film and discussion
The Hidden Jews of Ethiopia
Nafkot – Yearning, a new film by Dr. Malka Shabtay
The Hidden Jews of Ethiopia, a new book by Dr. Marla Brettschneider
Panelists
Dr. Malka Shabtay is an applied anthropologist who has worked for decades with the Ethiopian Jewish community in Israel and more recently in Ethiopia. Author of many books, she has taught in numerous academic institutes including the Ruppin Academic Center and the Institute for Immigration and Social Integration. Shabtay combines research, consultancy, and training for organizations applying cultural and cross-cultural perspectives in their work. Nafkot (Yearning 2022) is her second ethnographic film.
Mr. Belayneh Tazebku Worku is one of the leaders of the Ethiopian North Shewa Bete-Israel community and serves as the manager of the synagogue, Brit Olam, in Addis Ababa. Working in the community for twenty-five years, Tazebku Worku has focused on raising awareness and community organizing both locally and nationally toward full civil and human rights of the Bete Israel people and community. Tazebku Worku also works to meet concrete current needs of the community such as the creation of a Jewish cemetery and a Bete Israel community settlement in Debre Berhan, in the Amhara region.
Dr. Marla Brettschneider, Professor holds a joint appointment in Politics & Feminist Studies at the University of New Hampshire. She is a groundbreaking scholar of Jewish diversity politics and political theory, also using diversity as a frame to address antisemitism in the US and globally. Lecturing widely and author of numerous award-winning books, her works include: Jewish Feminism and Intersectionality; The Family Flamboyant: Race Politics, Queer Families, Jewish Lives; The Hidden Jews of Ethiopia; The Jewish Phenomenon in Sub-Saharan Africa, & The Narrow Bridge: Jewish Views on Multiculturalism with a forward by Cornel West.
Ticket Info: $15; register at eventbrite.com
Presented by:
film and discussion
book talk
Jewish Culture Between Canon and Heresy - Live on Zoom
A new career-spanning anthology from Jewish historian David Biale, Jewish Culture Between Canon and Heresy, brings over a dozen of his key essays together for the first time. These pieces, written between 1974 and 2016, are all representative of a method Biale calls "counter-history": "the discovery of vital forces precisely in what others considered marginal, disreputable and irrational." The themes that have preoccupied Biale throughout the course of his career—in particular power, sexuality, blood, and secular Jewish thought—span the periods of the Bible, late antiquity, and the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. Exemplary essays in this volume argue for the dialectical relationship between modernity and its precursors in the older tradition, working together to "brush history against the grain" in order to provide a sweeping look at the history of the Jewish people. Join YIVO for a discussion focusing on this new anthology featuring Biale in conversation with Sarah Abrevaya Stein.
About the Speakers
David Biale is Emanuel Ringelblum Distinguished Professor of Jewish History at the University of California, Davis. He was educated at UC Berkeley, the Hebrew University and UCLA. His most recent books are Hasidism: A New History (with seven co-authors), Gershom Scholem: Master of the Kabbalah and Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought. Earlier books are Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History, Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History, Eros and the Jews and Blood and Belief: The Circulation of a Symbol Between Jews and Christians. He is also the editor of Cultures of the Jews: A New History and the Norton Anthology of World Religions: Judaism. His books have been translated into eight languages and have won the National Jewish Book Award three times.
Professor Biale has served as chair of the Department of History at UC Davis and as Director of the Davis Humanities Institute. He also founded and directed the UC Davis Program in Jewish Studies. In 2011, he won the university’s highest award, the UC Davis Prize for Undergraduate Teaching and Scholarly Achievement. He also founded the Posen Society of Fellows, an international doctoral fellowship for students of modern Jewish history and culture.
Sarah Abrevaya Stein is author or editor of ten books. In The New York Times, Matti Friedman has written that "Stein, a UCLA historian, has ferocious research talents [...] and a writing voice that is admirably light and human." Stein's most recent book, Wartime North Africa, A Documentary History 1934-1950 (Stanford University Press, with the cooperation of the USHMM, 2022), is the first-ever collection of primary documents on North African history and the Holocaust. Stein's previous book, Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux: Macmillman, 2019), explores the intertwined histories of a single family, Sephardic Jewry, and the dramatic ruptures that transformed southeastern Europe and the Judeo-Spanish diaspora. Stein’s books, articles, and pedagogy have won numerous prizes, including two National Jewish Book Awards, the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award. Stein is also co-editor (with David Biale of UCD) of Stanford University Press Series in Jewish History and Culture.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/Canon-and-Heresy
Presented by:
book talk
book talk
This Was Not America - Live on Zoom
This Was Not America: A Wrangle Through Jewish-Polish-American History is a new book featuring a conversation, often contentious, between Michael Steinlauf, historian of Polish-Jewish culture and child of Holocaust survivors, and the anthropologist and artist Elzbieta Janicka. The conversation touches on critical moments in Jewish, Polish, and American history, including fleeing the Warsaw Ghetto, living underground fighting for social justice in 1960s’ Seattle, and helping dismantle the communist system in 1980s’ Poland. Beyond individual biography, the talk ranges from the apparition of a dybbuk in postwar Brooklyn to the consequences of a non-critical approach to Polish-Jewish studies. Join YIVO for a discussion of this unique new book with co-authors Steinlauf and Janicka led by YIVO’s own Eddy Portnoy.
About the Speakers
Michael Steinlauf is the author of Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust as well as numerous studies of Jewish culture in prewar Poland. He was one of the founders of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Currently he is completing studies of the Polish Jewish dramatist Mark Arnshteyn and the Yiddish culture hero Y. L. Peretz.
Elzbieta Janicka is a literary scholar and visual artist. She is the author of Sztuka czy Naród? [Art or Nation?] and Festung Warschau, exposing violence and exclusion embedded in Polish dominant culture, as well as numerous studies of Polish antisemitism. Most recently she co-authored Philosemitic Violence. Poland’s Jewish Past in New Polish Narratives (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021).
Eddy Portnoy, the Senior Academic Advisor & Director of Exhibitions at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, is the author of Bad Rabbi and Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/This-Was-Not-America
Presented by:
book talk
book talk
Knowledge Under Siege: The Guardians of Fate - Live on Zoom
This event is a part of YIVO's series Knowledge Under Siege, which presents recent scholarship from Poland about the Holocaust and antisemitism. Each event features scholars discussing a recent book they worked on.
Bozena Keff, Straznicy fatum [The guardians of fate] (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2020).
“Straznicy fatum” [The guardians of fate] by Bozena Keff is a collection of essays on Polish-language literature about the Holocaust. Keff asks whether those literary works contain a diagnosis of Polish culture that corresponds with its assessment by critical humanities and arts today. In the texts analyzed by Keff, Poles are presented as so-called “Polish witnesses to the Holocaust” who were allegedly “helpless” because of the Nazi terror. Today – on the basis on the same texts – they are recognized as co-perpetrators. Another topic discussed by Keff are the terms and conditions that Polish culture has imposed upon Jews who undertook to integrate into it. “Host and guest regulations” were and are intuitively known to all Jews in Poland as a set of unwritten, because obvious, rules of domination and submission. Keff examines their functioning notably in the biography and work of a Polish-language poet of the Holocaust Tadeusz Rózewicz.
About the Speaker
Bozena Keff – a philosopher by training, she is a writer, poet, feminist activist and theorist. Her books include: “Postac z cieniem. Postacie zydówek w polskiej literaturze konca XIX wieku i dwudziestolecia miedzywojennego” [Figure with shadow. Portraits of Jewish women in Polish literature at the turn of the twentieth century] (2001); “Barykady. Kroniki obsesyjne” [Barricades. Obsessive chronicles] (2005). Her monograph “Antysemityzm. Niezamknieta historia” [Anti-Semitism. Story unfinished] (2013) addresses antisemitism as a durable element in European and Polish history and culture. Translated into Hebrew, French, Italian, Spanish and German, her transgressive poetry suite “Utwór o Matce i ojczyznie” (2008) was published in the US as “On Mother and Fatherland” in the translation of Alissa Valles and Benjamin Paloff in 2017.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/KnowledgeUnderSiege3
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book talk
lecture
German Refugee Classicists: Eva Lehmann Fiesel and Ruth Fiesel – Live on Zoom
This presentation illuminates the extraordinary lives and legacies of two German-born classicists, Eva Lehmann Fiesel and her daughter Ruth Erika Fiesel, warmly welcomed here in the United States as refugees from the Nazis and their "race laws" in 1934. A gifted specialist in Etruscan studies born in 1891, Eva Fiesel died in 1937, seven months after assuming a post as Visiting Associate Professor of Classics at the all-female Bryn Mawr College outside of Philadelphia, unable to fulfill her immense scholarly promise. Ruth, who was born in 1921 and died in 1994, earned her own BA in classics from Bryn Mawr in 1942, subsequently availing herself of opportunities to undertake graduate work in classics in both the United States and abroad. Yet she ultimately opted to teach Latin at the pre-collegiate level and work as in secondary school administration rather than pursue a PhD. and university career in classics.
How and why do the achievements of this mother-daughter dyad matter not only to the profession of classics worldwide, but also to women’s history, and that of our country? Scholar Judith Peller Hallett will focus on the role of gender in the emigration of German refugee classicists to the United States, explore both similarities and differences between the study of classics in German and American educational institutions, and reflect on how generational as well as socio-cultural change shaped the shared commitment to classical studies – and its glorious interdisciplinarity – by members of the same family.
About the Speaker
Judith Peller Hallett is Professor of Classics and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Emerita at the University of Maryland, College Park. She holds a BA in Latin from Wellesley College and an AM and PhD in Classical Philology from Harvard University. She has published widely in the areas of Latin language and literature; women, the family and sexuality in Greco-Roman antiquity; and the study and reception of classics in the Anglophone world. A former Blegen Visiting Scholar in the Department of Classics at Vassar College and Suzanne Deal Booth Resident Scholar at the Center for Intercollegiate Studies in Rome, she has also held fellowships from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. A 2013 collection of essays from Routledge— Domina Illustris: Latin Literature, Gender and Reception, edited by Donald Lateiner, Barbara Gold and Judith Perkins—celebrates her academic career.
Ticket Info: Free; register at lbi.org/events/german-refugee-classicists/
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lecture
yiddish club
YIVO Yiddish Club: Yiddish Hip Hop with Josh "Socalled" Dolgin – Live on Zoom
Nu, vilst redn a bisele yidish? An event for Yiddish enthusiasts the world over, the YIVO Yiddish club is an informal monthly gathering to celebrate Mame-loshn. Hosted by Shane Baker, sessions take place in English, and are liberally peppered with Yiddish. Each month Baker is joined by a different guest who discusses their work and a related Yiddish cultural theme. In the spirit of a club, sessions are held as interactive zoom meetings in which participants can see and hear one another. Each session includes ample time for audience questions, group discussion, and, time permitting, knock-down, drag-out arguments. Attendees need not know any Yiddish to attend, though some familiarity with the language is highly recommended.
This session features Josh "Socalled" Dolgin, a pianist, accordionist, producer, journalist, photographer, filmmaker, magician, cartoonist and puppet maker based in Montreal, Quebec. Dolgin has lectured and has led master classes in music festivals around the world, from Moscow to Paris, from London to LA, and from Krakow to San Francisco, and has performed on every continent. He has released over 6 albums which include musical collaborations with artists across a variety of genres ranging from Classical, Jazz, and Hip Hop to Klezmer. In December 2015, Socalled was presented with the “Adrienne Cooper Memorial Dreaming in Yiddish” award for his work disseminating and exploring Yiddish culture.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/YiddishClub18 for a Zoom link
Presented by:
yiddish club
book talk
Elie Wiesel: Confronting the Silence - In-person and Live on Zoom
As an orphaned survivor and witness to Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) became a torchbearer for victims and survivors of the Holocaust at a time when the world preferred to forget. How did this frail, soft-spoken man from a small village in the Carpathians become such an influential presence on the world stage? Drawing from Wiesel’s writings and interviews with his family, close friends, scholars, and critics, Joseph Berger’s new book, Elie Wiesel: Confronting the Silence, presents Wiesel as both a revered Nobel laureate and a man of complex psychological texture and contradictions. Join YIVO for a discussion of this new book featuring Berger in conversation with Samuel Norich.
About the Speakers
Joseph Berger was a New York Times reporter, columnist, and editor for thirty years, and he continues to contribute periodically. He has taught urban affairs at the City University of New York’s Macaulay Honors College. He is the author of Displaced Persons: Growing Up American After the Holocaust and lives in New York City.
Samuel Norich served as executive director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research from 1980-1992, and as vice president of the World Jewish Congress from 1975 to 1981. Norich is the author of What Will Bind Us Now?: A Report on the Institutional Ties Between Israel and American Jewry. Norich currently serves as the president of the Forward Association. He was the publisher and chief executive of the English and Yiddish Forward for two decades, until he retired in 2017.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/Elie-Wiesel
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book talk
concert
Spring Romance: Phoenix Chamber Ensemble performs Mozart, Dvorak and Berens – In-person Event and Livestreamed on YouTube
Join Phoenix Chamber Ensemble pianists Vassa Shevel and Inessa Zaretsky and guest artists Ellen Braslavsky on piano, Michael Katz on cello, and Anna Elashvili on violin, for Mozart’s Piano Trio in C Major, K.548; Dvorak’s Four Romantic Pieces Op.75 for violin and piano; Berens’ Gesellschafts Quartet in F Major, Op. 80 for violin, cello and piano 4 hands; Berens’ Gesellschafts Quartet in A minor, Op. 72 for violin, cello and piano 4 hands; and Berens’ Gesellschafts Quartet Op. 72 for violin, cello and piano 4 hands.
Made possible by the Stravinsky Institute Foundation through the generous support of the Blavatnik Family Foundation.
Ticket Info:
In person: $15 general; $10 members, seniors, students – ADVANCE PURCHASE REQUIRED; register here
On YouTube: Pay what you wish; register here
Presented by:
concert
panel discussion
Conversation with Stefan Schirmer and FC Ente Bagdad
Join us as we chat with winners of the 2023 Obermayer Awards. Learn more about the work, perspectives, and personal motivations of these inspiring people. We'll show a brief film, have an in-depth conversation facilitated by Widen the Circle Executive Director Joel Obermayer, and invite questions from the audience.
Stefan Schirmer has been the guiding force behind making Mainz-based German football club FC Ente Bagdad into a beacon for diversity, acceptance, and equality, as well is in helping people recognize and understand Jewish history and culture. The club organizes many popular remembrance events, particularly during Mainz Remembrance Weeks, and reaches out to “new Germans” from war-torn countries including Syria, Afghanistan, and Ukraine who have found refuge in Mainz. For one match, the entire team wore kippahs in solidarity with a person who had recently been attacked.
Ticket Info: Free; register at lbi.org/events/obermayer-fc-ente-bagdad/
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panel discussion
memorial event
Commemoration of the 80th Anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising at Der Shteyn
Please Note: This event does NOT take place at the Center for Jewish History.
Please join us to commemorate the 80th Anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Speaking in the program are Irena Klepfisz, Jeffrey Shandler, and Mindy Spiegel. The artistic program will include Joanne Borts, Menachem Fox, Shifee Losacco, Elliott Palevsky, and Daniella Rabbani, as well as children from the Workers Circle Midtown Shule.
This event will take place at der shteyn, the memorial stone in Riverside Park between 83rd and 84th Street. The program will be recorded and made available on YouTube.
Ticket Info: Free; no registration required.
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memorial event
film screening
The Levys of Monticello - In-person Event
Join us for a screening of The Levys of Monticello followed by a discussion with filmmaker, Steven Pressman and historian, Hasia Diner.
When Thomas Jefferson died in 1826, he left behind a mountain of personal debt, which forced his heirs to sell his beloved Monticello home and all of its possessions. The Levys of Monticello is a documentary film that tells the little-known story of the Levy family, which owned and carefully preserved Monticello for nearly a century – far longer than Jefferson or his descendants. The remarkable story of the Levy family also intersects with the rise of antisemitism that runs throughout the course of American history.
Ticket Info: $10; register at ajhs.org/events/film-screening-the-levys-of-monticello/ for a Zoom link
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film screening
conversation
At Lunch with Hannah Goldfield – Live on Zoom
Julie Salamon (Wall Street Journal & NY Times) sits down with The New Yorker’s food critic and writer for the weekly Tables for Two restaurant column Hannah Goldfield. Previously, she was a fact checker at The New Yorker and an editor at T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Her writing has appeared in New York magazine and the Times among other publications.
Ticket Info: Free; register at ajhs.org/events/at-lunch-with-hannah-goldfield/ for a Zoom link
Presented by:
conversation
concert
Innovators in Exile Concert – In-Person Event
In 1922, a group of musicians organized a festival in Salzburg to showcase modern music. Seen by some scholars as an attempt to subvert the conservative image of a newly-founded Austria being promoted by the Salzburg Festival, the festival returned in 1923 as the International Society for Contemporary Music, which still exists today.
However, even by 1923, the festival had already earned the ire of anti-modernists, with one reporter calling the participants “musical Bolsheviks.” The majority of those composers would later be exiled – either as Jews or because Nazi ideology linked modernism with Jewishness and communism. Most of these composers, in the midst of or on the precipice of vibrant careers, are now virtually unknown.
Join us in honoring the centennial of the ISCM with three evenings of music from these exiled composers, including Rudolf Reti, Paul Pisk, Karl Weigl, Hugo Kauder, Wilhelm Grosz, Egon Lustgarten, Paul Hindemith, and Egon Wellesz. On April 20th, at the Center for Jewish History, we will kick off the series with chamber works and talks by Michael Haas (exil.arte) and Alexis Rodda (soprano, program coordinator of Elysium Between Two Continents, and independent musicologist).
Ticket Info: Free, optional $10 donation; register at lbi.org/events/innovators-in-exile-2023/
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concert
class
All in the Mishpocheh: Intro to Jewish Genealogy at CJH - Live on Zoom
10-session classes run from April through June 2023
Fridays, 10:00-11:15 am ET, April 21 – June 30
Join the staff of the Center for Jewish History’s Ackman & Ziff Family Genealogy Institute for this 10-week online genealogy course, suitable for beginner and intermediate learners. Topics include: family trees, online search strategies, immigration, DNA, Holocaust, finding your ancestral towns, name changes, obtaining records from other countries, and much more. By the end of this course, you will have a portfolio of new documents and information on your ancestors' lives ready to share with your family.
Students are encouraged to participate live but are welcome to watch or review class recordings as needed.
FAQ
Can I contact the instructor outside of the class time?
One unique aspect of this course is that our librarian instructors not only permit, but encourage, their students to reach out to them beyond the class time – via email, video chat, or in-person visits. Former participants say this one-on-one availability was instrumental in their personal research progress, providing the tailored guidance they needed to chart their research path or break through longstanding “brick walls.”
Will I get personal feedback?
You will definitely receive personal feedback to your questions either during or between classes. Your fellow students may also offer their advice during class or in the What’s App chat group, which has been an invaluable asset to students’ learning.
How many people will be in the class?
Class sizes have ranged from about 20-30 students, with an average of 10-15 always participating live on Zoom and others watching some or many of the classes non-synchronous to the Zoom class time.
Read reviews by past participants!
"Absolutely take this class if you are interested in genealogy or just curious."
"The information and guidance provided helped me to launch my genealogy research in an effective way."
"The course gave me terrific resources to use in the future and demonstrated how to use the resources. It was terrific to listen to the progress of others and how they reached their goals."
"You have opened the door to an endless journey."
Registration Info: $295 general, $255 CJH members (members are those who have donated $50 or more to the Center in the past year) - Register here
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class
book talk
The Population History of German Jewry: 1815–1939 - In-person Event
The late Steven Mark Lowenstein was a brilliant social historian who, after retiring from his academic position at the University of Judaism, labored until his final days to complete a monumental demographic history of German Jewry. Lowenstein took the research of Hebrew University demographer Professor Usiel Oscar Schmelz and brought it to life with insights into the daily experiences of German-speaking Jews. David N. Myers (UCLA), who co-edited the book for its posthumous publication, will join Marsha Rozenblit (Maryland), David Ellenson (HUC), and Lowenstein’s daughter, Ruth Glasser (UCONN), for a celebration of Lowenstein’s legacy and his final opus.
If you would like to attend this program virtually, please select the "Virtual Admission" option when reserving tickets on Eventbrite.
Reviews
“The pioneering research of Usiel Schmelz and Steven Lowenstein provides a new dimension for German-Jewish History. Instead of relying on a few personal accounts and anecdotal evidence, this book constitutes a tool to decipher the complete picture of the German-Jewish community. It is an indispensable source for everyone interested in the modern Jewish experience.”
— Michael Brenner, President of the International Leo Baeck Institute for the Research of German-Jewish History and Culture
“Steven Lowenstein’s landmark volume presents the history of German Jewry from the early 19th century into the Nazi era through the prism of shifting population patterns. Replete with an incomparable array of data, the book’s meticulous narrative also serves as a memorial to a diverse Jewish community whose history reflected the triumphs and tragedies of the modern Jewish experience.”
— Jack Wertheimer, The Jewish Theological Seminary
“Steven Lowenstein’s demographic history of Jews in Germany is a state-of-the-art study that will certainly become a classic. He has absorbed and presented in highly readable prose the chronological, regional, and topical demographic interpretations of the years 1815-1939 while also engaging in historiographical debates. This new and all-embracing picture of German Jewry offers readers careful analyses of such topics as urbanization, marriage and intermarriage, births and deaths, in and out migration and internal migration, and addresses age, region, and gender while also comparing to non-Jewish populations in Germany. The book is breathtaking in its research and scope and a must for every scholar of German-Jewish history.”
— Marion Kaplan, Skirball Professor Emerita of Modern Jewish History
“Stephen Lowenstein has published the definitive demographic history of German Jewry. This is a monumental curated archive, actually a twice posthumous book. Lowenstein's initial statistics were compiled by the Israeli demographer Oscar Schmelz, and Lowenstein himself died before finishing this tome. The massive detail will help us explain a burning question in German history. Does the trend toward ‘racial suicide’ documented in this book help explain the cultural achievements of Jews in modern Germany? Family historians, genealogy buffs and population historians will rely on Lowenstein's volume and appreciate its comparative reach and meticulous detail.”
— Deborah Hertz, Wouk Chair in Modern Jewish Studies, Department of History, University of California at San Diego
Ticket Info: General: $10; LBI/CJH/Partner Members, Students, Seniors: $5; register at lbi.org/events/steve-lowenstein/
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book talk
concert
Virtual Tenement Concert: Songs of Yiddish New York with YIVO - Live on YouTube
Back by popular demand! The Tenement Museumand YIVO are partnering up again on April 24th on YouTube Live for a night exploring Jewish immigrant New York City of yesteryear through musical performances from inside the recreated 1890s parlor of the Levine family, immigrants from Eastern Europe.
At once a “golden land” of opportunity and joy and a place full of the challenges of immigrant life, New York held a myriad of experiences for new Americans. From songs about leaving one’s homeland and arriving in Ellis Island, to anthems of the everyday difficulties of sweatshop labor, to hit songs of the Yiddish theater that exemplify leisure time activities, this concert uses music to bring the bustling world of the Jewish lower East side to life.
A performance of Pulitzer prize-finalist Alex Weiser’s song cycle, Coney Island Days, will round out the program. Based on an oral history interview with the composer’s late grandmother, these songs explore childhood activities in Coney Island, working in the family’s knish store, visiting the Russian bath, and more.
The concert will feature introduction and historical commentary by Alex Weiser in conversation with Tenement Museum President Annie Polland, and musical performances by singer Eliza Bagg and pianist Paul Kerekes.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/Songs-of-Yiddish-NY for a YouTube link
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concert
book talk
Speaking Yiddish to Chickens - Live on Zoom
Author Seth Stern joins us to discuss his new book Speaking Yiddish to Chickens, moderated by the Chair of Jewish Studies at the University of Connecticut, Avinoam Patt.
Most of the roughly 140,000 Holocaust survivors who came to the United States in the first decade after World War II settled in big cities such as New York. But a few thousand chose an alternative way of life on American farms. More of these accidental farmers wound up raising chickens in southern New Jersey than anywhere else. Speaking Yiddish to Chickens is the first book to chronicle this little-known chapter in American Jewish history when these mostly Eastern European refugees – including the author’s grandparents – found an unlikely refuge and gateway to new lives in the US on poultry farms. They gravitated to a section of south Jersey anchored by Vineland, a small rural city where previous waves of Jewish immigrants had built a rich network of cultural and religious institutions.
Ticket Info: Free; register at ajhs.org/events/book-talk-speaking-yiddish-to-chickens/ for a Zoom link
Presented by:
book talk
panel discussion
Curriculum Wars and the Struggle for the Future of Judaism – In-person Event
News reports about curricular standards in Hasidic schools have set off a polarizing public debate. With the rapid growth of Hasidic Judaism, many observers recognize that the future of American Judaism is being contested. Arguments over the Jewish curriculum are not new. In his new book, The Jewish Reformation, Michah Gottlieb (NYU) explores how in the 18th and 19th centuries these disputes reflected competing spiritual visions of Judaism. Join us for an illuminating program about the contemporary relevance of these centuries-old debates. David Ellenson (Hebrew Union College) will moderate a conversation between Gottlieb, Yitzhak Melamed, (Johns Hopkins University) and Naomi Seidman (University of Toronto).
If you would like to attend this program virtually, please select the "Virtual Admission" option when reserving tickets on Eventbrite.
Ticket Info: General: $10; LBI/CJH/Partner Members, Students, Seniors: $5; register atregister at lbi.org/events/curriculum-wars/
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panel discussion
lecture
Between the Living and the Dead: Considering Tradition in the Jewish Cemeteries of Poland, 1918-1945 – Live on Zoom
The Jewish cemetery has long been a site guided by Jewish law and traditional ritual practice. However, in the early twentieth century, pressures of modernity and urbanization in Poland strained traditional practices at the Jewish cemetery. In this talk, Alison B. Curry will examine how politics, modernity, and tragedy altered traditional uses of Jewish cemeteries in Poland.
While during the interwar period specific aspects of funerals, burials, and cemetery usage relied less and less on Jewish tradition and law, with the start of the Second World War, caring for bodies after death became both a priority and a triviality. Handling the ever-increasing numbers of the deceased in the ghetto meant that, in many cases, various death traditions were abandoned altogether. On the other hand, the sanctity of Jewish tradition and ethics emboldened many activists to call for returns to traditional practices of funeral and burial during the Holocaust.
In this talk, Curry argues that the Jewish cemetery became a central space for negotiation of identity – a place where the living considered their own Jewishness, reflected in that of the dead.
About the Speaker
Alison B. Curry is a doctoral candidate in History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Previously, she received her M.A. in Holocaust and Genocide Studies from Gratz College and a Graduate Certificate in Digital Public Humanities from George Mason University. Curry’s dissertation research focuses on the ritual, spatial, and functional uses of Jewish cemeteries in Poland between 1918 and 1945. Currently, Curry is a Saul Kagan Fellow in Advanced Shoah Studies as well as the 2022-2023 Max Weinreich Center Fellow in Polish Jewish Studies. Her research has also been supported by the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies, the Association for Slavic, East European & Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/Cemeteries-of-Poland for a Zoom link
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
Family History Today: Give Us Our Name - Jewish Genealogy and American Jewish Religion – Live on Zoom
Since its organizational beginnings in the 1970s, Jewish genealogy has offered countless Americans of Jewish descent an opportunity to connect with Jewish history emotionally and spiritually. Based on her interviews with genealogists around the country, observations of Jewish Genealogical Societies, and studies of Jewish genealogists’ papers, Rachel B. Gross, Associate Professor and Chair of American Jewish Studies at San Francisco State University, will discuss how and why genealogy research has come to be viewed as a religious practice by many American Jews today.
Ticket Info: Pay what you wish; register here for a Zoom link
Presented by:
lecture
book talk
Unearthed - In-person and Live on Zoom
As a child, Meryl Frank was the chosen inheritor of family remembrance. Her aunt Mollie told her about Vilna, the Yiddish theater, and, above all else, Meryl’s cousin, the radiant Franya Winter. Franya was a leading light of Vilna’s Yiddish theater, a remarkable and precocious woman who cast off the restrictions of her Hasidic family and community to play roles as prostitutes and bellhops, lovers and nuns. Yet there was one thing her aunt Mollie would never tell Meryl: how Franya died. Before Mollie passed away, she gave Meryl a Yiddish book containing the terrible answer but forbade her to read it. And for years, Meryl obeyed.
Drawing on archives across four continents, including extensively from YIVO, and guided by the shocking truth recorded in the pages of the forbidden book, Meryl Frank's Unearthed traces her search for her cousin Franya. Meryl’s discoveries reveal a lost world destroyed by hatred, illuminating the cultural haven of Vilna and its resistance during World War II. Join YIVO for a discussion with Meryl Frank about this new book led by Opinion Editor of the Forward, Laura E. Adkins.
About the Speakers
Meryl Frank is president of Makeda Global Network, an international consulting firm that works with thousands of women worldwide. Over a long and varied career, she has been an activist, a mayor, an ambassador, and a champion for women’s leadership and political participation around the world. In 2009, President Obama appointed her United States Representative and, subsequently, Ambassador to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. In May of 2022, President Biden appointed Frank to a seat on the US Holocaust Memorial Council. She is also a member the Board of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
Laura E. Adkins is an award-winning writer, editor, and speaker based in New York. She is the Opinion Editor of the Forward. Laura’s writing on antisemitism, Orthodox Judaism, data, and gender has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Glamour, and other outlets. She was previously the Opinion Editor of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the editor of Jewish Insider, and an assistant blogs editor at The Times of Israel.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/Unearthed
Presented by:
book talk
symposium
Zionism and American Jews: Bringing Us Together and Pulling Us Apart – In Person and Livestreamed on Zoom
Zionism and American Jews marks the State of Israel’s 75th birthday by gathering twenty internationally recognized scholars at the Center for Jewish History to discuss the long relationship between the American Jewish community and the Zionist movement.
Since the Jewish state’s founding in 1948, American Jews have been stalwart supporters of Israel. But growing domestic political instability in Israel, spiking tensions between Israelis and Palestinians, and surging antisemitism in the U. S., have caused new splits to emerge among American Jews about the Zionist movement. Generationally as well as politically, American Jews appear to be more divided about Zionism than ever. Yet these divisions are hardly new. In fact, for nearly a century and a half, Zionism has been a source of contention, not just consensus, among Jews in the United States and around the world. The question of whether the Jewish people should be viewed as an ethnically defined nation or merely a religious community has been hotly contested within Jewish communities from the late 19th century to the present. Zionism and American Jews chronicles this long history in the effort to explain present-day tensions and opportunities in the relationship between the American Jewish community and the State of Israel.
The symposium, which is organized in partnership with the National Library of Israel, is the first installment in a larger series of public symposia sponsored by the Center for Jewish History’s brand new Jewish Public History Forum. Future symposia at The Forum will include “Jewish Responses to Fascism, 1933-2023” (fall 2023), “Jews and Immigration: 1924-2024 (spring 2024), and “Jews and Democracy: Antiquity to the Present” (fall 2024).
This program is presented with the generous support of David Berg Foundation.
Click here for a schedule, list of speakers, and tickets.
Ticket Info:
In person: $36 (including lunch and reception)
Zoom livestream: $5
Presented by:
symposium
lecture
Gaping Mouths and Leaning Towers: The Queer Geometries of Peretz Markish's Long Form Poems, "Di kupe" and "Radyo" - Live on Zoom
Following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Yiddish—that stateless tongue par excellence—found official status within the new “international state” of the Soviet Union. In her seminal study of modernisms, Chana Kronfeld identifies the poetics of Hebrew and Yiddish literatures as processes of de-territorialization (1996). This talk takes Kronfeld’s study of marginal modernisms as a point of departure and aims to interrogate the relationship between space, revolution, and language at the beginning of the Soviet experience. Specifically, this paper places Peretz Markish’s Yiddish long-form poems, Di kupe (The Mound) and Radyo (Radio), in conversation with the architectural aspirations of the Soviet avant-garde. The poems’ irregular—indeed, impossible—representation of bodies in space resists established traditional definitions of being and belonging and, in turn, undercuts the authority of any traditional establishment itself. To enact his takedown of tradition, Markish disrupts linguistic and spatial conventions to (de)construct fictional edifices: the mound (Di kupe) is at once divine and profane, everywhere and nowhere, concave and erect; the tower of his poem Radyo, too, reaches up, outwards, and down to broadcast a message of cautious hope in the face of violence. Given these mechanisms, Markish’s poetry does not simply wrangle with the paradoxical project of “building communism,” especially as it relates to the new Soviet Jew, but rather performs its contradictions. As they turn the inside out and the upside down, Di kupe and Radyo illustrate the power of revolution as a destabilizing force that both made and unmade one's sense of self.
About the Speaker
Elaine Wilson is a writer, literary translator, language instructor, and PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic Languages at Columbia University. She studies Russian and Yiddish literature of the early Soviet period and is currently at work on her dissertation, entitled: “The Soviet Exodic: Resistance and Revolution in Soviet Russian and Yiddish Literature,1917 – 1935.” She is the recipient of the Vladimir and Pearl Heifetz Memorial Fellowship and the Vivian Lefsky Hort Memorial Fellowship in Jewish Literature at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research for 2022-2023.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/Markish-Poems
Presented by:
lecture
book talk
The Object of Jewish Literature: A Material History - Live on Zoom
With the rise of digital media, the "death of the book” has been widely discussed. But the physical object of the book persists. In her new book, The Object of Jewish Literature: A Material History, through the lens of materiality and objects, Barbara E. Mann tells a history of modern Jewish literature, from novels and poetry to graphic novels and artists’ books. Bringing contemporary work on secularism and design in conversation with literary history, she offers a new and distinctive frame for understanding how literary genres emerge. Join YIVO for a discussion exploring this new publication with Mann in conversation with literary and cultural historian Justin Cammy.
About the Speakers
Barbara E. Mann is the inaugural holder of the Stephen H. Hoffman Professorship in Modern Hebrew Language and Literature at Case Western Reserve University. She is the author of A Place in History: Modernism, Tel Aviv and the Creation of Jewish Urban Space (Stanford, 2006) and Space and Place in Jewish Studies (Rutgers, 2012).
Justin Cammy is professor of Jewish Studies and World Literatures at Smith College. Cammy is the translator from the Yiddish of Sholem Aleichem's Judgment of Shomer, Hinde Bergner's On Long Winter Nights: Memoirs of a Jewish Family in a Galician Township, and most recently Abraham Sutzkever's From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2021).
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/The-Object-of-Jewish-Literature
Presented by:
book talk
yiddish club
YIVO Yiddish Club: Yiddish Club Mixer – Live on Zoom
The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the International Association of Yiddish Clubs (IAYC) join forces to present a Yiddish club mixer. This event, held as a Zoom meeting, will allow Yiddish clubs around the world the opportunity to share a bit about themselves, and to meet fellow Yiddish enthusiasts. Clubs will each share in English or Yiddish* 3-5 minutes about their origins, activities, a fun story about their Yiddish club, and information about how to get involved in their offerings. All are invited to join to watch!
Interested in presenting about your Yiddish club? Please send an email to info@yivo.org with the subject heading “Yiddish Club Mixer.” A limited number of presentation slots are available and will be assigned on a first-come, first-served basis.
*If a club that is held in another language would like to present in their language this is possible, but we ask for screen-share translation in English or Yiddish if so.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/YiddishClub19 for a Zoom link
Presented by:
yiddish club
lecture
Baruch Vladeck and the Movement for Public Housing - Live on Zoom
Baruch Vladeck (1886-1938) was an important figure in American Yiddish culture, serving as the longtime managing editor of the Forverts, a New York City Councilman, president of the American ORT and chairman of the Jewish Labor Committee. Yet one of Vladeck's most significant, but still underappreciated, roles was his place on the first board of the New York City Housing Authority and as a supporter of public housing. The public housing movement in New York in part grew out of earlier Jewish tenant activism, especially on the Lower East Side. In the 1930s, New York City was a pioneer in the field of public housing, creating a system that today is the largest in the nation and houses around 340,000 people in its developments. In this talk, Michael Casper will explore Vladeck's unique place as a pioneer in the public housing movement.
About the Speaker
Michael Casper is the Postdoctoral Associate in Modern Jewish History at Yale University. He is the coauthor, with Nathaniel Deutsch, of A Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate, and the Making of Hasidic Williamsburg, which won a National Jewish Book Award. He is the recipient of the 2022-2034 Fellowship in American Jewish Studies, funded by the Rose and Isidore Drench Memorial Fellowship and the Dora and Mayer Tendler Endowed Fellowship in Jewish Studies.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/Baruch-Vladeck
Presented by:
lecture
book talk
Isaac Bashevis Singer's "Simple Gimpl" - Live on Zoom
Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Gimpl tam” was published on March 30, 1945, in the obscure Yiddish-language journal Idisher kempfer, about a month before the Nazi surrender. A story of bullying and the potential for revenge, it tells the deathbed confession of an orphaned baker who is targeted by his own community for ridicule and practical jokes. Gimpl has come to be seen as a symbol of the Jewish people in the diaspora, and, by synecdoche, minorities in general. Should they be passive in the face of aggression? Or should they defend themselves?
A new bilingual edition features Singer's original Yiddish alongside his own partial translation, now completed and edited by writer and scholar David Stromberg. The book also features the 1953 Saul Bellow translation which first brought the story to fame, new illustrations by Liana Finck, and an afterword by David Stromberg. Join YIVO for a discussion with Stromberg featured in conversation with David Roskies.
About the Speakers
David Stromberg is a writer, translator, and scholar whose work has appeared in The American Scholar, The Massachusetts Review, and Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. His recent books include Old Truths and New Clichés, an edited collection of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s essays, and a speculative nonfiction novella, A Short Inquiry into the End of the World. His follow-up essay, “The Eternal Hope of the Wandering Jew,” appears in The Hedgehog Review.
David G. Roskies is the Sol and Evelyn Henkind Chair emeritus in Yiddish Literature and Culture and a professor emeritus of Jewish literature at The Jewish Theological Seminary. He also served as the Naomi Prawer Kadar Visiting Professor of Yiddish Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Dr. Roskies was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012. Dr. Roskies is a cultural historian of Eastern European Jewry. A prolific author, editor, and scholar, he has published nine books and received numerous awards. In 1981, Dr. Roskies cofounded with Dr. Alan Mintz Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History, and served for seventeen years as editor in chief of the New Yiddish Library series, published by Yale University Press. A native of Montreal, Canada, and a product of its Yiddish secular schools, Dr. Roskies was educated at Brandeis University, where he received his doctorate in 1975.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/Simple-Gimpl
Presented by:
book talk
book talk
Knowledge Under Siege: Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in German Occupied Poland - Live on Zoom
This event is a part of YIVO's series Knowledge Under Siege, which presents recent scholarship from Poland about the Holocaust and antisemitism. Each event features scholars discussing a recent book they worked on.
Night Without End. The Fate of Jews in German Occupied Poland, edited by Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2022).
Jan Grabowski discusses Night Without End, a study focused on the so-called third phase of the Holocaust in Poland. The phase began after the liquidation of the ghettos and continued until the very end of the occupation. The authors of the book look at eight rural counties which, in the summer of 1942, contained a population of more than 110,000 Jews. Less than 2% of them survived the war and close to 70% of those who went into hiding, either perished at the hands of their gentile neighbors, or were turned in by them to the Germans. On the basis of Israeli, Polish, German, US and Russian/Ukrainian archives, the authors study the Jewish struggle for survival, the agency of the local populations, and the German genocidal strategies. The book, which provoked a furious reaction of the Polish nationalist authorities, has now been made available to the English-reading audience through the combined efforts of Yad Vashem and Indiana University Press.
About the Speaker
Jan Grabowski is a Professor of History at the University of Ottawa and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He has authored/co-authored or edited twenty books and published more than eighty articles. His book “Hunt for the Jews. Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland” (2013) has been awarded the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for 2014. In 2018 he co-edited and co-authored “Dalej jest noc” [Night Without End], a two-volume study of the wartime fate of Jews in selected counties of occupied Poland. Grabowski’s most recent book is “Na posterunku. Udzial polskiej policji granatowej i kryminalnej w Zagladzie Zydów” [On duty. The role of the Polish “blue” police in the Holocaust] (2020). He was appointed the 2021-2022 Cleveringa Chair at Leiden University in Netherlands and in December 2022 he has been awarded the Canadian SSHRC Impact Award for research.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/KnowledgeUnderSiege4
Presented by:
book talk
film screening
Babylon: Ghetto, Renaissance, and Modern Oblivion - In-person Event
Babylon: Ghetto, Renaissance, and Modern Oblivion, the award-winning film, considers the resonance of Psalm 137 (By the Waters of Babylon) through the music of two ghettoized peoples – Italian Jews of Mantua during the period of the Counter-Reformation, and African Americans before, during, and after the Harlem Renaissance.
A 29-minute voyage through four centuries, Babylon confronts vital questions about minority musicians and their foundational roles in the music we enjoy today. Who was celebrated? Who was erased? Who was invited to the party and who was left out in the cold? Whose genius was attributed to someone else? Who contributed the most while remaining on the sidelines of history? And most importantly, why does it keep happening?
Ezra Knight narrates a script that interweaves works by Italian-Jewish composer Salomone Rossi (1570 – 1630) and contemporary American Brandon Waddles (1988 –). Additional Rossi works include performances by the Bacchus Consort, Voices of Music, and soprano Jessica Gould in collaboration with lutenist Lucas Harris. Also featuring the groundbreaking Kaleidoscope Vocal Ensemble, other musical selections include historical recordings by Ma Rainey, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Big Mama Thornton, The Fisk Jubilee Singers, as well as two luminaries in contemporary West African music – Kevin Nathaniel Hylton and Yacouba Sissoko.
Since its December 2020 premiere, Babylon has garnered over 90 laurels from film festivals across the globe in multiple categories.
Join YIVO and the American Society for Jewish Music for a screening of this film followed by a Q&A with director Jessica Gould.
About the Speaker
Jessica Gould is a director, writer, and soprano who continues to enjoy a formidable reception for her maiden film project, Babylon: Ghetto, Renaissance, and Modern Oblivion, on the international film festival circuit. Having become a filmmaker by virtue of the pandemic out of a need to continue presenting classical and early music through the prism of history in the absence of live performance, Ms. Gould’s ever expanding laurels include 90 awards and counting from festivals across the globe. As the Founder and Artistic Director of Salon/Sanctuary Concerts, based in New York City, her original projects have received grants from numerous foundations and institutions, generous support which has enabled the series to blossom into one of the more significant presenters of historical performance in New York City and beyond.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/Babylon-Screening
Presented by:
film screening
conversation
At Lunch with Joseph Berger – Live on Zoom
Julie Salamon (Wall Street Journal & NY Times) sits down with New York Times reporter and author Joseph Berger. Joseph was a New York Times reporter, columnist, and editor for thirty years. He is the author of four books: Displaced Persons: Growing Up American After the Holocaust, which was a New York Times Notable Book; The World in a City: Traveling the Globe Through the Neighborhoods of the New, New York; and The Young Scientists: America’s Future and the Winning of the Westinghouse. His biography of Elie Wiesel is scheduled for publication in February 2023.
Ticket Info: Free; register at ajhs.org/events/at-lunch-with-joseph-berger/ for a Zoom link
Presented by:
conversation
lecture
Poetics of Arrival or Return?: Laying the Path toward Industrial Utopia in Peretz Markish’s, 'Der fertsikyeriker man' - Live on Zoom
By the time his pogrom poema Di kupe (The Mound) was first published in Warsaw in 1921, Peretz Markish had already begun work on his self-proclaimed magnum opus Der fertsikyeriker man (The Forty-Year-Old Man; Tel Aviv, 1978), an unrealized contribution to the corpus of Comintern art and literature that appeared in the Soviet Union and throughout the world in the 1920s and 30s.
This talk examines the factors that led Markish to pivot so forcefully from his early abstract expressionism to increasingly ideological writing and demonstrates how this shift is revealed through his verse. This rereading of Di kupe presents the poema as a literary monument to destruction as read through the framework established by Svetlana Boym. In this regard, Di kupeserves as a point of departure for Der fertsikyeriker man, which becomes another literary monument that, through its odic genre form and prophetic mode, ritualizes the pursuit of industrial workers’ utopia in an abstract yet inconspicuously Soviet landscape. He adopts the prophetic mode to substantiate an ideal of proletarian messianism that drives his poetic persona to seek an escape from the world of profane chaos and violence to an industrialized sublime. As an Eastern European Yiddish poet, Markish was born into a nation without a land but a fixation on the Book and the Temple; his book Der fertsikyeriker man envisions not the restoration of the Temple in Jerusalem, but the construction of the factory as the fulfillment of this different, proletarian messianism. By presenting his vision as prophecy, Markish indicates that the industrial utopian project remains an unrealized work in progress—a common goal to continue building toward.
About the Speaker
Roy Ginsberg is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. His research interests revolve around Russian and Yiddish modernisms and the role of the arts and literature in creating and redefining ideological identities over the course of the 20th century. He is currently working on his dissertation project “Building the Ratn-Farband: Monumentalizing the Soviet Utopian Project through Yiddish Art and Literature.” He is the recipient of the Vladimir and Pearl Heifetz Memorial Fellowship and the Vivian Lefsky Hort Memorial Fellowship in Jewish Literature at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research for 2022-2023.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/Poetics-of-Arrival-or-Return
Presented by:
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
Presented by:
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: Free; register at yivo.org/Four-Winters
Presented by:
film screening
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
Presented by:
panel discussion
book talk
Knowledge Under Siege: Philo-Semitic Violence: Poland’s Jewish Past in New Polish Narratives - Live on Zoom
This event is a part of YIVO's series Knowledge Under Siege, which presents recent scholarship from Poland about the Holocaust and antisemitism. Each event features scholars discussing a recent book they worked on.
Elzbieta Janicka and Tomasz Zukowski, Philo-Semitic Violence. Poland’s Jewish past in new Polish narratives (Landham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021).
“Philo-Semitic Violence” examines phenomena termed a “new opening in Polish-Jewish relations,” thought to stem from sociocultural change and the posthumous inclusion of those subjected to antisemitic violence. Elzbieta Janicka and Tomasz Zukowski investigate the terms and conditions of this inclusion whose object is an imagined collective Jewish figure. Different creators and media, same friendly intentions, same warm reception beyond class and political cleavages, regardless of gender and age. The made-to-measure Jewish figure confirms and legitimizes the majority narrative—especially about Polish stances and behaviors during the Holocaust. The consequence: aggression toward anyone who dares to interrupt the narcissistic self-staging of Polish virtue. “Philo-Semitic Violence” exposes the Polish ethnoreligious identity regime that privileges the concern for the collective image over reality. Janicka and Zukowski’s inquiry shows how patterns of exclusion and violence are reproduced when antisemitism—with its Christian sources and community-building function—is not openly problematized, reassessed, and rejected in light of its consequences and the basic principle of equal rights.
About the Speakers
Elzbieta Janicka is a historian of literature interested in the identity and community building function of Polish antisemitism. She is the author of the books: “Szluka czy Naród?” [Art or the Nation?] (2006) on a Polish poet Andrzej Trzebinski, member of a Polish fascist organization during WWII and “Festung Warschau” [Fortress Warsaw] (2011) on present-day symbolic topography of the former Warsaw ghetto area. She recently authored “Herbarium Polonorum (Heimatphotographie)” (2020) and co-authored “This Was Not America. A wrangle through Jewish-Polish-American history” (Academic Studies Press, 2022; with Michael Steinlauf). She works at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
Tomasz Zukowski is a historian of literature interested in the identity issues at the point of convergence of minorities and the dominant group, and the related discursive mechanisms in the context of the Holocaust. He recently published: “Wielki retusz. Jak zapomnielismy, ze Polacy zabijali Zydów” [The Great whitewash. How we forgot that the Poles were killing Jews] (2018) and “Pod presja. Co mówia o Zagladzie ci, którym odbieramy glos” [Under the pressure. What do those we silence say about the Holocaust?] (2021). Co-author and co-editor of “The Holocaust Bystander in Polish Culture, 1942-2015. The Story of Innocence” (Palgrave, 2021). He works at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/KnowledgeUnderSiege5
Presented by:
book talk
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
Presented by:
book talk