book talk
Sholem Asch: Underworld Trilogy - In-person and Live on Zoom
The newly published translated collection Sholem Asch: Underworld Trilogy includes three of Asch’s Yiddish dramas which take place in the world of the criminals and the literal underworld. Translated by Caraid O'Brien, the “Underworld Trilogy” is comprised of: God of Vengeance (1907), Motke Thief (1917), and The Dead Man (1922). All three works were successfully produced on the Yiddish stages of America and Europe, and their influence continues to be felt throughout the world’s theater today. Sholem Asch remains one of the most translated and performed Yiddish playwrights in history.
Join YIVO for a discussion of Sholem Asch: Underworld Trilogy, complete with performances of scenes from the book.
Ticket Info: Free, registration is required.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Presented by:
book talk
book talk
Our Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948-1978 – In-Person Event
Join us for the timely launch of a new book on the American Jewish relationship with Israel focused on its most urgent and sensitive issue: the question of Palestinian rights. Author Geoffrey Levin, assistant professor of Middle Eastern and Jewish Studies at Emory University, will discuss his book Our Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948-1978 (Yale University Press, 2023) in a lively conversation moderated by Professor Lila Corwin-Berman of Temple University. Levin, a former CJH Graduate Fellow, will also discuss the many archival collections he used while researching at the Center. Following the program will be a light reception celebrating the book's release, where the book will be available for sale and signing.
Co-sponsored by New York University's Taub Center for Israel Studies and Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History
Ticket Info: Pay what you wish; register at /tickets/palestine-question-2023-11-30
Presented by:
book talk
conversation
At Lunch with Mark Hetfield – Live on Zoom
Julie Salamon (Author and Journalist) sits down with the President and CEO of HIAS, Mark Hetfield. Mark first joined HIAS in 1989 as a caseworker in Rome, Italy. He has worked for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, a large law firm as an immigration attorney, and has held multiple roles at HIAS over the years. Since being named HIAS’ President and CEO in 2013, Mark has led the transformation of HIAS from helping refugees because they were Jewish to helping refugees because we are Jewish. Mark is proud of HIAS’ role in assisting and resettling refugees of all faiths and ethnicities and as a major implementing partner of the United Nations Refugee Agency and the U.S. Department of State. He is a frequent commentator and writer on refugee issues on television, radio, newspapers, and other media outlets. Mark holds both a Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service and a Juris Doctor from Georgetown University.
Ticket Info: Free; register at ajhs.org/events/at-lunch-with-mark-hetfield/ for a Zoom link
Presented by:
conversation
book talk
Celebrating Yiddish Voices: YIVO’s New Translation Series - In-person and Live on Zoom
Yiddish Voices is an exciting new series of translated works that connects today’s readers with Yiddish literature, in its full range of authors, genres, and subject matter. Published in partnership with the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and Bloomsbury Academic, each volume presents a rich and engaging literary work in English translation with a well-matched historian’s introduction, one that is both erudite and readable. Expertly curated by Alyssa Quint and Elissa Bemporad, the series is organized to showcase first-time translations of enduring Yiddish texts—memoirs, novels, and plays—from which arise topics and themes that have powerful resonance today.
The first volume of Yiddish Voices, Three Yiddish Plays by Women, brings together plays penned in Russia, Poland, and the United States from over a century ago. Each play grapples with enduring women’s issues, including motherhood, pregnancy and abortion, financial independence, and self-realization, and each from a woman’s perspective.
Join YIVO as we celebrate the launch of Yiddish Voices, complete with performances of scenes from the first volume of the series led by Allen Lewis Rickman, and discussion with editors Quint and Bemporad and translators Rickman and Miro Miniewski.
Ticket Info: Free, registration is required.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Presented by:
book talk
book talk
The Disney Revolt- The Great Labor War of Animation's Golden Age – In-person Event
Author Jake S. Friedman joins us with moderator John Canemaker for an in-person discussion at the Center for Jewish History.
Soon after the birth of Mickey Mouse, one animator raised Walt Disney Productions far beyond Walt’s expectations. That animator also led a union war that almost destroyed the company. Art Babbitt worked for the Disney studio throughout the 1930s and through 1941, years in which he and Walt were driven to elevate animation as an art form, as seen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, and Fantasia. But as America struggled through the Great Depression and an impending World War, labor unions spread across Hollywood. Disney fought the unions while Babbitt embraced them. Soon, angry Disney cartoon characters graced picket signs as hundreds of artists went out on strike. Adding fuel to the fire was Willie Bioff, one of Al Capone’s wiseguys, who was seizing control of Hollywood workers and vied for the animators’ union. This is the untold story of American idealism, and how businessmen, artists, and the Mafia fought for control of the world’s most famous studio. Using never-before-seen research from previously lost records, including conversation transcripts from within the studio walls, author and historian Jake S. Friedman reveals the details behind the labor dispute that changed animation and Hollywood forever.
Jake S. Friedman is a New York–based writer, teacher, and artist. He is a longtime contributor to Animation Magazine, and has also written for American History Magazine, The Huffington Post, Animation World Network, Animation Mentor, and The Philadelphia Daily News. For ten years he was an animation artist for films and television as seen on Nickelodeon, Disney Channel, and Saturday Night Live. He currently teaches History of Animation at the Fashion Institute of Technology and at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. The rest of his time he specializes in mental health for the creative psyche.
John Canemaker has won an Academy Award, an Emmy and a Peabody Award for his animation and is an internationally renowned animation historian and teacher at NYU. His film, The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation, won an Oscar in 2005 for Best Animated Short, as well as an Emmy. A 28-minute autobiographical essay about a troubled father/son relationship, The Moon and the Son marked a personal and professional breakthrough in animation storytelling. Canemaker is also a noted author who has written nine books on animation, as well as numerous essays, articles and monographs for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications.
Ticket Info: $10 General Admission or $35 Admission + Copy of the Book
Presented by:
book talk
concert
Rachmaninoff at 150! Phoenix Chamber Ensemble celebrates Chanukah with music by Rachmaninoff, Haydn, and more – In-person event and on YouTube
Join Phoenix Chamber Ensemble pianists Vassa Shevel and Inessa Zaretsky and guest artists Anna Elashvili on violin, Raman Ramakrishnan on cello, and Ivan Filipchyk on accordion. The concert will begin with Lullaby by Sephardic composer Paul Ben-Haim in memory of the terror victims in Israel. The program will include pieces by Rachmaninoff, Bach, Haydn, and Piazolla, and the concert will conclude with Yemei HaChanukah in celebration of the first night of the holiday.
Made possible by the Stravinsky Institute Foundation through the generous support of the Blavatnik Family Foundation.
Ticket Info:
In person: $15 general; $13 seniors, students; $12 members; register here
On YouTube: Pay what you wish; register here
Presented by:
concert
yiddish club
Yiddish Club with Dylan Seders Hoffman - 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 actor, singer, and filmmaker, Dylan Seders Hoffman. She is the founder and artistic director of Chava Productions, a film production company which presents original works located at the intersection of pop culture and 21st century Jewishness with a generous dose of Yiddish. Chava Productions’ first short film Yiddish Mean Girls premiered in the fall of 2022. As an actor, she has performed Off-Broadway with the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, including in their New York Times Critic's Pick production The Sorceress, with the New Yiddish Rep, and at the New York Theatre Festival.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/YiddishClub22 for a Zoom link
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Presented by:
yiddish club
concert
Hanukkah Concert 2023: Jazzukkah for Hanukkah - In-person Event
The Jazzukkah Project is an ensemble that is putting a new sonic spin on the Hanukkah canon, some in English, some in Hebrew, and some instrumental. Their music pays homage to and updates familiar holiday classics, mixing them with jazz cool and salsa flair. For instance, they give “I Have A Little Dreidel” a bebop makeover, inject “Hanukkah, Oh, Hanukkah” with Afro-Cuban grooves and also play original material, like the ballad “Hanukkah Blues.”
As is traditional at the Annual Hanukkah Concert, the evening will begin with a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, the famed Yiddish-speaking author, this year read by noted actress Eleanor Reissa.
Led by the acclaimed bassist Giliad Abro, one of Israel’s top jazz musicians, The Jazzukkah Project will include jazz pianist Tom Oren, percussionist Alon Benjamini, and singer-songwriter, Elana Rozenfeld.
Ticket Info: $18; ASJM & YIVO members: $12; Seniors & students: $9
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Presented by:
concert
concert
Shir Hashirim — An Operetta by Rumshinsky and Shor - In-person and Live on Zoom
Join YIVO for a performance of the music of Shir Hashirim (The Song of Songs), a 1911 operetta by Joseph Rumshinsky and Anshel Shor. Premiered in NYC, Shir Hashirim was subsequently performed around the world. It was so popular that a 1935 film was made based on it, and, according to Rumshinsky, a young George Gershwin could play the whole score by heart. Shir Hashirim is a musical comedy which features several interlocking love triangles that include an aging composer along with his children and their lovers and friends. The work also touches on serious topics including love, mortality, and women's suffrage. Reconstructed from a variety of archival materials collected at YIVO, UCLA, and the Library of Congress, the operetta will be performed by students of the Bard Conservatory Vocal Arts Program.
The Sidney Krum Young Artists Concert Series is made possible by a generous gift from the Estate of Sidney Krum.
Ticket Info:
In Person: $15; YIVO members & students: $10
Zoom Livestream: Free;
registration is required.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Presented by:
concert
book launch and panel discussion
Fascism in America: Past and Present - In-Person Event & Live on YouTube
Join us for the launch of a timely new book on the history of fascism in the United States from the 1930s to today. Co-editors Gavriel Rosenfeld and Janet Ward will lead a panel discussion on Fascism in America: Past and Present (Cambridge University Press, 2023), featuring many of the volume’s contributors, including Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Anna Duensing, Linda Gordon, Alexander Reid Ross, Ousmane Power-Greene, Matthew Specter, Richard Steigmann-Gall, andThomas Weber. After the program, there will be a light reception. The book will also be available for sale and signing.
Ticket Info: Pay what you wish
Register for in-person tickets here.
Register for YouTube tickets here.
Presented by:
book launch and panel discussion
gallery tour
Exhibition Tour of The Golden Path: Maimonides Across Eight Centuries - In-person Event
Join Ilana Benson, YUM’s Director of Museum Education for a guided tour of The Golden Path: Maimonides Across Eight Centuries, illuminating the life and impact of the multifaceted luminary and great Jewish sage across continents and cultures through rare manuscripts and books. Exhibition highlights include manuscripts in Maimonides’s own handwriting, a carved 11th century door to the Torah ark from Cairo’s Ben Ezra Synagogue, and beautifully illuminated medieval manuscripts.
Ticket Info: Free admission but reservations are required. For reservations, please email RSVP@yum.cjh.org.
Presented by:
gallery tour
book launch
The Controversialist: Arguments with Everyone, Left, Right, and Center – In-Person & Live on YouTube
To mark the publication of Martin Peretz’s autobiography, The Controversialist: Arguments with Everyone, Left Right and Center, the Center for Jewish History invites you to a conversation between Peretz and longtime New Republic literary editor, Leon Wieseltier.
From 1974 to 2012, during his years as publisher and editor-in-chief of the New Republic, Martin Peretz was a familiar presence on the American political scene. In its time under his leadership, the magazine was always fresh, erudite, contrarian, and brave. Anyone interested in finding out the most distinctive expert takes on the issues that mattered—whether they be domestic or international, cultural, or political—knew that the New Republic was required reading. In addition, Peretz spent over 40 years as a teacher in the Social Studies program at Harvard. The list of his former students is a who's who of American political life, including former vice president Al Gore, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and many more.
The Controversialist begins in a vibrant but tragedy-stricken community of Yiddish Jews in his native Bronx and takes Peretz, blessed with that rare trait of always being in the right place at the right time, into the same rooms as some of the most prominent writers, thinkers, businessmen, activists, and politicians of the 20th and 21st centuries. Peretz’s insights into his relationships with these men and women—many of them his students, teachers, colleagues, friends, and, of course, enemies—are both original and illuminating.
Through his examination of the personalities, not least his own, at the center of the events that have defined the postwar and neoliberal decades, Peretz makes a rich and compelling argument for the ideals that have been the focus of his life: liberalism, democracy, and Zionism. In revisiting this rich life, he considers, too, what will come next now that those ideals are no longer assured.
The conversation will be followed by a reception, book sales, and signing.
Ticket Info:
In-person tickets: Pay what you wish; click here to register
YouTube: Pay what you wish; click here to register
Presented by:
book launch
lecture
A Very Jewish Christmas: When Jesus Spoke Yiddish - In-person and Live on Zoom
It is a curious fact that among the first Yiddish books ever printed was a translation of the New Testament, which appeared in 1540, only 18 years after Luther's famous translation (which it shamelessly cribbed). In the centuries that followed, another dozen or so missionary translations directed to Yiddish-speaking Jews followed. This talk will explore a dramatic change in the character of these translations in the twentieth century, when new conceptions of the Yiddish language, new cosmopolitanism in Yiddish culture, and new understandings of Jewish-Christian conversion converged to create new translation styles that aimed to express Jesus's Jewishness through a rich and haymish Yiddish.
Join YIVO for a very Jewish Christmas celebration featuring a talk on Yiddish translations of the New Testament by Naomi Seidman. A kosher Chinese food dinner will follow the presentation.
About the Speaker
Naomi Seidman is the Jackman Humanities Professor at the University of Toronto, in the Department for the Study of Religion and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies. Her fourth book, Sarah Schenirer and the Bais Yaakov Movement: A Revolution in the Name of Tradition, won a National Jewish Book Award in Women's Studies in 2019. A 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, Professor Seidman is presently completing a study of the Hebrew and Yiddish translations of Freud's writings during his lifetime. Her podcast on leaving the ultra-Orthodox Jewish world, Heretic in the House, was recently released by the Shalom Hartman Institute.
Ticket Info:
In Person: $15; YIVO members & students: $10
Zoom Livestream: Free; registration is required.
Presented by:
lecture
gallery tour
Exhibition Tour of The Golden Path: Maimonides Across Eight Centuries - In-person Event
Join Ilana Benson, YUM’s Director of Museum Education for a guided tour of The Golden Path: Maimonides Across Eight Centuries, illuminating the life and impact of the multifaceted luminary and great Jewish sage across continents and cultures through rare manuscripts and books. Exhibition highlights include manuscripts in Maimonides’s own handwriting, a carved 11th century door to the Torah ark from Cairo’s Ben Ezra Synagogue, and beautifully illuminated medieval manuscripts.
Ticket Info: Free admission but reservations are required. For reservations, please email RSVP@yum.cjh.org.
Presented by:
gallery tour
gallery tour
Museum Director's Tour of The Golden Path: Maimonides Across Eight Centuries - In-person Event
Join YUM’s Director Gabriel Goldstein for a guided tour of The Golden Path: Maimonides Across Eight Centuries, illuminating the life and impact of the multifaceted luminary and great Jewish sage across continents and cultures through rare manuscripts and books. Exhibition highlights include manuscripts in Maimonides’s own handwriting, a carved 11th century door to the Torah ark from Cairo’s Ben Ezra Synagogue, and beautifully illuminated medieval manuscripts.
Ticket Info: Free admission but reservations are required. For reservations, please email rsvp@yum.cjh.org. Limited space.
Presented by:
gallery tour
concert
Challenging the Theater of Memory: Yiddish Song beyond Kitsch and Stereotype - In-person Event and Live on Zoom
Performing Yiddish music in post-war Germany and Austria comes with a set of expectations and assumptions about Jewish culture. In this lecture-concert, Yiddish musicians and researchers Isabel Frey and Benjy Fox-Rosen confront these expectations, challenging the so-called “Theater of Memory” where Jewish roles are limited and often instrumentalized to fit into the broader dominant cultural narrative.
The evening’s musical journey begins with nostalgic Yiddish songs before moving to unaccompanied folk songs collected through ethnographic fieldwork. It continues with partisan and resistance songs from the Holocaust and concludes with new Yiddish music by the artists themselves. Through musical performance, dialogue, and short essayistic fragments, Frey and Fox-Rosen reflect on the myth of the shtetl, the ruptures and continuities of oral transmission, the weight of Holocaust memory culture and their own attempts to creatively deal with the expectations inherent to performing Jewish music in the German-speaking world.
Join YIVO for this performance followed by a Q&A with performers Isabel Frey and Benjy Fox-Rosen moderated by Samantha Cooper and Gordon Dale.
Ticket Info:
In person: $15; YIVO members & students: $10
Zoom Livestream: $5
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Presented by:
concert
lecture
Holocaust Distortion in Poland and Beyond - Live on Zoom
Since the beginning of this century, the commemoration and the history of the Holocaust were at the heart of political struggles in Poland. In order to defend the “good name of the nation,” Polish authorities created institutions and legislated laws intended to enforce the official, state-approved version of history. This new narrative shifts the focus away from the Jewish victims of the Shoah and places it on righteous gentiles, real or imagined. It is within this context that old antisemitic tropes came alive and acquire new currency. This unprecedented, and state-sponsored, assault on the memory of the Shoah is known today as Holocaust distortion, a particularly insidious brand of Holocaust denial.
In this lecture, Jan Grabowski will shed light on the origins of the current situation as well as its impact on Holocaust memory and Holocaust education in Poland, Europe, and beyond.
Buy a book on this topic, Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in German-Occupied Poland.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
Presented by:
lecture
class
All in the Mishpocheh: Intro to Jewish Genealogy at the CJH - Online Course
10-session online course (via Zoom)
Fridays, 1:00-2:15 PM ET
January 12 – March 15, 2024
Join the staff of the Center for Jewish History’s Ackman & Ziff Family Genealogy Institute for this 10-week online genealogy course, suitable for beginners and anyone interested in reviewing the basics. Topics include family trees, online search strategies, immigration, DNA, Holocaust records, 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 class time?
Absolutely! 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 students say this one-on-one availability was instrumental in their personal research progress, providing the tailored guidance they needed to chart their research path.
Will I get personal feedback?
Yes. Your instructor will give you feedback on your assignments and your personal research questions either during or between classes. Your fellow students may also offer their advice during class.
How many people will be in the class?
Class sizes have ranged from about 20-30 students, with an average of 10-15 students regularly participating in the live Zoom classes.
Registration Info: $295 general; $255 CJH members; click here to register
Presented by:
class
symposium
A Medium for the Masses: The Yiddish Press and the Shaping of American Jewish Culture - In-person Event and Live on Zoom
This symposium will look back on more than 150 years of the Yiddish press in the United States, examining its role as a vehicle of acculturation, a forum for political and ideological debates, and a seedbed for the growth of a mass culture among Jews worldwide. The day’s events will culminate in an evening program celebrating the launch of Ayelet Brinn’s new book, A Revolution in Type: Gender and the Making of the American Yiddish Press (NYU Press, 2023), which offers a fascinating glimpse into the complex and often unexpected ways that women and ideas about women shaped widely read Yiddish newspapers.
Buy A Revolution in Type: Gender and the Making of the American Yiddish Press.
This program is part of the Center for Jewish History's Jewish Public History Forum.
Ticket Info:
In person: $18; YIVO members & students: $12
Zoom Livestream: Free
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Presented by:
symposium
concert
Shotns/Shadows: A New Album from the Fortunoff Archive - In-person Event & Live on Zoom
Join YIVO for a performance of the Yale Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies' newest album, Shotns/Shadows. Part of the "Songs From Testimonies" project, this album is based on poems and songs from interviews with Holocaust survivors recorded by the Fortunoff Archive. Compiled and researched by composer, multi-instrumentalist, ethnomusicologist, and Yiddish educator Zisl Slepovitch and arranged and recorded by singer Sasha Lurje and his ensemble, this album draws upon the more than 100 testimonies in the Fortunoff Archive's collection in which survivors recount poetry or sing musical compositions from the prewar, wartime and postwar periods. The songs and poems included on Shotns/Shadows were sung or recounted in a number of testimonies and reflect the richness of Holocaust video testimonies as a unique form of documentation.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
Presented by:
concert
symposium
Addressing Antisemitism: Contemporary Challenges – In-person & live on YouTube
Addressing Antisemitism: Contemporary Challenges seeks to explain the recent upsurge of Jew hatred in the contemporary world. Timed to coincide with International Holocaust Remembrance Day and co-sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism (ISCA) at Indiana University, the symposium brings together prominent scholars to discuss the challenge of defining antisemitism, explaining its explosion in Europe and the United States, understanding its dissemination through digital media, and determining how scholars and activists should best combat it in an era of intensifying global turmoil.
Tickets include lunch and a wine and cheese reception after the program. Speakers will be selling and signing books throughout the day.
Click here for a list of panels and speakers.
This symposium is presented in partnership with Indiana University's Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and has received generous support from the Achelis & Bodman Foundation, the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM), the American Jewish Committee's Edward M. Chase Educational Fund, and Robert S. Rifkind. The symposium is the fourth installment in a larger series of public symposia sponsored by the Center for Jewish History’s Jewish Public History Forum.
Ticket Info:
In-person tickets: $36 general; $28 members click here to register
YouTube: Pay what you wish; click here to register
Presented by:
symposium
lecture
The Reality of Myth for Yiddish Writers in Weimar Germany - Live on Zoom
Berlin in the Weimar Republic (1918-1933) — though peripheral to the centers of Yiddish culture in the United States, Poland, and the Soviet Union — offered financial windfalls and business opportunities for migrants with foreign currency, particularly for writers with contact to the American Yiddish press. Moreover, Germany, unlike Poland, maintained diplomatic and economic relations with the Soviet Union, which allowed writers sympathetic to the Bolshevik Revolution a safe haven.
The heyday of Yiddish culture in Berlin was relatively short-lived, dating from about 1921 until about 1926, after which the Soviet Union had achieved political stability and began to invest, at least for the next decade, in a wide series of Yiddish-language cultural institutions. Nevertheless, Berlin was an important way-station in the development of modern Yiddish culture and particularly a Yiddish avant-garde.
In historical terms, it is always necessary to distinguish between "myth" and "reality"; for Yiddish writers in interwar Berlin, however, what is fascinating is the degree to which myth and reality informed and interpenetrated one another. In this lecture, Marc Caplan will examine the historical significance and legendary allure of Weimar culture by considering three of its most significant Yiddish writers: Moyshe Kulbak, Dovid Bergelson, and Der Nister ("the hidden one," Pinkhes Kahanovitch).
About the Speaker
Marc Caplan is a native of Louisiana and a graduate of Yale University. In 2003 he earned his Ph.D. in comparative literature from New York University. Since then he has held professorial appointments at Indiana University, Johns Hopkins University, Yale, the University of Wroclaw (Poland), and Dartmouth College, as well as research fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, the Universität Konstanz (Germany), the Center for Jewish History (New York), and the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor). In 2011 he published How Strange the Change: Language, Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms—a comparison of Yiddish and African literatures—with Stanford University Press. His second book, Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin: A Fugitive Modernism, was published by Indiana University Press in 2021. Currently he is a senior lecturer in Yiddish literature for the Heinrich-Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Presented by:
lecture
celebration
Is Anything Okay? The History of Jews and Comedy in America - In-person and Live on Zoom
Celebrate the launch of our newest online course about Jewish comedy, which delves into the history of Jewish comedy and its development in the United States.
Ticket Info: Free, registration is required.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Presented by:
celebration
lecture
Yiddish and Hebrew Little Magazines in the Weimar Republic - Live on Zoom
In this talk, Barbara Mann will discuss the "little magazine," a staple of modernist Jewish culture which flourished in the Weimar Republic. The little magazine is a distinctively portable and collaborative genre, an appropriate venue for the migrant, cosmopolitan mix of Berlin’s interwar Jewish population. Each issue blended poetry, manifestos and visual arts to create a unique form of cultural expression. Mann will explore the publishing history of Yiddish and Hebrew little magazines, their content, physical features, and readership.
About the Speaker
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).
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Presented by:
lecture
concert
Yiddish and Hebrew Song in the Weimar Republic
The Weimar Republic era contained a hotbed of Jewish musical activity. Following World War I, there was a spike of curiosity about Eastern European Jewry and Yiddish, which inspired many German-Jewish composers—from Cantor Leon Kornitzer to avant garde composer Stefan Wolpe—to explore Yiddish folksong in their music. At the same time, Berlin and Vienna acted as important publishing centers for the Jibneh Edition. In addition to featuring music of some German-Jewish composers such as Aron M. Rothmüller and Israel Brandmann, Jibneh Edition disseminated music of composers born in the Russian Empire associated with the Society for Jewish Folk Music such as Joel Engel, Joseph Achron, Michael Gnessin, and Alexander Krein, as well as the great Yiddish song composer Lazar Weiner writing in America. This rich musical activity bridged communities active in the East and West and reflected the linguistically and ideologically diverse aspirations of Jewish composers of its time. Join YIVO for a concert exploring Yiddish and Hebrew songs of the Weimar Republic.
Ticket Info: In-person admission is $15, and $10 for YIVO members and students. The Zoom livestream is free. Register at https://yivo.org/Weimar-Song for tickets.
Presented by:
concert