.
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
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cabaret performance
lecture and concert
Nusakh Vilne Memorial: Songs of Eliakum Zunser – In-person Program and Live on Zoom
Join us in commemorating the Jewish community of Vilna through poetry, music, and presentation.
This year, Alyssa Quint will discuss the work of folk bard and songwriter Eliakum Zunser (Elyokem Tsunzer). A performance of Zunser’s music by tenor Maximillian Jansen and pianist Dan Schlosberg will follow Quint’s presentation.
About the Participants
Alyssa Quint is the Leo Charney Visiting Fellow at Yeshiva University’s Israel Studies Center and a co-editor of the Yiddish Voices translations series (YIVO/Bloomsbury). She is the author of The Rise of the Modern Yiddish Theater (2019), which was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and the Jordan Schnitzer Award. She is also the editor of three volumes on the Yiddish theater: Women on the Yiddish Stage (2023), Three Yiddish Plays by Women: Female Jewish Perspectives, 1880-1920 (2023), and Mississippi: a Yiddish Play About the Scottsboro Affair (2026). She is a contributing editor of the online Digital Yiddish Theater Project and an editor and writer for Tablet Magazine.
Tenor Maximillian Jansen is a versatile performer acclaimed for his work in opera, concert, and musical theater, praised for his “warm, but penetrating voice” (The Times Union). Recent highlights include his Lincoln Center debut with the New York Choral Society in Honegger’s King David, appearances with the Metropolitan Opera, Berkshire Opera Festival, and Opera Saratoga, and performances at the Bard Music Festival. In 2022, he presented a live premiere of a new work by David Ludwig Serkin for the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. This premiere was given as part of YIVO’s Continuing Evolution: Yiddish Folksong Today, a music festival celebrating Yiddish folksong.
Brooklyn-based composer, pianist, arranger, and music director Dan Schlosberg creates acclaimed work across opera, theater, and concert music. Recent projects include arrangements and music direction of the original cast recording of Heartbeat Opera’s Manon! (2026); the new opera Complications In Sue (2026) with Michael R. Jackson’s libretto at Opera Philadelphia; the new musical The Counterfeit Opera (2025), which premiered at Little Island; and new orchestration for Poul Ruders’ The Handmaid’s Tale (2025) at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. In 2021, Schlosberg was the audition, rehearsal, and soundtrack pianist for Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
Presented by:
lecture and concert
concert
Reclaiming More Music of Polish Composers: Refugees from World War II - In-person Program
This concert, entitled “Reclaiming More Music of Polish Composers: Refugees from World War II,” is another in a continuing series of collaborations between organizations which share the goal of musical reclamation. Composers whose voices and careers were brutally silenced by the Nazis during World War II were also blindsided by the post-war music world.
Even today, more than 80 years later, there is still a need to give voice to the music of these creators. Included on the program is essential, mostly unheard music, by Szymon Laks, Mieczyslaw Weinberg, and Roman Ryterband, some of Poland’s most important pre-war composers. This concert will feature performances by Hanna Hipp (mezzo soprano), Jaroslaw Nadrzycki (violin), Josif Feigelson (cello), and Grzegorz Mania (piano).
Reception to follow concert.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
Presented by:
concert
book talk
Yiddish Poetry and Jewish Identity in 1930s America – Live on Zoom
Introspectivism: Yiddish Poetry and Jewish Identity in 1930s America studies the poetry written in New York by the In Zikh, also known as the “Introspectivists” or Inzikhistn. Introspectivism forced social and political topics into the margins in order to create space for imagination and fantasy distant from the lived experience of the poets. As such, the worsening conditions of European Jews and the rise of totalitarianism in the early 1930s pushed the poets to address the theme of cultural heritage and reconnect with their Jewish roots. Although the Inzikhistn have been acknowledged as one of the most important groups of Yiddish writers, only certain aspects of their poetry and poetics have been explored. Itay Zutra focuses primarily on In Zikh’s poetry to show how it determined the course of the group’s development and the development of Introspectivism as a movement. By developing a methodology that explores Yiddish poetry as context for the expansion of individualism in Jewish culture, Zutra affirms how the overall movement carved out room for Yiddish-speaking American Jewish identity.
Join YIVO for a discussion with Zutra about this new book moderated by Justin Cammy.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
book talk
book talk
Master of Melody: Ben Zion Shenker and Hasidic Song in America – In-person Program
Introspectivism: Yiddish Poetry and Jewish Identity in 1930s America studies the poetry written in New York by the In Zikh, also known as the “Introspectivists” or Inzikhistn. Introspectivism forced social and political topics into the margins in order to create space for imagination and fantasy distant from the lived experience of the poets. As such, the worsening conditions of European Jews and the rise of totalitarianism in the early 1930s pushed the poets to address the theme of cultural heritage and reconnect with their Jewish roots. Although the Inzikhistn have been acknowledged as one of the most important groups of Yiddish writers, only certain aspects of their poetry and poetics have been explored. Itay Zutra focuses primarily on In Zikh’s poetry to show how it determined the course of the group’s development and the development of Introspectivism as a movement. By developing a methodology that explores Yiddish poetry as context for the expansion of individualism in Jewish culture, Zutra affirms how the overall movement carved out room for Yiddish-speaking American Jewish identity.
Join YIVO for a discussion with Zutra about this new book moderated by Justin Cammy.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
book talk
lecture
The Origins, Flowering, and Documentary Afterlife of Yiddish Cinema – Live on Zoom
In celebration of YIVO's 101st year, join us for our Yiddish Civilization 101 series. Each program will highlight key topics in Ashkenazi history and culture, including shtetl life, film, and Ashkenazi foodways, amongst others. Guided by expert scholars, each lecture will provide a greater understanding of Jewish life in Eastern Europe and its diasporas.
Born before World War I, the Yiddish cinema came to supplement—and in some places supplant—the Yiddish stage. Except for a brief period on the eve of World War II when new Yiddish talkies appeared in New York City movie houses virtually every month, the Yiddish cinema was a novelty of the marketplace. Addressing a need and operating on a shoestring, these motion pictures created a world; at once documentary evidence and fantasy projection, they spoke directly to their Ashkenazi Jewish audiences. Yiddish movies also belong to Polish, Soviet, and off-Hollywood American cinema, but taken on its own terms, with neither laughter nor through tears.
This lecture by J. Hoberman will discuss this unique episode in film history, an international enterprise that created a national cinema without a nation-state.
About the Speaker
J. Hoberman is an author, teacher, and film critic (33 years at The Village Voice). His many books include Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film Between Two Worlds, The Red Atlantis: Communist Culture in the Absence of Communism, and, with Jeffrey Shandler, Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting, written for the 2003 exhibition at the Jewish Museum. A contributor to the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe and POLIN Museum’s Legacy of Polish Jews, Professor Hoberman taught for many years at the Cooper Union, as well as NYU, the University of Hawaii, Harvard University and currently, Columbia University, where his most recent graduate seminars have been devoted to documentary activism. He continues to contribute film criticism to The Nation, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times. His most recent book is Everything is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop. Many years ago, he had a paid internship at YIVO.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
lecture
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
lecture
Defining "The Jew" in the Age of Eugenics: American Jewish Physicians and Biological Jewishness in the Early 20th Century – Live on Zoom
The arrival of millions of new Jewish immigrants, as well as the rise of the eugenics movement, fomented antisemitic sentiment in the United States in the early 20th century. American Jewish physicians, like other Jews, represented diverse viewpoints regarding how this frightening trend should be addressed. Unlike most American Jews, however, they were especially well equipped to couple these recommendations with their authority on Jewish biology, directly countering the scientific racism of eugenicists. This insider knowledge, along with the high esteem medical men were held by Jews at the time, made the voices of American Jewish physicians central to the community’s answer to “The Jewish Question” in the United States. While they disagreed on some biological nuances, early 20th century American physicians were broadly united in their resistance to a hereditarian notion of Jewishness: that Jewishness was biologically inscribed and that the Jewish body was inevitably distinct from the rest of the human race.
By delving into the published writings, personal correspondences, and diary entries of ideologically diverse Jewish physicians, Leigh Alon will show how in the early 20th century, American Jewish physicians, regardless of their politics, saw delegitimizing the biological basis for Jewishness as imperative towards securing their community’s future.
About the Speaker
Leigh Alon is an MD/PhD student in the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, in her fifth year of the PhD. She is working on a dissertation tracking how American Jewish physicians defined Jewishness in biological terms from the early 20th into the 21st century. She is a 2026 Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellow. She has received fellowships from the American Philosophical Society, New York Academy of Medicine, the American Jewish Archives, the American Academy for Jewish Research, the American Jewish Historical Society, the Feinstein Center for American Jewish History, the Osler Library of the History of Medicine, and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Before attending graduate school, she worked in HIV prevention at the Chicago Center for HIV Elimination.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
lecture
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
walking tour
Yiddish Theater Walking Tour
This walking tour meets at 255 Grand St, New York, NY 10002 (NW corner of Sara D. Roosevelt Park at Chrystie St and Grand St) and will run from 11:00am to 1:00pm. View directions »
Join YIVO Learning and Media Center Educator Susannah Trubman on a two-hour walking tour exploring the heart of what was once a major hub for the sensational, international phenomenon known as Yiddish theater. Beginning at the former site of Jacob Adler’s Grand Theater (255 Grand Street, now a part of Sara D. Roosevelt Park) and ending in Union Square, this walking tour will have attendees walk along the former Yiddish Broadway with special attention paid to sites of past theaters and notable performances. Attendees should wear comfortable shoes, bring water, and be prepared to stand for longer periods of time.
About the Guide
Susannah Trubman holds a B.A. in English Literature from University of Wisconsin-Madison and an M.A. in History from Temple University. She has been studying Yiddish language and culture with YIVO since 2019, is a three-time veteran of the Uriel Weinreich Summer Program, and served as an intern for the Landsmanshaftn Collection at the YIVO archive.
Ticket Info: $18; registration is required
Presented by:
walking tour
lecture
The YIVO Origins of the Oyneg Shabes Archive: Understanding the Documents of the Hersh Wasser Collection – Live on Zoom
The Oyneg Shabes archive that Emanuel Ringelblum organized in the Warsaw Ghetto was one of the most successful examples of cultural resistance in all of Nazi-occupied Europe, a reminder that Jews could fight with paper and pen as well as with guns. Ringelblum did all he could to make sure that even if the Jews of Poland did not survive, posterity would remember them on the basis of Jewish and not Nazi documents.
But Ringelblum’s archive did not arise in a vacuum. No single institution had more of an impact on its ethos than the pre-war YIVO. Many key members of the archive, including Emanuel Ringelblum, Yitzhak Giterman, Hersh Wasser, Shmuel Winter, Rachel Auerbach, and Menakhem Linder had been YIVO activists.
After the war, Wasser, one of only three survivors of the archive staff, and fearful of what would happen to Jewish life in Stalinist Poland, managed to smuggle copies of many rescued documents to the YIVO in New York. This talk by Samuel Kassow will discuss the contents of YIVO’s Hersh Wasser Collection and the insights it offers into the workings of the Oyneg Shabes archive.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
lecture
discussion
Pivotal Elections in American Jewish History - In-person Program
On the eve of the 2026 midterm elections, join the Center for Jewish History and the American Jewish Historical Society for the 2026 Amy Goldman Fowler Lecture, presented in support of the exhibition All We Have Standing Between Us: 250 Years of Jews and American Democracy.
A distinguished panel of speakers will explore the evolving role of Jewish voters in American political life, looking back at pivotal elections and the issues that shaped Jewish political engagement across the ideological spectrum.
What can the history of Jewish voting patterns tell us about the forces shaping American democracy today? Join us for an engaging conversation about how historical precedents may shape America’s political future.
A dessert reception and book sales will follow the program.
This program is made possible by the Amy Goldman Fowler Foundation.
About the Speakers
Matthew Dallek is a historian and professor of political management at George Washington University. His research and teaching interests include 20th-century U.S. politics, extremism, and the conservative movement. He is author of Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right, and he is working on a book about presidential assassination attempts and political violence in modern America. His essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Atlantic.
Samuel G. Freedman is an award-winning author, columnist, and professor. A former columnist for The New York Times and a professor emeritus at Columbia University, he is the author of ten acclaimed books. His most recent book, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights, won the 2024 Hillman Prize for Book Journalism. His book, Small Victories: The Real World of a Teacher, Her Students and Their High School (1990), was a finalist for the 1990 National Book Award. His book, The Inheritance: How Three Families and America Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond (1996), was a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize. His book, Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry (2000), won the National Jewish Book Award for Non-Fiction in 2001.
Ronnie Grinberg is Associate Professor of History and core faculty member of the Schusterman Center for Judaic and Israel Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals (Princeton University Press 2024), which was longlisted for a National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) Award in criticism and was a finalist in two categories for the National Jewish Book Award. The book also received wide critical acclaim in venues including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and the Times Literary Supplement. Grinberg has published academic articles in the Journal of American History and American Jewish History. She is currently co-editing a volume on an American Jewish intellectual tradition to be published by Rutgers University Press and is also co-editor of the Journal of Women’s History.
Julie Salamon is a New York Times best-selling author of 13 books, including her 2011 biography of playwright Wendy Wasserstein, Wendy and the Lost Boys. Her books include The Devil’s Candy, ranked among the top 25 Hollywood books of all time by The Hollywood Reporter, and Facing the Wind, an NPR Fresh Air “Best Book of 2001.” Writing about her 2019 book An Innocent Bystander, Publishers Weekly called Salamon “one of today’s foremost chroniclers of American politics and culture.” The 2021 podcast series, “The Plot Thickens: Season Two,” based on The Devil’s Candy and written and hosted by Salamon, was named a top ten podcast of 2021 by The New York Times. Her new book, Ghosts of 10th Avenue, will be published in April 2027. Former reporter and film and television critic for The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, Salamon is host of a monthly podcast interview series called, “At Lunch,” sponsored by the American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS). She is also an AJHS Trustee. For 25 years, she has been board chair of BRC, a New York City non-profit that provides housing, health care, and social services for people who are unsheltered.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
Presented by:
discussion
book talk
My Name is Stramer – In-person Program
Though he returned from America penniless, Nathan Stramer still daydreams of a better life, as he struggles to make ends meet back in the small Polish town of Tarnów. Raising six children with his wife Rywka, he chases hare-brained schemes to make money while she fantasizes about a trip to the seaside. Crammed into a two-room apartment on down-at-heel Goldhammer Street, the family gets by on very little, and everyone has to pitch into Nathan’s latest ventures, including an ill-fated Stramer family café.
As the years pass, their children begin to take steps into a changing world. While Nathan and Rywka try to hold the center of their raucous family life together, national conflicts begin to escalate in Europe, and sinister forces creep into the Stramers’ world that they don’t yet understand. Author Mikolaj Lozinski tells the tragic story of the interwar years through the ordinary triumphs and struggles of this sprawling Polish-Jewish family.
Join us for a discussion with Lozinski about the newly-released English translation of his historical fiction novel My Name is Stramer, in a discussion led by Irena Grudzinska Gross.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
book talk
lecture
More than a Symbol: The Jewish Labor Bund in History – In-person Program and Live on Zoom
More so than any other party on the Jewish left, the Jewish Labor Bund holds a particular mystique in the imagination of Jewish leftists, even decades after the Bund in Poland was dissolved. It is remembered as a potent symbol of Diaspora Socialism, anti-Zionism, and Yiddish activism. However, the Bund was more than a symbol. The Bund was a potent movement in the Jewish communities of Russia and Poland, shaping Jewish economic, political, and cultural life across Eastern Europe for half a century and continuing in the diaspora worldwide.
It is that reality that this talk by Joshua Meyers will explore. Using the Bund Archive, located and preserved at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, this talk will examine the history of the Bund from its origins through World War II, when the party served as the standard bearer of Diaspora Socialism in the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe. It will delve into the evolving relationships between the Bund and other major political movements—Zionists, Communists, and others—that it existed alongside and frame these relationships within their historical reality. It will explore the factors that made the Bund so attractive to Jews in the Russian Empire and interwar Polish Republic, as well as the limits to that attraction against the political, cultural, and social realities it lived in. Ultimately, it will offer a narrative of the Bund rooted not in our world or imaginations, but in the reality of the Bund’s own members, while exploring its legacy and that of Diaspora Socialism in the 21st century.
This evening’s program is the second in a series of programs held in conjunction with YIVO’s current digitization of the Jewish Labor and Political Archives (JLPA). Consisting of nearly 200 collections encompassing 3.5 million pages of archival documents that were collected by the Bund Archives, the JLPA forms the world’s most comprehensive body of material pertaining to Jewish political activity in Europe and the United States.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
lecture
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
symposium
Jews and American Democracy: 250 Years of Debate - In-Person Event
To mark the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and in conjunction with the new exhibition, All We Have Standing Between Us: 250 Years of Jews and American Democracy, the Center for Jewish History and American Jewish Historical Society are proud to present a full-day symposium, Jews and American Democracy: 250 Years of Debate.
While Jews have been deeply involved in the American democratic experiment since 1776, they have has seldom spoken in a unified voice about how best to achieve its guiding ideals. Across generations, Jews have vigorously debated the opportunities and challenges presented by the principles of freedom, equality, popular sovereignty, and economic opportunity, voicing their views from multiple political perspectives. Whatever their differences, however, Jews have remained united in their pursuit of the promise of American democracy.
Jews and American Democracy brings together a distinguished group of scholars to explore questions surrounding the history and present-day engagement of Jews in American political life. The symposium features four panels: “One Community, Many Voices: American Jewish Political Traditions”; “The Paradox of Belonging: Antisemitism in American Jewish History”; “The World at Large: American Jews and Foreign Policy”; and “After Exceptionalism: The Future of American Jewish History.”
Jews and American Democracy is made possible by the generous sponsorship of the Polonsky Foundation with support from the Leon Levy Foundation. The symposium is the latest event organized in conjunction with CJH’s Jewish Public History Forum, which regularly convenes public conversations on historical issues of contemporary relevance.
Ticket Info: General: $18, $12: Students and Seniors, $9 CJH Members
Presented by:
symposium
performance
A Staged Reading of 'The Dybbuk' – In-person Program
Join YIVO and the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene for a staged reading of Sh. An-ski’s legendary folk drama of spiritual possession and predestined love, The Dybbuk. Growing out of An-ski’s ethnographic expeditions to the Pale of Settlement between 1912 and 1914, The Dybbuk includes a wealth of detail pulled from Jewish folklore. During these expeditions, An-ski and a team took photographs, made recordings, and gathered hundreds of folktales, folksongs, and sacred objects to document traditional Eastern European Jewish life. The resulting play, originally written in Russian between 1913 and 1916, was translated into Yiddish by An-ski himself and is considered a canonic work of Yiddish theater, which has inspired countless film, opera, and ballet adaptations. This staged reading is directed by Mikhl Yashinsky.
This reading will be in Yiddish with English supertitles.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
performance
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
panel discussion
World of Our Fathers at 50 – In-person Program and Live on Zoom
World of Our Fathers by Irving Howe, originally published in 1976, traces the journeys of Eastern Europe’s Jews to America over four decades. Beginning in the 1880s, it offers a portrayal of the Eastern European Jewish experience in New York and shows how the immigrant generation tried to maintain their Yiddish culture while becoming American. The book became a New York Times bestseller and remains a popular work for those interested in understanding why these forebears to many of today’s American Jews made the decision to leave their homelands and how they experienced immigrant life in the early part of the twentieth century.
Join us for a discussion reflecting on the legacy of World of Our Fathers in honor of its fiftieth anniversary with Hasia Diner, Tony Michels, and Sam Adler-Bell, moderated by Annie Polland.
Buy World of Our Fathers by Irving Howe.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
panel discussion
lecture
Modern Yiddish Literature – Live on Zoom
In celebration of YIVO's 101st year, join us for our Yiddish Civilization 101 series. Each program will highlight key topics in Ashkenazi history and culture, including shtetl life, film, and Ashkenazi foodways, amongst others. Guided by expert scholars, each lecture will provide a greater understanding of Jewish life in Eastern Europe and its diasporas.
When does modern Yiddish literature begin? What does "modern" even mean? Which works belong to the Yiddish literary canon—and why were women so often left out? Why are the works of Mendele Moykher-Sforim, Sholem Aleichem, and Y.L. Peretz revered as the "classics" of Yiddish literature? Why was the Yiddish literary world so famously divided into competing literary, political, and ideological movements? How has the multilingualism of virtually every Yiddish writer—and reader—shaped the literature they created? And what role has translation played in the creation, dissemination, and reception of Yiddish literature?
Readers and writers have debated these issues ever since the Haskole, the Jewish Enlightenment. This talk by Anita Norich will trace the development of Yiddish literature from the early nineteenth century onward, examining its major writers, movements, and cultural contexts.
About the Speaker
Anita Norich is Collegiate Professor Emerita of English and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the translator of Desires by Tsilye Dropkin (2024), Fear and Other Stories by Chana Blankshteyn (2022), A Jewish Refugee in New York by Kadya Molodovsky (2019), numerous short stories, among them the previously untranslated stories of Israel Joshua Singer and Esther Kreitman, and, with Ellen Cassedy, Hand to Hand by Rashel Veprinski (2025). She is also the author of Writing in Tongues: Yiddish Translation in the 20th Century; Discovering Exile: Yiddish and Jewish American Literature in America During the Holocaust; and The Homeless Imagination in the Fiction of Israel Joshua Singer.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
lecture
concert
Music in Our Time 2026 - Fleeing for Survival - In-person Program
Leaving their homelands and taking flight from the repressive, advancing Hitler regime, Jewish composers, and many whose music was labeled degenerate, had to leave Germany, Austria, France, among other countries, and found themselves fleeing for survival. This concert showcases some of the music written by Darius Milhaud, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Paul Ben-Haim, Walter Bricht, Arnold Schoenberg, Alexander von Zemlinsky, Julius Bürger, Erich Zeisl, Karol Rathaus, and Kurt Weill.
Amid the shock of dislocation and struggling with new languages, they attempted to restart their formerly promising European careers on foreign soil. The United States and Palestine were the inadvertent beneficiaries of much of this sadly interrupted powerful and promising European legacy.
This concert will be performed by the young artists of the Mannes School of Music and presented by the American Society for Jewish Music, The Mannes Sounds Festival, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and the Leo Baeck Institute.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
Presented by:
concert
film screening
Fania's World of Flavors, Smells, and Colors - In-person Program
The documentary Fania’s World of Flavors, Smells, and Colors tells the story of Fania Lewando, a Polish Jewish woman born in 1886 in Kowal. Before World War II, she ran the popular Dietojarska Jadlodajnia in Vilnius, where she served vegetarian specialties rooted in Ashkenazi cuisine. She combined unusual flavors with a focus on healthy cooking, believing that a meat-free diet rich in vitamins was essential to good health. Her culinary talents became widely known and admired, attracting prominent visitors, including the young and then little-known Marc Chagall.
Lewando was also the only woman invited to serve as a chef aboard the Polish ocean liner M/S Batory, where she prepared kosher meals for the ship’s passengers. Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, she published a cookbook in Yiddish and Polish editions featuring 400 vegetarian recipes.
Tragically, the outbreak of the war brought Lewando’s international career to an abrupt end. In 1941, Fania Lewando and her husband perished, and her cookbook was lost amid the chaos of the war. Decades later, a copy was unexpectedly discovered at an antiquarian book fair. Translated into English by YIVO in New York, the cookbook became a bestseller and has since been published in Lithuanian, Polish, and Czech.
Join us for the New York premiere of this documentary followed by a Q&A with director Andrzej Ciecierski, moderated by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett.
Buy Fania Lewando’s The Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook.
Ticket Info: $15; YIVO members, American Friends of POLIN Museum supporters, & students: $10
Presented by:
film screening
book talk
New from Yiddish Voices: Mississippi and Hasidic Warsaw – In-person Program and Live on Zoom
Join us for the launch of the latest two translations in the Yiddish Voices series, a partnership between YIVO and Bloomsbury. The first, Mississippi: A Yiddish Play about the Scottsboro Affair, is a fictionalized retelling of the Scottsboro Affair, which began with the wrongful arrest of nine African American youths in Alabama in 1931. The play demonstrates how important it was to Yiddish writers of the 1920s and 1930s to grapple with the persecution of Black people in America.
The second, Hasidic Warsaw: Reb Zalmen and the Aleksander Shtibl, is an intimate portrait of the lives of those who went inside the Aleksander Hasidim's shtibl (prayer house) in the early 20th century to pray, eat, study, and argue. The book provides rich material for the ethnography of Polish Hasidism in the early 20th century.
The event will feature a discussion exploring both of these newly published translations. The program will also include a performance by Marques Hollie of a song from Mississippi and a nigun from the Aleksander Hasidim. Book signing and reception will follow.
This program is supported by the family of Harriet Yassky.
Buy Mississippi: A Yiddish Play about the Scottsboro Affair.
Buy Hasidic Warsaw: Reb Zalmen and the Aleksander Shtibl.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
book talk
lecture
History of Yiddish – Live on Zoom
In celebration of YIVO's 101st year, join us for our Yiddish Civilization 101 series. Each program will highlight key topics in Ashkenazi history and culture, including shtetl life, film, and Ashkenazi foodways, amongst others. Guided by expert scholars, each lecture will provide a greater understanding of Jewish life in Eastern Europe and its diasporas.
There are many public misconceptions about the origins and history of Yiddish, however much consensus has emerged on a lot of the basics. This lecture by Dovid Katz will start with the Jewish scene in Europe just over a thousand years ago and survey the new European Jewish culture areas, focusing in on Ashkenaz, Ashkenazim, and all three of their Jewish languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, and Yiddish), setting the table for understanding the contextual rise and early history of Yiddish, its eastward trek, role in society, and dramatic growth. The lecture will also focus on the language and dialect, cultural orientations, literature, and the 19th century rise of Yiddish modernity in Eastern Europe.
The lecture will conclude by considering the internal diversity of Yiddish culture—from ultra-Orthodox to revolutionary secular movements—as well as touch on debates over linguistic standardization of the language.
Those interested in reading more on Dovid Katz’s perspectives are welcome to look at his book Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish, which is available free online as a PDF.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
lecture
concert
Hanukkah Concert 2026 - In-person Program
Celebrating the joys of the season, the American Society for Jewish Music's Annual Hanukkah concert has been a popular mainstay for many years. Co-sponsored by YIVO, the Leo Baeck Institute, and the Center for Jewish History, the performance celebrates this joyous holiday with songs and stories that charm and delight audiences.
This year’s concert will welcome back Paul Shapiro’s Ribs & Brisket Band, featuring Cilla Owens. Eleanor Reissa, the Tony Award-nominated director, Broadway, TV and film actress, playwright, choreographer, and critically acclaimed singer, will also read a Hanukkah story to start the program.
Ticket Info: $18; ASJM, YIVO, & CJH members: $12; Seniors & students: $9
Presented by:
concert
book talk
Through the Eyes of Jewish Child Survivors from Poland – Live on Zoom
Through the Eyes of Jewish Child Survivors from Poland offers an intimate social history of Jewish childhood during and after the Holocaust. Centered on children from German-occupied Poland but informed by experiences across Nazi-occupied Europe, the book highlights the child’s own perspective to illuminate rescue, survival, and relationships with adults under the Nazi occupation. Author Joanna Beata Michlic examines children’s wartime experiences, showing how agency, gender, class, and religious or social background shaped their chances of survival. The book also traces the complex efforts of these young survivors to reclaim both childhood and Jewish identity, revealing the gap between their hopes and the actual opportunities of the immediate post-war period.
Drawing on children’s diaries, letters, testimonies, and memoirs, Michlic illuminates how children experienced and remembered trauma: the destruction of their families, the loss of their pre-war worlds, and the struggle to adapt to a new reality, challenging myths that sentimentalize the children’s endurance and portray the Holocaust as neatly concluded.
Join us for a conversation with Michlic about this book, led by Samuel Kassow.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
book talk
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
Presented by:
book club
film screening
Immigrant Songs: Yiddish Theater and the American Jewish Experience - In-person Program
Join us for the New York premiere of Immigrant Songs: Yiddish Theater and the American Jewish Experience, directed by Jeff Janeczko. This documentary traces the arc of Yiddish theater from its origins in Eastern Europe under pioneering figures like Avrom Goldfaden and Boris Thomashefsky, through its golden age in the 1920s and 1930s on Manhattan’s Second Avenue, to its mid-century decline and remarkable modern revival—culminating in the celebrated 2018 production of Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish (Fidler afn Dakh). Through archival footage, original music by Frank London, and testimony from more than 20 leading scholars and performers, the film illuminates a world that was at once deeply rooted in Eastern European Jewish culture and transformative in its encounter with American life.
Ticket Info: $15; YIVO members and students: $10
Presented by:
film screening
book talk
A Very Jewish Christmas: Christmas in Yiddish Tradition – In-person Program and Live on Zoom
Back in Europe, Yiddish-speaking Jews traditionally let loose on Christmas Eve with feasting, drinking, dancing, and gambling. Scholars have previously assumed this Christmas Eve vacation from Torah study to have been some sort of antagonistic counterculture to Christians celebrating Christmas. But Christmas in Yiddish Tradition reveals that the Christmas traditions transmitted in Yiddish were very similar to those transmitted in other European languages. Drawing on a wealth of documents, Jordan Chad argues that rather than European Jews being antagonistic towards Christmas, their Christmas Eve celebrations were exactly what they looked like: Jews celebrating Christmas. The volume offers the surprising argument that while Jews never celebrated the birth of Jesus, Christmas did not actually become the strictly Christian holiday that it is today until the period when Jews migrated to the New World.
Join YIVO for a very Jewish Christmas celebration featuring a talk by Chad uncovering the story of how Christmas once flourished in a language exclusive to non-Christians—and how modern Jews and Christians ultimately came to forget about the time when they celebrated Christmas in tandem. A kosher Chinese food dinner will follow the presentation.
Ticket Info: $10; YIVO members & students: $5
Presented by:
book talk
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
Presented by:
concert