lecture
Kine un kloglid – The Yiddish Art of Lamentation in Early Modern Ashkenaz – Live on Zoom
Diana Matut | Delivered in Yiddish.
In this lecture, Diana Matut will delve deep into the history of Yiddish song cultures. Yiddish or bilingual Hebrew-Yiddish laments, dirges, or elegies in early modern Ashkenazi society were both individual and communal. Mourning through song offered ways of coping and establishing patterns of memory. Through it, history was being narrated and interpreted. In turn, lamenting about past or present experiences helped to form the identities of Jewish communities and to keep memory alive. Laments were part of establishing wider societal norms of ethics and behavior, often with the ultimate objective of preparing the singer or reader for the end of their lives.
This lecture will also explore the more “entertaining” sides of the lament, namely, in parodies and Purim plays between 1500 and 1800.
About the Speaker
Dr. Diana Matut teaches Old Yiddish and Jewish Music at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. Formerly a lecturer for Jewish Studies at Halle University, she is now director of the Old Synagogue — House of Jewish Culture in Essen. She was the Joseph Kremen Memorial Fellow in East European Jewish Arts, Music, and Theater at YIVO (New York) and Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies (three times). From 2019 to 2020, she was the convenor of the Oxford Seminar in Advanced Jewish Studies and led a research group focusing on "Jewish Musical Cultures in Europe, 1500-1750." In 2021, she was awarded the Mare-Balticum-Fellowship of the University of Rostock. In 2019, Matut, together with American composer/arranger Josh Horowitz, led the Henech Kon Project, which brought the only surviving pre-war Yiddish opera from Europe back on stage (omaworks.eu/triangle-orchestra).
Various musical projects are the result of her cooperation with Yiddish Summer Weimar, among them the Young Kadya Choir, a German-Israeli project which became the focus of a documentary; a CD with rediscovered Yiddish children’s songs called Far dem nayem dor – For the New Generation; and the Glikl-oratorye, focusing on the life of early modern Jewish woman Glikl of Hameln, which Matut wrote together with Alan Bern (www.glikl.eu).
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lecture
Family History Today: Strategies to Analyze Endogamous DNA – Live on Zoom
This lecture will discuss how best to weed out false-positive DNA Matches that test-takers from endogamous groups face daily. Participants will learn about segment analysis and threshold manipulation to determine which matches are worth pursuing. The benefits and drawbacks of each testing platform will be covered, and finally the use of tools such as DNA Painter will be demonstrated. Presented by Alec Ferretti.
About the Speaker
Alec Ferretti is a New-York-City-based professional genealogist, who has worked for the Wells Fargo Family & Business History Center, researching family histories for high-net-worth clients. Alec specializes in the genealogy of 20th century immigrants to the United States. He is a regular lecturer at genealogical societies and conferences. He serves as the President of the New York Genealogy & Technology Group, serves actively on the Board of Directors of the Association of Professional Genealogists, and on the Board of Reclaim the Records, a nonprofit dedicated to wrangling public records from obstinate government agencies.
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“You had buried me, and I’ve come back!”: Manipulation, Lies, and the Archives of the Cinematic Dybbuk – Live on Zoom
Zehavit Stern | Delivered in English.
This talk explores how stories are told—and sometimes fabricated—through film. Our starting point is the 1937 Yiddish film The Dybbuk, based on S. An-sky’s celebrated play (1914–17), a cornerstone of both Yiddish and Hebrew theater. This classic film is juxtaposed with the 2017 German-Polish documentary The Prince and the Dybbuk, which traces the enigmatic life of the art film’s director, Michal Waszynski. As archival traces blur into cinematic invention, the documentary raises deeper questions about memory, identity, and loss. The talk thus reflects on the haunting legacy of a lost Eastern European Jewish world and on how film can preserve, possess, or lay claim to possession—revealing as much about our present desires as about the past it seeks to recover.
About the Speaker
Zehavit Stern is a scholar of Yiddish theater, film, literature and folklore, and of Hebrew literature. She holds an MA in Yiddish culture from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2005) and a PhD in Jewish Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and the Graduate Theological Union (2011). She has taught at the University of Oxford (2011-2015), Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, the Hebrew University and Tel Aviv University and is currently the Academic Dean, head of Honors Program and assistant professor of theater studies, at Emuna Academic College of Arts and Education. She has published and lectured extensively on Eastern European Jewish culture. Among her publications are “The Maternal Drag: Motherhood as Performance in Yiddish Film Melodrama,” in Choosing Yiddish: New Frontiers of Language and Culture, and “On Dubbing the Dead: The Dybbuk 1937-1917,” in TDR/The Drama Review (vol. 63:2, 2019). Her forthcoming book, titled The Birth of Theatre from the Spirit of Folk Performance: Eastern European Jewish Culture and the Invention of a National Dramatic Heritage examines the emergence of the narrative that views the Purim-shpil and other formerly rejected folkish expressions as the origins of Jewish theater.
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lecture
Yiddish Warsaw on the Hudson – Live on Zoom
Ofer Dynes | Delivered in Yiddish.
The 1930s saw the immigration of a cohort of Yiddish writers from Poland to the United States that included Israel Joshua Singer, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Kadya Molodowsky, Nachman Meisel, Melech Ravitch, and Aaron Zeitlin. Unlike many of their American contemporaries, they were all established writers prior to their emigration. This talk will explore how these authors' shared experience as immigrant writers shaped their understanding of the role of Yiddish in American cultural life, how this vision evolved during the World War II, and how their reimagining of Yiddish literature’s significance for American Jewry influenced their writings.
About the Speaker
Ofer Dynes is Leonard Kaye Assistant Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Columbia University. He received his Ph.D. in Jewish Studies at Harvard University (September 2016) and held a postdoctoral fellowship at McGill University (2016-2018). Before coming to Columbia, he was an Assistant Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he taught classes in eastern European Jewish literature and history and served as the head of the Program in Yiddish Studies. Dynes specializes in the literature and cultural history of Eastern European Jewry from the 18th to 21st centuries. He has a particular interest in the nexus of literature and political thought. He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled The Fiction of the State: The Polish Partitions and the Beginning of Modern Jewish Literature (1772–1848). He has also recently co-edited a special volume of Prooftexts, entitled The Beginnings of Modern Jewish Literature in Europe,with Naomi Seidman (University of Toronto). Dynes is a co-founder and organizer of the Hebrew Lab Faculty Seminar, a New-York based workgroup for scholars in Hebrew Literature.
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lecture
The Red Jews: Intertextuality in a Yiddish Myth – Live on Zoom
Rebekka Voß | Delivered in English.
Envisioned as a tribe of ruddy-faced, redheaded, and red-bearded Jewish warriors clad in red attire, the legendary Ten Lost Tribes of Israel are referred to as “Red Jews” (royte yidlekh) in Yiddish. This unique figure is a creation of late medieval vernacular culture in Germany and became a shared motif among both Jews and Christians, circulating in both Yiddish and German. These two linguistic communities interpreted the Red Jews in different ways, each contesting their significance and viewing them through varying shades of red.
This lecture by Rebekka Voß will trace the journey of the Red Jews through both Jewish and Christian imaginations, from their medieval origins to their presence in Old Yiddish and modern Yiddish literature. Focusing on select stories of the Red Jews, the lecture will explore their intertextuality, illustrating how this popular literary motif engaged with canonical texts, including the Bible, works of Hebrew and Yiddish literature (such as Toledot Yeshu, the polemical counter-story of the life of Jesus, and the romance Viduvilt), as well as medieval German literature.
About the Speaker
Rebekka Voß teaches Jewish history in Frankfurt. Her research focuses on Jewish cultural history in early modern Europe, with special attention to cultural transfer between Jews and Christians.
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The Yiddish of Jerusalem: The Old Yishuv in the Research of Mordecai Kosover – Live on Zoom
Yaad Biran | Delivered in Yiddish.
In the 1930s, Mordecai Kosover, the young researcher of Yiddish from Vilna, lived in Jerusalem and recorded his observations about the local Yiddish of the Old Yishuv’s residents. This was part of a larger project of his: to demonstrate that the history of Jews of the modern-day Land of Israel began not with Rishon LeTzion (the 1882 first settlement of the New Yishuv), but decades earlier, and that, furthermore, the Jewish community of the Land of Israel was not a world apart but was in fact very connected to a worldwide “Yiddishland.”
About the Speaker
Dr. Yaad Biran received his Ph.D. in Yiddish literature at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He teaches Yiddish language and culture at Beth Shalom Aleichem in Tel Aviv, at Haifa University and in the Tel Aviv summer course. He is a writer and a translator, the author of a short stories book "Laughing with Lizards" (Hebrew) and the writer of "Esther's Cabaret," a contemporary Yiddish Cabaret in Tel Aviv. He also guides Yiddish tours in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
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book talk
Brazilian Belonging: Jewish Politics in Cold War Latin America – In-Person Program
In this presentation, Michael Rom will explore the participation of Brazilian Jews in political movements throughout the Cold War. From Zionist and communist activists who fought against antisemitic immigration restrictions and the presence of Holocaust perpetrators in Brazil’s postwar democracy (1945-64), to Jewish students who were part of underground organizations that sought to overthrow the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-85), Brazilian Jews have consistently played central roles in Brazilian political movements. Through this political activism, they sought to affirm and define belonging in their nation-state, ethnic community, and generation, while grappling with national myths about race, transnational political ideologies, and local and global forms of state violence. Drawing on extensive archival research conducted in Brazil, Israel, and the United States, Brazilian newspapers in Portuguese and Yiddish, and oral history interviews with Brazilian Jewish political activists, this research situates Brazilian Jewish politics of belonging within the transnational contexts of the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, Cold War superpower rivalries, Latin American revolutionary insurgencies, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
A light reception, book sales, and signing will follow the program.
About the Speaker
Michael Rom is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Jewish History and Culture at Hebrew Union College, Los Angeles. He received a PhD in History from Yale University and held a graduate fellowship at Center for Jewish History in 2017-18. He has held postdoctoral research fellowships at Harvard University, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Cape Town. His first book, Brazilian Belonging: Jewish Politics in Cold War Latin America, is now available from Stanford University Press.
Ticket Info: Pay what you wish; register here
Photo: Scholem Aleichem School Bus, 1956, courtesy of the Jewish Museum of São Paulo, Brazil.
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The People’s Torah: Crowd-Sourcing Jewish Customs from An-ski to the Internet – Live on Zoom
Nathaniel Deutsch | Delivered in English.
A century ago, Sh. An-ski, the revolutionary and playwright most famous for The Dybbuk, described the countless customs that guided Jewish daily life as a kind of “Oral Torah.” To document the People's Torah, An-ski created a massive ethnographic questionnaire in Yiddish for use in the Russian Pale of Settlement and especially among its Hasidic residents. Now, a team of researchers led by Nathaniel Deutsch is launching The Digital Minhag Project, an interactive website built around a Yiddish-English version of An-ski’s ethnographic questionnaire that seeks to crowd-source contemporary Jewish customs or minhagim, beginning with those still practiced by Hasidic communities. What has changed since An-ski created his questionnaire? What has remained the same?
About the Speaker
Nathaniel Deutsch combines historical, textual, and ethnographic methods to explore phenomena from antiquity to the modern period. He is a professor of history and holds the Baumgarten Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he served as the Faculty Director of The Humanities Institute for more than a decade and the Chair of the University of California Consortium of Humanities Centers. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and won the National Jewish Book Award, the Jordan Schnitzer Book Award from the Association for Jewish Studies, and an Honorable Mention for the Merle Curti Award from the Organization of American Historians. Deutsch is currently creating “The Digital Minhag Project: A Crowd-Sourced Archive of Jewish Customs.”
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
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lecture
Family History Today: Genetic Census of the Jewish People – In-Person Program & Live on Zoom
With the rise of consumer genetic testing, private individuals and academic studies have taken advantage of the lowered costs in order to research the recent and deeper human past. In the Jewish genealogy world, consumer DNA testing has proven to be a valuable tool, helping genealogists break through brick walls, reuniting families torn apart by the Shoah, and providing a wealth of data for multidisciplinary academic research. At the Genetic Census of the Jewish People project, popularly known as Avotaynu, they asked what DNA tells us about Jewish history, from the very beginnings 3,000 years ago to today. Over eight years ago, the project launched a study into the global non-Ashkenazi Jewish world. Their first target was the Sephardic Diaspora, ranging from India in the East to the New World in the West. In this lecture, co-administrator Michael Waas will provide a brief history and definitions for "Sephardic", discuss autosomal, Y, and mitochondrial DNA, and provide some case studies and preliminary findings from the Avotaynu study.
This program is sponsored by the Ackman & Ziff Family Genealogy Institute at the Center for Jewish History (CJH) and Ancestry
About the Speaker
Ever since he was a young child, Michael Waas has been interested in history and the world around him. Following a conversation in high school with his cousin about family lore that the famous union leader Samuel Gompers was a cousin , he began his journey into genealogical and historical research. That beginning led him to the path where he is today: Michael is a Heritage Professional specializing in historic preservation and multidisciplinary research into the Portuguese Jews and Ottoman Jewry.
He received his BA in Anthropology with a specialization in Historical Archaeology from New College of Florida, and the subject of his Senior Thesis was "The Archaeology of Ethnogenesis of the Seminole People of Florida," under the direction of Dr. Uzi Baram. Michael recently completed his Masters in the Department of Jewish History at the University of Haifa under the direction of Dr. Ido Shahar and Dr. Shai Srugo. The title of his thesis was “Istorya i oy: A comparative study on the Development of Jewish Heritage of Three Jewish Communities of the former Ottoman Empire.” In addition, he has been volunteering with AvotaynuDNA since 2016, where he is the anthropologist and historian of the research.
Michael is a member of the Association of Professional Genealogists, the Society for Sephardic Studies and he is the Associate Director of the Sephardic Research Division at JewishGen. Currently, Michael is pursuing a JD at New York Law School.
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