walking tour
Dancing through Yiddish Literary New York: A Guided Tour
This walking tour meets outside of Village East by Angelika, 181-189 2nd Avenue, New York, NY 10003, and will run from 1:00pm to 3:00pm.
Explore New York’s Lower East Side through its urban dance spaces. Between 1881 and 1924, 2.5 million East European Jews immigrated to the United States. Like other ethnic groups in New York around 1900, many of these Yiddish speakers spent their leisure hours dancing: in commercial dance halls, neighborhood associations, dancing academies—and in the pages of newspapers, literary fiction, etiquette guides, and the warnings of social reformers. Jewish writers such as Abraham Cahan identified dancing with changes in courtship and gender roles as part of Americanization and American capitalism. Dancing could be a way of showing off physical fitness and disposable income. It was also a sign of shocking new forms of intimacy between men and women. On this guided tour with Yiddish literature and dance scholar Dr. Sonia Gollance, we will visit some key New York dance sites in the footsteps of Yiddish writers and journalists. No knowledge of Yiddish is necessary for this walking tour.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
About the Guide
Sonia Gollance is Associate Professor of Yiddish Studies at University College London. Her work focuses on Yiddish and German literature, dance, theatre, and gender. She is the author of It Could Lead to Dancing: Mixed-Sex Dancing and Jewish Modernity (Stanford University Press, 2021), a finalist for the National Jewish Book Awards. She has taught at the University of Vienna, The Ohio State University, and the University of Göttingen, as well as at klezmer festivals in Europe and North America.
Ticket Info: $30; YIVO members & students: $25
Presented by:
walking tour
open house
YIVO Learning and Media Center Open House
Come tour YIVO’s brand new Learning and Media Center!
YIVO is opening the doors to its new YLMC, a publicly accessible space for visitors to come and explore Jewish history and the YIVO Collections.
The space features a striking welcome vestibule highlighting photographs and objects from YIVO’s storied history, artifact displays from the YIVO Archives and Library, interactive activities like a poster-making station and a touch-screen map featuring hundreds of photos of Jewish life in Eastern European towns and cities, an intimate open-stacks library with Yiddish and English books, multimedia stations for listening to sound recordings and watching videos from the YIVO Collections, and a classroom for lessons that utilize rare archival materials.
During this open house, educators and their families are invited to visit YIVO's Learning and Media Center and take a guided tour of the new space with YLMC Educator Susannah Trubman. If you are a member of the public interested in attending, please register for the August 24, 2025 open house.
Space is limited! Sign up today to be among the first to see the YLMC.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
Presented by:
open house
open house
YIVO Learning and Media Center Open House
Come tour YIVO’s brand new Learning and Media Center!
YIVO is opening the doors to its new YLMC, a publicly accessible space for visitors to come and explore Jewish history and the YIVO Collections.
The space features a striking welcome vestibule highlighting photographs and objects from YIVO’s storied history, artifact displays from the YIVO Archives and Library, interactive activities like a poster-making station and a touch-screen map featuring hundreds of photos of Jewish life in Eastern European towns and cities, an intimate open-stacks library with Yiddish and English books, multimedia stations for listening to sound recordings and watching videos from the YIVO Collections, and a classroom for lessons that utilize rare archival materials.
During this open house, the general public is invited to visit YIVO's Learning and Media Center and take a guided tour of the new space with YLMC Educator Susannah Trubman. Families are welcome! If you are an educator interested in attending, please register for the August 17, 2025 open house.
Space is limited! Sign up today to be among the first to see the YLMC.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
Presented by:
open house
book talk
Polish Jewish Collecting and Museums, 1891–1941 - Live on Zoom
Displays of Belonging illuminates the lives and work of Polish Jewish collectors and museologists, who sought to preserve the treasures of the Jewish past while demonstrating Jewish belonging on Polish soil during the interwar period. At the turn of the century, Jewish ethnographers and museum creators staked their claim to belonging to the civic nation through the display of Jewish folk art, fine art, and Judaica. After World War I, the nearly three million Jews in the Second Polish Republic were suddenly challenged with finding a place for themselves in a state that increasingly defined itself as a creation of the ethnic Polish nation, to which Jews, by many accounts, did not belong.
By tracing emergent documentation and display practices in partitioned Poland and in the interwar Second Polish Republic, Sarah Ellen Zarrow offers an analysis of how integrated Jews identified with Polish culture and history and with non-Jewish Poles, and how they conceived of, negotiated, and argued their collective place within Poland. The book places Jewish ethnographic practice and art collection within a Polish context, and sheds light on ways in which ideas about belonging and national identity were negotiated in the space of museums.
Join YIVO for a discussion with Zarrow about this book, led by Jeffrey Shandler.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
About the Speakers
Sarah Ellen Zarrow is Associate Professor of History at Western Washington University, where she holds an endowed chair in Jewish History. Her ongoing research focuses on Jewish life in Eastern Europe, particularly in Poland. I am especially interested in Jewish museum practices, language politics, and schooling. She previously was a Research Fellow at New Europe College Institute for Advanced Studies in Bucharest, Romania, and a Visiting Scholar at the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies at New York University. She holds a doctorate from the joint program of the Skirball Department of Hebrew & Judaic Studies and the History Department at NYU. Zarrow has also served as a consultant to archival and museum projects at YIVO and POLIN: Museum of the History of Polish Jews, designing exhibits and creating educational programming.
Jeffrey Shandler is Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University. His publications include Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (University of California Press, 2005); Shtetl: A Vernacular Intellectual History (Rutgers University Press, 2014); Yiddish: Biography of a Language (Oxford University Press, 2020); and Homes of the Past: A Lost Jewish Museum (Indiana University Press, 2024). Among other titles, he is editor of Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust (Yale University Press, 2002) and translator of Emil and Karl (Square Fish/Macmillan, 2006), a Holocaust novel for young readers by Yankev Glatshteyn.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
Presented by:
book talk
lecture
Taking Yiddish Science Global: YIVO’s Foreign Branches, 1925-1994 - Live on Zoom
“Hoops are rolling, one after the other,
From the East, from the North, from the South,
They all come together in YIVO
In the treasury of books and sforim [holy books].”
— Daniel Charney, “Hoops are Rolling” (Also known as the “YIVO March”).
From almost its very inception, YIVO was a global organization. Yiddish speaking communities, inspired by the diaspora nationalism and Yiddishism of YIVO, created local branches across the world, which came to be known as YIVO’s foreign sections. The “YIVO March,” cited above, rang out in Havana, Cuba, in 1953, for example; YIVO branches flourished across North and South America, in South Africa and even in Australia and China. These foreign sections used the techniques that YIVO had pioneered: surveys, autobiography competitions, material collection, and Yiddish historical writing and exhibition curation, to write new histories of immigration and demonstrate the ongoing viability of Yiddish as a language of scholarship. During and after the Holocaust, these branches, swelled by recent refugees from Nazism, turned their expertise towards some of the first exhibitions that commemorated the victims of the Holocaust — and set a program for the reconstruction of Yiddish culture. This lecture by William Pimlott tells the story of how YIVO became a global institution and the new and different stories that YIVO's Friend Societies tell about 20th century Jewish history.
About the Speaker
William Pimlott is the inaugural Postdoctoral Research Associate at the NYU Center for the Study of Antisemitism. He recently completed his PhD on the Yiddish press in Britain, 1896-1910, at UCL and has subsequently held two research fellowships at the University of London: at the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism and the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, respectively. Dr. Pimlott has published articles on Yiddish history-making in Britain, on the South African Yiddish press and Yiddish art history in Jewish Social Studies, Jewish Historical Studies, and Shofar. This year, he is the Dina Abramowicz Emerging Scholar Postdoctoral Fellow at the YIVO Institute in New York (2024-2025).
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
Presented by:
lecture
performance
The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language - In-person Program
Join YIVO for the world premiere production of The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language, a new chamber opera with music by Pulitzer Prize finalist Alex Weiser and libretto by Ben Kaplan. The opera tells the remarkable true story of Yiddish linguist Yudel Mark’s unfinished effort to create a comprehensive Yiddish dictionary.
With a runtime of 50 minutes, the opera is performed by an ensemble of five singers, combining characters based on historical figures — Yudel Mark and Max Weinreich, with those inspired by Jewish mystical themes; the character of Yudel Mark is haunted by three ‘alefs,’ three divine emanations of the Yiddish language—played by three mezzo-sopranos—who compel him to breathe new life into Yiddish as he works to complete the dictionary.
The Great Dictionary invites audiences to contemplate the surprisingly grand ambition of Yiddish culture after its decimation during the Holocaust and to consider the power of language to transform and shape us.
Directed by Rebecca Miller Kratzer, the production will feature tenor Jason Weisinger, baritone Gideon Dabi, and mezzo-sopranos Kristin Gornstein, Kate Maroney, and Kelly Guerra. An ensemble featuring clarinet, string quintet, and piano will be led by conductor David Bloom. The production will feature scenic design by Michael Bennett Lewis, projection design by Camilla Tassi, lighting design by Stacey Boggs, and costume design by Matsy Stinson.
Presented as YIVO's Annual Nusakh Vilne Memorial Program and as a part of YIVO’s 2025 centennial celebration, this production is presented in collaboration and with generous support from American Opera Projects, the League for Yiddish, and the American Society for Jewish Music.
The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. America Opera Project’s programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council. AOP’s programs are also made possible in part by the Howard Gilman Foundation.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
Presented by:
performance
performance
The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language - In-person Program
Join YIVO for the world premiere production of The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language, a new chamber opera with music by Pulitzer Prize finalist Alex Weiser and libretto by Ben Kaplan. The opera tells the remarkable true story of Yiddish linguist Yudel Mark’s unfinished effort to create a comprehensive Yiddish dictionary.
With a runtime of 50 minutes, the opera is performed by an ensemble of five singers, combining characters based on historical figures — Yudel Mark and Max Weinreich, with those inspired by Jewish mystical themes; the character of Yudel Mark is haunted by three ‘alefs,’ three divine emanations of the Yiddish language—played by three mezzo-sopranos—who compel him to breathe new life into Yiddish as he works to complete the dictionary.
The Great Dictionary invites audiences to contemplate the surprisingly grand ambition of Yiddish culture after its decimation during the Holocaust and to consider the power of language to transform and shape us.
Directed by Rebecca Miller Kratzer, the production will feature tenor Jason Weisinger, baritone Gideon Dabi, and mezzo-sopranos Kristin Gornstein, Kate Maroney, and Kelly Guerra. An ensemble featuring clarinet, string quintet, and piano will be led by conductor David Bloom. The production will feature scenic design by Michael Bennett Lewis, projection design by Camilla Tassi, lighting design by Stacey Boggs, and costume design by Matsy Stinson.
Presented as YIVO's Annual Nusakh Vilne Memorial Program and as a part of YIVO’s 2025 centennial celebration, this production is presented in collaboration and with generous support from American Opera Projects, the League for Yiddish, and the American Society for Jewish Music.
The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. America Opera Project’s programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council. AOP’s programs are also made possible in part by the Howard Gilman Foundation.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
Presented by:
performance
lecture
"Yiddish Pills" and Summer Thrills: Reconstituting Yiddishism at Camp Hemshekh - In-person Program & Live on Zoom
In the decades directly following the Holocaust, Jewish leaders anxiously debated how to preserve and produce what they considered authentic Jewish culture, fearful that upward mobility and suburbanization threatened the integrity of Jewish life in America. In their searches for solutions to the problem of cultural decline, post-war Jews came to see residential summer camps as panaceas to their communal ills, constructing deeply educational and ideological camp programs with an eye towards collective transformation. Yiddishists — Jews who dedicated their efforts to the future of Yiddish culture and speech in America — not only set the groundwork for Jewish educational camping to take off, but also participated in this wider phenomenon of anxiety over the state of post-war Jewry. And yet despite their vital roles, Yiddishists are often left out of the story of Jewish camping, education, and identity-building in post-war America. In this talk, Sandra Fox will discuss how the founders and leaders of Camp Hemshekh embraced the sleepaway camp as a potential cure for Yiddish cultural and linguistic decline, and how the generations at the camp created a new purpose for and style of Yiddishism for the post-war moment.
This evening’s program is the second in a series of programs held in conjunction with YIVO’s current digitization of the Jewish Labor and Political Archives (JLPA). Consisting of nearly 200 collections encompassing 3.5 million pages of archival documents that were collected by the Bund Archives, the JLPA forms the world’s most comprehensive body of material pertaining to Jewish political activity in Europe and the United States.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
About the Speaker
Sandra Fox is the incoming Robert S. Rifkind Chair in American Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary. She was previously a Goldstein-Goren Visiting Assistant Professor of American Jewish History at New York University and director of the Archive of the American Jewish Left in the Digital Age. Her research interests include American Jewish history, the history of youth and childhood, Yiddish culture, and the history of sexuality. Her book,The Jews of Summer: Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America (Stanford University Press) addresses the experiences of youth in post-war Jewish summer camps and the place of intergenerational negotiation in the making of American Jewish culture.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
Presented by:
lecture
book talk
The Tourist's Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City - Live on Zoom
The Tourist's Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City offers a new look at over a century of Yiddish culture in New York City. Author Henry H. Sapoznik focuses on theater, music, architecture, crime, Black-Jewish cultural interactions, restaurants, real estate, and journalism to tell the history of New York’s Yiddish popular culture from 1880 to the present. Culled from over five thousand Yiddish and English newspaper articles of the period, and thanks to new research from previously inaccessible materials, the book reveals fresh insights into the influence of Yiddish culture on New York City and showcases the culture’s persistent resiliency.
Join YIVO for a discussion with Sapoznik about this new book, led by Eddy Portnoy.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
About the Speakers
Henry H. Sapoznik is an award winning producer, musicologist, performer, and writer in the fields of traditional and popular Yiddish and American music and culture. Sapoznik, a native Yiddish speaker and child of Holocaust survivors, is one of the founders of the klezmer revival, the founder of the Max and Frieda Weinstein Archive of YIVO Sound Recordings, and a five-time Grammy nominated producer and winner of the 2002 Peabody award for his 10 part NPR series “The Yiddish Radio Project.” The collection upon which it was based contains over 10,000 unique items and is housed at the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress in Washington DC.
Eddy Portnoy is the Senior Academic Advisor and Director of Exhibitions at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. The exhibitions he has created for YIVO have won plaudits from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, VICE, The Forward, and others. He has written numerous articles on topics relating to Jewish popular culture and is also the author of Bad Rabbi and Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press (Stanford University Press, 2017).
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
Presented by:
book talk
book talk
Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children's Literature - Live on Zoom
As migration carried Yiddish to several continents during the twentieth century, an increasingly global community of speakers and readers clung to Jewish heritage while striving to help their children make sense of their lives as Jews in the modern world. In Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children’s Literature, Miriam Udel traces how the stories and poems written for these Yiddish-speaking children underpinned new formulations of secular Jewishness. Udel discusses how Yiddish children’s literature espoused various political ideologies and constituted a project of Jewish cultural nationalism before the Holocaust. Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children’s Literature shows how Yiddish authors, educators, and cultural leaders, confronting practical limits on their ability to forge a fully realized nation of their own, focused instead on making a symbolic and conceptual world for Jewish children to inhabit with dignity, justice, and joy.
Join YIVO for a conversation with Udel about this new book, led by Marjorie Ingall.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
About the Speakers
Miriam Udel is Associate Professor of German Studies and Jewish Studies at Emory University, focusing on Yiddish language, literature, and culture. Udel’s academic research interests include twentieth-century Yiddish literature and culture, Jewish children’s literature, and American-Jewish literature. She is the author of Never Better!: The Modern Jewish Picaresque (University of Michigan Press, 2016), winner of the 2017 National Jewish Book Award in Modern Jewish Thought and Experience, and Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children’s Literature (Princeton University Press, forthcoming 2025). She is also the editor and translator of Honey on the Page: A Treasury of Yiddish Children’s Literature (New York University Press, 2020).
Marjorie Ingall is the author of Mamaleh Knows Best: What Jewish Mothers Do to Raise Successful, Creative, Empathetic, Independent Children and Sorry Sorry Sorry: The Case for Good Apologies (with New York Times-bestselling author Susan McCarthy), as well as co-creator of the website SorryWatch, which analyzes apologies in the news, in history, and in the arts. She is also the author of Hungry (with Crystal Renn), The Field Guide to North American Males, and Smart Sex (with Jessica Vitkus). She often writes about children’s books for the New York Times Book Review. She has been a columnist for Tablet Magazine and The Forward; a contributing writer for Glamour and Self; and Senior Writer at Sassy, where she was also the books editor.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
Presented by:
book talk
panel discussion
The Jewish Inn in Polish Culture - Live on Zoom
The Jewish inn was a center of economic and social life in Polish lands before the World War II. While its primary role was to provide hospitality, it also functioned as a multifaceted hub for business, leisure, and religious festivities, reflecting its vital role in the community. In The Jewish Inn: Between Practice and Phantasm, editors Halina Goldberg and Bozena Shallcross present 11 articles that delve into the inn's significance as a symbolic incubator of Jewish cultural possibilities. From exploring the intricate connections between music, dance, and other arts within the inn, to highlighting the increasing prominence of women in the inn's family dynamics, this collection offers an interdisciplinary look at this central pillar of Jewish Polish culture.
Join YIVO for a panel discussion with Goldberg and contributors Glenn Dynner, Beth Holmgren, and Eliza Rose about this book.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
About the Speakers
Halina Goldberg is Professor of Musicology and Director of the Robert F. Byrnes Russian and East European Institute in the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. She is Director of the digital project, “Jewish Life in Interwar Lodz,” and the author of Music in Chopin's Warsaw.
Glenn Dynner holds the Jay Berkowitz Chair in Jewish History at the University of Virginia. A recent Guggenheim Fellow, he is the author of Men of Silk: The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society (Oxford University Press, 2006); Yankel’s Tavern: Jews, Liquor & Life in the Kingdom of Poland (Oxford University Press, 2014); and The Light of Learning: Hasidism in Poland on the Eve of the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2024). He is also Editor of the journal Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies.
Beth Holmgren, Professor Emerita of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at Duke University, has published widely on Polish literature, theater, popular culture, and film—scholarship ranging from the award-winning books Rewriting Capitalism: Literature and the Market in Late Tsarist Russia and the Kingdom of Poland to Starring Madame Modjeska: On Tour in Poland and America. Over the last decade, she produced a series of articles exploring the Polish Jewish foundations of sophisticated popular culture in the interwar period and the wartime and postwar diaspora. Holmgren is currently completing the final, separately published American chapter of the biography, Warsaw is My Country: The Story of Krystyna Bierzynska, 1928-1945 (2018). After Krystyna Bierzynska lost most of her Jewish family to Nazi round-ups, killing centers, and the razing of the Warsaw Ghetto, she served as a 16-year-old orderly in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising and emigrated to the United States in 1951 as co-combatant in the Allied forces.
Eliza Rose is Assistant Professor and Laszlo Birinyi Sr. Fellow of Central European Studies at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. She received her Ph.D. in Slavic languages at Columbia University in 2020. Her articles on visual cultures of state socialism have been published in journals such as Slavic Review and Studies in Eastern European Cinema. Her current research investigates an ambitious campaign in late-socialist Poland to integrate industry and the visual arts. Her translations of Polish scholarly and art writing have been published widely.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
Presented by:
panel discussion
gala
YIVO's Centennial Gala 2025 - In-person Event
Honoring
Sir Simon Schama and Ruth and David Levine
Venue
Tribeca 360
10 Desbrosses Street, New York City
Presented by:
gala