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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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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panel discussion
