lecture
Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in the Context of Antisemitism in Eastern Europe in the Interwar Period of the 20th Century - Live on Zoom
By the end of the First World War, antisemitism became a moral and political marker of social consciousness as well as a behavior of many right-wing politicians as anti-Jewish discourse was actively imposed in many post-imperial states in Eastern and Central Europe. At the same time, the newly created Ukrainian states (both the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UNR) and the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic (ZUNR)) attempted to provide a positive policy toward the Jews and proposed a new anti-imperial alternative to the harsh legacy of imperial and post-imperial, great-power chauvinist policy. After the UNR and ZUNR leadership ceased to control the territory and effectively influence inter-ethnic relations within the borders of their state, relations between Ukrainians and Jews worsened, and were deformed under the impact of the conditions and policies of other states, in which these two peoples existed.
In this presentation, Andrii Bolianovskyi will elucidate the key figures and main aspects of Ukrainian-Jewish relations, as well as the intervention of "transnational players" in a broad global geopolitical context. Considerable attention will be paid to clarifying the positive experience of relations and highlighting the history of attempts to establish mechanisms of interaction between Ukrainian and Jewish political, public and other organizations and social groups in Western Ukraine. Also considered is the impact of the politics of the right-wing political parties of the Second Polish Republic, which inspired state antisemitism, as well as of the politics of Bolshevik Russia as a state with latent antisemitism.
About the Speaker
Dr. Andrii Bolianovskyi completed his doctorate in History at Ivan Franko National University of Lviv (Ukraine) in 2013. He is currently Senior Fellow at the Ivan Krypiakevych Institute of Ukrainian Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. His work specializes in Ukraine (especially its western regions), Poland, Germany and Russia in the first half of the 20th century and his research interests include Holocaust studies, nationalist movements, mass violence and genocide, inter-ethnic conflicts, and war crimes. While in residence at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (Washington), as well as during his fellowship at Yad Vashem International Institute for Holocaust Research (Jerusalem), Dr. Bolianovskyi conducted research on his project and presented it under the title “Ukrainian-Jewish relations in the context of Shoah in Ukraine, July, 1941–July, 1944.” He is recipient of the 2022-2023 Professor Bernard Choseed Memorial Fellowship and the Natalie and Mendel Racolin Memorial Fellowship in East European Jewish Studies at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
Ticket Info: Free; Registration required
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lecture
lecture
Yiddish Publishing after the Holocaust: I.L. Peretz and the Legacy of Polish Jewry - Live on Zoom
Yiddish publishers in the postwar period sought to collect, codify, and (re)produce Yiddish literature as a preservative measure against cultural erasure. This was in part a reaction to the aftermath of the Holocaust and a fear that the legacy of this culture could soon be lost forever. Many major resulting publications bear the marks of these anxieties most prominently in their form, which was characteristically accumulative: large scale book series, anthologies, lexica, encyclopedias, and reprinted editions of the collected or complete works of Yiddish’s classic writers, Mendele, Sholem Aleichem, and I.L. Peretz. As these new volumes traveled around the world, from Buenos Aires to New York, Montreal to Warsaw, and many places in between, their creation and circulation highlights a changing transnational literary network that had recently flourished during the interwar years. Publishers responded to a network in flux by flooding a literary market with new volumes.
In this lecture, Rachelle Grossman will give an overview of global Yiddish after the Holocaust by focusing on competing publications made in honor of two literary jubilees of I.L. Peretz, “the father of modern Jewish literature”: his 30th yahrzeit and his 100th birthday. These publishing efforts were not only a means to create new Yiddish books, but they were also a form of public debate over the meaning of Peretz the figure, his work, and the place of Yiddish in postwar Jewish life.
About the Speaker
Rachelle Grossman is a specialist in Yiddish print culture, and she is completing a doctorate in Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Her article on Yiddish publishing in postwar Poland was recently awarded the Pantzer New Scholar Award by the Bibliographical Society of America. Her work on Yiddish in Mexico was awarded the 2020 UC Irvine and is forthcoming in Comparative Literature Studies. Rachelle’s research has been supported by the Polish Studies Association, the Latin American Jewish Studies Association, and the American Academy for Jewish Research. She was the recipient of the Aleksander and Alicja Hertz Memorial Fellowship and the Samuel and Flora Weiss Research Fellowship in Polish Jewish Studies at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
Ticket Info: Free; Registration required
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lecture
lecture
Spanish Jews in Colonial Florida - In-person Event & Livestreamed on YouTube
Larry Kanter Lecture Series in Memory of Jack Coleman
Rabbi Merrill Shapiro, Founder and Chairman of the St. Augustine Jewish Historical Society, looks at the presence of people of Jewish descent living, during the 16th century in what we know today as Florida, 89 years before landing in New Amsterdam. Pulling from the research of Dr. Stanley Hordes, formerly the State Historian of New Mexico and researcher at the University of Mexico’s Latin American Institute, as well as Roger L. Martinez-Dávila, Associate Professor of History & Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, this talk will examine genealogy records, evidence that helps to identify the south’s earliest Jews of descent, conversos, and crypto-Jews.
This program is sponsored by Larry Kanter in memory of Jack Coleman
Ticket Info: $10 in person: In person ticket registration
Free livestream via YouTube: Online livestream registration
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lecture
panel discussion
Profs. Sam Shonkoff, Naomi Seidman, David Biale “Old Boys” at the New Lehrhaus: The Rosenzweig-Buber-Scholem Debate Transported to 2023 - Live on Zoom
What if Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem were transported to 2023 Berkeley and asked to teach at New Lehrhaus? How would the passing of over a century since they established and taught at Lehrhaus Judaica in Frankfurt in 1920 change their debates about God and the Commandments, Zionism and Messianism, and Adult Jewish Learning?
Three distinguished New Lehrhaus teachers—Sam Shonkoff, Naomi Seidman, and David Biale—will enact an imaginary debate followed by schmoozing and refreshments a la 1920 Frankfurt.
Ticket Info: $12; Register here
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panel discussion
lecture
Yiddish to the Core: Wedding Music and Jewish Identity in Postwar New York City - Live on Zoom
If you attended a typical American Jewish wedding in the 1950s, you might have noticed some departures from tradition, such as a photographer buzzing around the rabbi, a floral wedding canopy, or “kosher style” catering. The modern formula varied from one wedding to another, but one thing was certain: if it was a Jewish wedding, you danced a hora. Even as Jews became increasingly Americanized and abandoned older practices, they held on to Jewish dances and dance music as an easy and accessible way of articulating their Jewish identity at a public event, in front of their family and friends. Jewish music and dance underwent significant changes during the postwar period, absorbing strong influences from American popular music and Israeli folk songs. Nonetheless, dances like the hora, freylekh, and sher remained “Yiddish to the core.” For many American Jews, these dances became a symbol of cultural continuity, and one of the important elements that defined their wedding as Jewish.
In this talk, Uri Schreter will explore the evolution of Jewish wedding music in the early postwar period across different sectors of New York’s Jewish community. We will discuss the relationship between diverse musical genres such as klezmer, Israeli folk song, swing, and Latin music, and learn how the choice of musical repertoire intersected with factors such as social class, religiosity, and political affiliation.
About the Speaker
Uri Schreter is an interdisciplinary musicologist, composer, keyboardist, and film-editor. Born in Tel Aviv, he is currently pursuing his PhD in historical musicology at Harvard University. Prior to Harvard, he studied at Tel Aviv University, where he earned a BA in composition and musicology, and an MA in modern European history. His current research project explores the politics of Jewish music during the early postwar period. His scholarship has been supported by the American Musicological Society, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, and the Feinstein Center for American Jewish History, and he is the recipient of the 2022–23 Ruth and Joseph Kremen Memorial Fellowship in East European Arts, Music, and Theater at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Outside of academia, Uri is a composer, pianist, and film editor, who has collaborated with numerous artists in Yiddish culture and beyond.
Ticket Info: Free; Registration required
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lecture
book talk
Franz Kafka: The Diaries - Live on Zoom
Dating from 1909 to 1923, Franz Kafka's handwritten diaries contain various kinds of writing: accounts of daily events, reflections, observations, literary sketches, drafts of letters, accounts of dreams, as well as finished stories. A new translation by Ross Benjamin titled Franz Kafka: The Diaries makes available for the first time in English a comprehensive reconstruction of the diary entries and provides substantial new content, including details, names, literary works, and passages of a sexual nature that were omitted from previous publications. Join YIVO for a conversation discussing this new publication with translator Benjamin in conversation with YIVO's Executive Director Jonathan Brent.
About the Speakers
Ross Benjamin’s translations include Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion, Joseph Roth’s Job, and Daniel Kehlmann’s You Should Have Left and Tyll. He was awarded the 2010 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for his rendering of Michael Maar’s Speak, Nabokov, and he received a Guggenheim fellowship for his work on Franz Kafka’s diaries.
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; register at yivo.org/Franz-Kafka
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book talk
film screening
Four Winters - In-person
"All I owned was my camera, leopard coat, rifle and a grenade in case I’m captured...the pillow was the rifle, the walls were the trees and the sky was the roof,” says Faye Schulman, one of over 25,000 Jewish Partisans, who organized and fought back against the better-trained and better-equipped Nazis and their collaborators from deep within the forests of WWII’s Eastern Europe, Ukraine and Belarus. Against extraordinary odds, these men and women, many barely in their teens, escaped Nazi slaughter – transforming from young innocents raised in closely knit families to courageous resistance fighters. They banded together in partisan brigades; engaging in treacherous acts of sabotage, blowing up trains, burning electric stations, and attacking armed enemy headquarters.
Through first-person interviews, Four Wintersuncovers secrets held for lifetimes, revealing a narrative of heroism, loss, enduring hope, grit, courage and deep humanity. Join YIVO for a screening of this award-winning documentary followed by a Q&A with the Filmmaker Julia Mintz: Director/Writer/Producer of Four Winters.
Four Winters was awarded a grant from Steven Spielberg’s Jewish Story Partners fund; received the “Human Rights Award” at Hamptons Doc Fest; and was named “Best Documentary” at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival; and the “”Audience Award” at Australia's International Jewish Film Festival.
About the Speaker
Julia Mintz is a writer, producer and director whose work focuses on narratives of bravery and resistance against unimaginable odds. She has been on the producing team for films that have been shortlisted for the Academy Awards, have premiered at Cannes, Sundance and TriBeCa, and won Emmy, Peabody and festival awards. Her films can be seen on HBO, PBS, American Masters, NETFLIX and Amazon. Recent projects include Mr. SOUL! which premiered at TriBeCa and was short-listed for an Academy Award®. She co-produced Joe Papp in Five Acts and post-produced Get Me Roger Stone, produced California State of Mind, and post-produced Soundtrack for a Revolution Nanking, Love Free or Die: Story of Bishop Gene Robinson. Additional projects include Muscle Shoals, Bing Crosby Rediscovered; Life and Times of Frida Kahlo, and Cyndi Lauper: Still So Unusual. Julia has also produced programming for Discovery, NASA, National Geographic, NHK and SONY.
Ticket Info: $10, YIVO members: $8; register at yivo.org/Four-Winters
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film screening
multimedia presentation
Images of the Past: Jews and the American Civil War – In-Person Event and Live on Zoom
Join us to experience a captivating program about the Civil War from a Jewish perspective that is designed to educate and entertain. Bruce Form and Mira Form are Civil War historians, re-enactors and living historians. Their many years of researching Jewish Civil War veterans and the Jewish community during the Civil War led them to discover two Philadelphians involved in that war: Myer J. Asch, Captain of the 1st New Jersey Cavalry, and Miss Rebecca Moss, Secretary of the Ladies Hebrew Association for the Relief of Sick and Wounded Soldiers. The Forms, who dress in period attire, bring their characters to life using projected images of people and documents from the time of the Civil War, as well as a living history display of original artifacts and reproductions of the period.
About the Speakers
Bruce and Mira Form have spoken on Jews in the Civil War to numerous Jewish organizations throughout the country, including the Gomez Mill House Foundation, Hadassah groups, Women’s American ORT, the Jewish War Veterans, a variety of congregations, as well as in public and private schools. They have also been well received by many Civil War groups throughout New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania.
Bruce received his Bachelor of Arts degree in History from Athens State University in Alabama and a Master of Arts degree in Behavioral Science from Kean University in New Jersey. His article, "Captain Myer Asch, 1st New Jersey Cavalry and the Quest for His Grave," appeared in the Summer 2022 issue of Dorot, the Journal of the Jewish Genealogical Society. Mira graduated cum laude from New York University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Russian Studies and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Both Bruce and Mira are charter members of Officers for the Union and Ladies for the Union, an elite living history organization, based in Gettysburg, PA, where they now reside.
Ticket Info:
In person: $5 general admission at the door; free for JGS members; no registration necessary
Zoom: Non-JGS members can register and pay $5 here. You will receive a Zoom link before the meeting date.
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multimedia presentation
concert
Concert Premiere of A Dying Person (A Goyses), A New Chamber Opera by Evan Rapport and Daniel London
A Dying Person (A Goyses) is inspired by Sh. An-sky, the ethnographer and author of The Dybbuk, who prepared a questionnaire of 2,087 detailed questions in the hopes of compiling a comprehensive record of Jewish life in Eastern Europe; however, the questions remained unanswered due to the onset of World War I. The opera engages the continuous—and legitimate—anxiety regarding the loss of Jewish civilization, even before the Holocaust, and ethnography, interviewing, testimony, and oral history as ways of addressing this fear. The libretto also contains elements of interviews done by the composer with his wife’s grandfather, a musician from a family of klezmers who was born in the Pale of Settlement in 1916 and lived there during his childhood.
The plot of the opera is simple: a middle-aged researcher interviews an older woman on her deathbed. In traditional Ashkenazic Jewish culture the person on their deathbed, between two worlds, has a distinct status (a goyses) and A Dying Person (A Goyses) wrestles with the idea that Jewish culture may itself be in a perpetual sort of goyses state, always seemingly on the verge of loss and annihilation, but never crossing over to the other side.
The ensemble for A Dying Person (A Goyses) is seven players, the instrumentation reminiscent of dance band and klezmer configurations at the beginning of the twentieth century. Together with the three singers, the group satisfies the minimum number of ten adults required for Jewish communal prayer.
Join us for a concert premiere of A Dying Person (A Goyses), a new chamber opera by Evan Rapport and Daniel London.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council, and in part with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.
About the Artists
Evan Rapport is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at The New School, saxophonist, and composer. He is the author of Greeted with Smiles: Bukharian Jewish Music and Musicians in New York (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Damaged: Musicality and Race in Early American Punk(University Press of Mississippi, 2020). He is currently working on a book about soprano saxophonist and composer Steve Lacy, and collaborating with Daniel London on two more chamber operas about Jewish life and death, with A Dying Person (A Goyses) as the first of the trilogy.
Daniel London is an actor and screenwriter from Pittsburgh, now living in New Jersey. His acting credits include the films Minority Report, Old Joy, and Synecdoche, New York, and he has appeared in productions with the Atlantic Theater Company, Roundabout Theatre Company, and Vineyard Theater. He is currently developing his screenplay Missing in Your Area with the production company 2AM. This is his first libretto.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/A-Goyses
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concert
panel discussion
Max Weinreich and the Meaning of Yiddish - Live on Zoom
Max Weinreich spent the entirety of his adult life building YIVO and the field of Yiddish Studies. A 'convert' to the cause of Yiddishism in his adolescence, he pursued a doctorate in German philology in Weimar Germany with the explicit goal of returning to Eastern Europe to contribute to the project of building a modern, secular Yiddish culture. His study visits to Yale University and Vienna in the early 1930s proved transformational in broadening and revising his understanding of the role of the social sciences in Jewish life as a tool for strengthening Jews' psychological and material resources. The destruction of the traditional Yiddish heartland in Eastern Europe and his experiences leading YIVO in post-WWII New York City added yet another dimension to Weinreich's conception of the importance of both Yiddish and Jewish Studies for the future of American and world Jewry. Would Max Weinreich recognize Yiddish studies today?
Moderated by Kalman Weiser and featuring Naomi Seidman, Kenneth Moss, and Jeffrey Shandler, this panel will examine Weinreich's evolving understanding of the meaning of Yidishe visnshaft (Yiddish studies) and the role of Yiddish in Jewish life throughout his career.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/Max-Weinreich
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panel discussion
lecture
Family History Today: Novel NYC Records – Live on Zoom
While New York's strict vital records laws can stymie genealogy researchers, there are several more obscure record types you can use to find your ancestors in the city. In this lecture, Alec Ferretti, professional genealogist at the Wells Fargo Family & Business History Center, will provide an overview of some NYC historical record sets that are often overlooked by genealogists, such as licensing records, voter registrations, and education records.
Ticket Info: Pay what you wish; register here for a Zoom link
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lecture
book talk
Heidegger in Ruins - Live on Zoom
Martin Heidegger’s sympathies for the conservative revolution and National Socialism have long been well known. As the rector of the University of Freiburg in the early 1930s, he worked hard to reshape the university in accordance with National Socialist policies. He also engaged in an all-out struggle to become the movement’s philosophical preceptor, “to lead the leader.” Yet for years, Heidegger’s defenders have tried to separate his political beliefs from his philosophical doctrines. They argued, in effect, that he was good at philosophy but bad at politics. But with the 2014 publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, it has become clear that he embraced a far more radical vision of the conservative revolution than previously suspected. His dissatisfaction with National Socialism, it turns out, was mainly that it did not go far enough. The notebooks show that far from being separated from Nazism, Heidegger’s philosophy was suffused with it.
In Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology, Richard Wolin explores what the notebooks mean for our understanding of arguably the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, and of his ideas—and why his legacy remains radically compromised. Join YIVO for a discussion with Wolin about this book led by YIVO's Executive Director Jonathan Brent.
About the Speakers
Richard Wolin is distinguished professor of history, political science, and comparative literature at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuseand The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism.
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; register at yivo.org/Heidegger
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book talk