lecture
The Origins, Flowering, and Documentary Afterlife of Yiddish Cinema – Live on Zoom
In celebration of YIVO's 101st year, join us for our Yiddish Civilization 101 series. Each program will highlight key topics in Ashkenazi history and culture, including shtetl life, film, and Ashkenazi foodways, amongst others. Guided by expert scholars, each lecture will provide a greater understanding of Jewish life in Eastern Europe and its diasporas.
Born before World War I, the Yiddish cinema came to supplement—and in some places supplant—the Yiddish stage. Except for a brief period on the eve of World War II when new Yiddish talkies appeared in New York City movie houses virtually every month, the Yiddish cinema was a novelty of the marketplace. Addressing a need and operating on a shoestring, these motion pictures created a world; at once documentary evidence and fantasy projection, they spoke directly to their Ashkenazi Jewish audiences. Yiddish movies also belong to Polish, Soviet, and off-Hollywood American cinema, but taken on its own terms, with neither laughter nor through tears.
This lecture by J. Hoberman will discuss this unique episode in film history, an international enterprise that created a national cinema without a nation-state.
About the Speaker
J. Hoberman is an author, teacher, and film critic (33 years at The Village Voice). His many books include Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film Between Two Worlds, The Red Atlantis: Communist Culture in the Absence of Communism, and, with Jeffrey Shandler, Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting, written for the 2003 exhibition at the Jewish Museum. A contributor to the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe and POLIN Museum’s Legacy of Polish Jews, Professor Hoberman taught for many years at the Cooper Union, as well as NYU, the University of Hawaii, Harvard University and currently, Columbia University, where his most recent graduate seminars have been devoted to documentary activism. He continues to contribute film criticism to The Nation, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times. His most recent book is Everything is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop. Many years ago, he had a paid internship at YIVO.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
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lecture
conversation
At Lunch with Joel Dinerstein – Live on Zoom
Julie Salamon, New York Times best-selling author, sits down with author Joel Dinerstein to discusses his latest book, The Last of the Ellis Island Jews: A Brooklyn Memoir. Dinerstein is the founding editor of a new series, Lost Classics of Jewish Literature, for the University of New Orleans Press. He is a Professor of English and a Sizeler Professor in Jewish Studies at Tulane University, where his courses focus on race and racism. He is also a well-known expert on the concept of cool, having written the first history of the subject (The Origins of Cool in Postwar America) and co-curated the first national exhibition on the subject (American Cool at the Smithsonian).
Ticket Info: Free; register online for a Zoom link
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conversation
lecture
Defining "The Jew" in the Age of Eugenics: American Jewish Physicians and Biological Jewishness in the Early 20th Century – Live on Zoom
The arrival of millions of new Jewish immigrants, as well as the rise of the eugenics movement, fomented antisemitic sentiment in the United States in the early 20th century. American Jewish physicians, like other Jews, represented diverse viewpoints regarding how this frightening trend should be addressed. Unlike most American Jews, however, they were especially well equipped to couple these recommendations with their authority on Jewish biology, directly countering the scientific racism of eugenicists. This insider knowledge, along with the high esteem medical men were held by Jews at the time, made the voices of American Jewish physicians central to the community’s answer to “The Jewish Question” in the United States. While they disagreed on some biological nuances, early 20th century American physicians were broadly united in their resistance to a hereditarian notion of Jewishness: that Jewishness was biologically inscribed and that the Jewish body was inevitably distinct from the rest of the human race.
By delving into the published writings, personal correspondences, and diary entries of ideologically diverse Jewish physicians, Leigh Alon will show how in the early 20th century, American Jewish physicians, regardless of their politics, saw delegitimizing the biological basis for Jewishness as imperative towards securing their community’s future.
About the Speaker
Leigh Alon is an MD/PhD student in the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, in her fifth year of the PhD. She is working on a dissertation tracking how American Jewish physicians defined Jewishness in biological terms from the early 20th into the 21st century. She is a 2026 Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellow. She has received fellowships from the American Philosophical Society, New York Academy of Medicine, the American Jewish Archives, the American Academy for Jewish Research, the American Jewish Historical Society, the Feinstein Center for American Jewish History, the Osler Library of the History of Medicine, and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Before attending graduate school, she worked in HIV prevention at the Chicago Center for HIV Elimination.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
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lecture
discussion
An Evening With Alex Weiser and Andrzej Cieplinski: A Celebration of “Tfiles” and Its Carnegie Hall Premiere – In-person Program
Join us for an intimate evening celebrating the American premiere of Tfiles, a clarinet concerto by composer Alex Weiser, to be performed at Carnegie Hall on October 27th by clarinetist Andrzej Cieplinski and the American Composers Orchestra led by conductor Kedrick Armstrong. The evening will feature a conversation between Weiser and Cieplinski - moderated by distinguished scholar Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett - exploring the work’s origins in Kadya Molodowsky’s poetic reflections on the idea of Jewish prayer, the partnership behind its realization, and the music's journey from its world premiere at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw to the stage of Carnegie Hall. The evening will also include a brief solo performance by Cieplinski, followed by a reception with food and the opportunity to meet the artists. Tfiles (Yiddish for "prayers") recasts the clarinet concerto as a set of musical prayers. Praised after its Warsaw premiere as “full of noble simplicity and warmth” (Polityka), the concerto follows Molodowsky's lead in reimagining the traditional collective Jewish ritual search for the divine as a personal, individual quest beyond the boundaries of traditional observance.
Andrzej Cieplinski's participation in this concert is generously supported by the Polish Cultural Institute New York, the American Friends of POLIN Museum (AFoPM) / Association of the Jewish Historical Institute (SZIH), and the Adam Mickiewicz Institute (IAM).
About the Participants
Alex Weiser is a composer described by The New Yorker as having "a knack for crafting music that is at once historically rooted and of its moment." His work meditates on cultural inheritance, sanctity, and the transience of life. Weiser's debut album and all the days were purple was named a 2020 Pulitzer Prize Finalist; a second album, in a dark blue night, was released by Cantaloupe Music in 2024. His compositions include the clarinet concerto Tfiles, premiered at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, and the operas Tevye's Daughters (American Lyric Theater) and The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language. Weiser serves as Director of Public Programs at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
Andrzej Cieplinski is a Polish clarinetist recognized as one of his generation's most compelling voices in contemporary music. A laureate of the 2015 European Broadcasting Union’s New Talent of the Year award, he has performed as soloist with leading orchestras across Europe - including the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra, and Aukso - under conductors including Krzysztof Penderecki and Elim Chan. A graduate of the Hochschule fur Musik Basel and the Karol Szymanowski Academy of Music in Katowice, Cieplinski is deeply committed to expanding the clarinet repertoire through collaboration with living composers, continuing a family legacy of championship for new music.
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is University Professor Emerita and Professor Emerita of Performance Studies at New York University, best known for her interdisciplinary contributions to Jewish studies and to the theory and history of museums, tourism, and heritage. Ronald S. Lauder Chief Curator of the Core Exhibition at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, she has had a lifelong relationship with YIVO, directing the YIVO Folksong Project from 1973–1975 and serving on its Advisory Board. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, awarded the Dan David Prize, and decorated with the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland.
The American Composers Orchestra (ACO) is a national discovery and development pipeline for new orchestral music, focused on bringing the full spectrum of American music to orchestral stages, providing a gateway to the orchestral composition and performance process, and amplifying the expressive power of orchestral music to enable a vibrant future for all Americans.
Ticket Info: Free
Presented by:
discussion
lecture
The YIVO Origins of the Oyneg Shabes Archive: Understanding the Documents of the Hersh Wasser Collection – Live on Zoom
The Oyneg Shabes archive that Emanuel Ringelblum organized in the Warsaw Ghetto was one of the most successful examples of cultural resistance in all of Nazi-occupied Europe, a reminder that Jews could fight with paper and pen as well as with guns. Ringelblum did all he could to make sure that even if the Jews of Poland did not survive, posterity would remember them on the basis of Jewish and not Nazi documents.
But Ringelblum’s archive did not arise in a vacuum. No single institution had more of an impact on its ethos than the pre-war YIVO. Many key members of the archive, including Emanuel Ringelblum, Yitzhak Giterman, Hersh Wasser, Shmuel Winter, Rachel Auerbach, and Menakhem Linder had been YIVO activists.
After the war, Wasser, one of only three survivors of the archive staff, and fearful of what would happen to Jewish life in Stalinist Poland, managed to smuggle copies of many rescued documents to the YIVO in New York. This talk by Samuel Kassow will discuss the contents of YIVO’s Hersh Wasser Collection and the insights it offers into the workings of the Oyneg Shabes archive.
This program is held in conjunction with Will These Words Reach You? The Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto, on view at the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, September 18, 2026 – February 14, 2027. This exhibition was created on the initiative of the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw, in partnership with the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust with the support of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
About the Speaker
Samuel Kassow, Charles H. Northam Professor of History, Emeritus at Trinity College, holds a PhD from Princeton University and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Jewish Research. From 2006 until 2013, he was the lead historian for two galleries of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, which opened in 2014. Professor Kassow is the author of Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum and the Secret Ghetto Archive (Indiana University Press, 2007), which received the Orbis Prize of the AAASS; was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award; and has been translated into eight languages. White Goat Press recently published his translation of Warsaw Testament by Rokhl Auerbach, which received a National Jewish Book Award. A child of Holocaust survivors, Professor Kassow was born in a displaced-persons camp in Germany.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
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lecture
lecture
More than a Symbol: The Jewish Labor Bund in History – In-person Program and Live on Zoom
More so than any other party on the Jewish left, the Jewish Labor Bund holds a particular mystique in the imagination of Jewish leftists, even decades after the Bund in Poland was dissolved. It is remembered as a potent symbol of Diaspora Socialism, anti-Zionism, and Yiddish activism. However, the Bund was more than a symbol. The Bund was a potent movement in the Jewish communities of Russia and Poland, shaping Jewish economic, political, and cultural life across Eastern Europe for half a century and continuing in the diaspora worldwide.
It is that reality that this talk by Joshua Meyers will explore. Using the Bund Archive, located and preserved at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, this talk will examine the history of the Bund from its origins through World War II, when the party served as the standard bearer of Diaspora Socialism in the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe. It will delve into the evolving relationships between the Bund and other major political movements—Zionists, Communists, and others—that it existed alongside and frame these relationships within their historical reality. It will explore the factors that made the Bund so attractive to Jews in the Russian Empire and interwar Polish Republic, as well as the limits to that attraction against the political, cultural, and social realities it lived in. Ultimately, it will offer a narrative of the Bund rooted not in our world or imaginations, but in the reality of the Bund’s own members, while exploring its legacy and that of Diaspora Socialism in the 21st century.
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.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
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lecture
book talk
Jewish Women at Home in the World – Live on Zoom
Join author Melissa R. Klapper for a discussion of her new book Jewish Women at Home in the World: Gender, Judaism & American Identity in the Rise of Mass Tourism with AJHS historian Andrew Sperling.
While Americans have gone abroad for leisure and education since the early days of American history, the period between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of World War II saw the rise of mass tourism, with changes in the way travel operated opening up the world in new ways for millions of people. It was during this era that a wide range of American Jewish women began to travel more extensively, experiencing their journeys through their unique intersecting national, religious, and gender identities.
In Jewish Women at Home in the World, Melissa R. Klapper documents the remarkable number of American Jewish women who traveled abroad in the mid-19th to mid-20th century. These women went to school overseas, visited relatives and hometowns, worked abroad, attended international activist meetings, and took sightseeing trips alone, with family members or friends, or with organized tour groups. The volume looks specifically at the role that gender and Jewish identity, as well as their American background, played in the women’s choices of where to go, what to do, whom to see, and how to behave.
Ticket Info: Free; register online for a Zoom link
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book talk
the blavatnik chamber music series at cjh
Four Voices, Four Worlds - In-Person Concert & Live on YouTube
Join Phoenix Chamber Ensemble pianists Vassa Shevel and Inessa Zaretsky for an unforgettable evening of Classical, Romantic, and modern music by Schubert, Beethoven, Bach, and Shostakovich, featuring guest violinist Anna Elashvili and cellist Serafim Smigelskiy.
Program:
J.S. Bach
Three Two-Part Inventions, transcribed for violin and cello
C Major • D minor • F Major
Anna Elashvili - violin, Serafim Smigelskiy - cello
Ludwig van Beethoven
Piano Trio in C Minor, Op. 1, No. 2
Anna Elashvili - violin, Serafim Smigelskiy - cello, Vassa Shevel - piano
Intermission
Dmitri Shostakovich
Piano Trio No. 2 in E Minor, Op. 67
Anna Elashvili - violin, Serafim Smigelskiy - cello, Inessa Zaretsky - piano
Johannes Brahms
Hungarian Dances, arranged for violin, cello and piano, 4 hands by F. Hermann
No.1 in G minor • No.2 in D minor • No.3 in F Major • No.4 in F minor • No.5 in F-sharp minor/G minor
Vassa Shevel & Inessa Zaretsky - piano
Founded in 2005 by pianists Vassa Shevel and Inessa Zaretsky, the Phoenix Chamber Ensemble has become a vital part of the New York classical community, presenting more than 70 public concerts at the Center for Jewish History. The ensemble has garnered a devoted following with its innovative programming and sensitive interpretations, earned an international reputation presenting concerts in Russia, Poland, Italy, and other European venues, and collaborated with numerous acclaimed guest artists, including clarinetist David Krakauer, the Grammy-nominated Enso Quartet, the Tesla Quartet, members of the Jasper String Quartet, the New York Little Opera Company, the Metropolitan Opera, and New York City Ballet.
Made possible by the Stravinsky Institute Foundation through the generous support of the Blavatnik Family Foundation.
Ticket Info:
In-person: $18 general, $10 seniors, $8 members click here to register
YouTube: Pay what you wish; click here to register
Presented by:
the blavatnik chamber music series at cjh
film screening
Diamonds of the Night – In-person Program
In winning the Grand Prix at the Mannheim-Heidelberg International Film Festival (IFFMH) in 1964, Jan Nemec’s drama Démanty noci (Diamonds of the Night) became the first Czechoslovak New Wave film to receive an internationally recognized award. The motion picture, based on a short story from the autobiographical book Darkness Casts No Shadow by Arnost Lustig, offers unusual and intensely attitudinal insight into the topic of war and resilience pushed to its limits. It tells the story of two young Jewish men who escape from a train taking them to their death. The film amounts to a naturalistic study of endangerment, repudiation, and uprootedness. The experiences of the desperate refugees in the Sudetenland forest merge with the memories, dreams, and visions of one of the men. Thus, the anatomy of a tortured human soul is projected into the sphere of existential drama.
More than five decades after its premiere, the film received renewed international recognition when a remastered version, prepared by the Czech National Film Archive, was selected for the prestigious Cannes Classics section of the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, alongside restorations of landmark films such as Vertigo and 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Join YIVO for a screening of this film followed by a panel discussion with Jonathan Brent, Eva Lustigová, Emily Tamkin, and Michael Feldman.
This event forms part of FestivAL100, an international celebration marking the 100th anniversary of the birth of the writer, journalist, screenwriter, and Holocaust witness Arnošt Lustig.
Watch the trailer:
Ticket Info: $15; YIVO members: $10
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film screening
panel discussion
World of Our Fathers at 50 – In-person Program and Live on Zoom
World of Our Fathers by Irving Howe, originally published in 1976, traces the journeys of Eastern Europe’s Jews to America over four decades. Beginning in the 1880s, it offers a portrayal of the Eastern European Jewish experience in New York and shows how the immigrant generation tried to maintain their Yiddish culture while becoming American. The book became a New York Times bestseller and remains a popular work for those interested in understanding why these forebears to many of today’s American Jews made the decision to leave their homelands and how they experienced immigrant life in the early part of the twentieth century.
Join us for a discussion reflecting on the legacy of World of Our Fathers in honor of its fiftieth anniversary with Hasia Diner, Tony Michels, and Sam Adler-Bell, moderated by Annie Polland.
Buy World of Our Fathers by Irving Howe.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
panel discussion
lecture
Modern Yiddish Literature – Live on Zoom
In celebration of YIVO's 101st year, join us for our Yiddish Civilization 101 series. Each program will highlight key topics in Ashkenazi history and culture, including shtetl life, film, and Ashkenazi foodways, amongst others. Guided by expert scholars, each lecture will provide a greater understanding of Jewish life in Eastern Europe and its diasporas.
When does modern Yiddish literature begin? What does "modern" even mean? Which works belong to the Yiddish literary canon—and why were women so often left out? Why are the works of Mendele Moykher-Sforim, Sholem Aleichem, and Y.L. Peretz revered as the "classics" of Yiddish literature? Why was the Yiddish literary world so famously divided into competing literary, political, and ideological movements? How has the multilingualism of virtually every Yiddish writer—and reader—shaped the literature they created? And what role has translation played in the creation, dissemination, and reception of Yiddish literature?
Readers and writers have debated these issues ever since the Haskole, the Jewish Enlightenment. This talk by Anita Norich will trace the development of Yiddish literature from the early nineteenth century onward, examining its major writers, movements, and cultural contexts.
About the Speaker
Anita Norich is Collegiate Professor Emerita of English and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the translator of Desires by Tsilye Dropkin (2024), Fear and Other Stories by Chana Blankshteyn (2022), A Jewish Refugee in New York by Kadya Molodovsky (2019), numerous short stories, among them the previously untranslated stories of Israel Joshua Singer and Esther Kreitman, and, with Ellen Cassedy, Hand to Hand by Rashel Veprinski (2025). She is also the author of Writing in Tongues: Yiddish Translation in the 20th Century; Discovering Exile: Yiddish and Jewish American Literature in America During the Holocaust; and The Homeless Imagination in the Fiction of Israel Joshua Singer.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
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lecture
family history today
Family History Today: The Interesting Things I Learned Painting My DNA - Live on Zoom
Featuring Jarrett Ross
You've taken the DNA test and have gotten the results, but how do you know which parts of your DNA have come from each ancestor? Join genetic genealogist, Jarrett Ross, for a fascinating lecture about DNA painting, where he'll show you how to use chromosome mapping to reveal surprising insights about the DNA that you've inherited. You'll learn how to identify how unknown DNA matches connect to specific branches of your family tree, how to analyze the chromosome maps for more in-depth understanding, and even how to use advanced DNA painting techniques, such as Visual Phasing.
Speaker Bio: Jarrett Ross, The GeneaVlogger, is a professional genetic genealogist who first caught an interest in genealogy as a young child, but began extensively researching in 2009 while a senior in college. Jarrett has built a special expertise in Genetic Genealogy, the Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam, southern New Jersey Jewish agricultural societies, and American Jewish genealogy, as well as extensive experience researching many other population groups. Jarrett recently left his job as the Lead Investigative Genealogist at DNA Labs International to pursue content creation full-time. Jarrett also volunteers as a Geni curator, a Search Angel, Vice President of the Triangle Jewish Genealogical Society, and is on the Board of Directors for the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies.
This program will not be recorded.
Ticket Info: Pay what you wish
Presented by:
family history today
book talk
New from Yiddish Voices: Mississippi and Hasidic Warsaw – In-person Program and Live on Zoom
Join us for the launch of the latest two translations in the Yiddish Voices series, a partnership between YIVO and Bloomsbury. The first, Mississippi: A Yiddish Play about the Scottsboro Affair, is a fictionalized retelling of the Scottsboro Affair, which began with the wrongful arrest of nine African American youths in Alabama in 1931. The play demonstrates how important it was to Yiddish writers of the 1920s and 1930s to grapple with the persecution of Black people in America.
The second, Hasidic Warsaw: Reb Zalmen and the Aleksander Shtibl, is an intimate portrait of the lives of those who went inside the Aleksander Hasidim's shtibl (prayer house) in the early 20th century to pray, eat, study, and argue. The book provides rich material for the ethnography of Polish Hasidism in the early 20th century.
The event will feature a discussion exploring both of these newly published translations. The program will also include a performance by Marques Hollie of a song from Mississippi and a nigun from the Aleksander Hasidim. Book signing and reception will follow.
This program is supported by the family of Harriet Yassky.
Buy Mississippi: A Yiddish Play about the Scottsboro Affair.
Buy Hasidic Warsaw: Reb Zalmen and the Aleksander Shtibl.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
book talk
lecture
History of Yiddish – Live on Zoom
In celebration of YIVO's 101st year, join us for our Yiddish Civilization 101 series. Each program will highlight key topics in Ashkenazi history and culture, including shtetl life, film, and Ashkenazi foodways, amongst others. Guided by expert scholars, each lecture will provide a greater understanding of Jewish life in Eastern Europe and its diasporas.
There are many public misconceptions about the origins and history of Yiddish, however much consensus has emerged on a lot of the basics. This lecture by Dovid Katz will start with the Jewish scene in Europe just over a thousand years ago and survey the new European Jewish culture areas, focusing in on Ashkenaz, Ashkenazim, and all three of their Jewish languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, and Yiddish), setting the table for understanding the contextual rise and early history of Yiddish, its eastward trek, role in society, and dramatic growth. The lecture will also focus on the language and dialect, cultural orientations, literature, and the 19th century rise of Yiddish modernity in Eastern Europe.
The lecture will conclude by considering the internal diversity of Yiddish culture—from ultra-Orthodox to revolutionary secular movements—as well as touch on debates over linguistic standardization of the language.
Those interested in reading more on Dovid Katz’s perspectives are welcome to look at his book Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish, which is available free online as a PDF.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
lecture
book talk
Through the Eyes of Jewish Child Survivors from Poland – Live on Zoom
Through the Eyes of Jewish Child Survivors from Poland offers an intimate social history of Jewish childhood during and after the Holocaust. Centered on children from German-occupied Poland but informed by experiences across Nazi-occupied Europe, the book highlights the child’s own perspective to illuminate rescue, survival, and relationships with adults under the Nazi occupation. Author Joanna Beata Michlic examines children’s wartime experiences, showing how agency, gender, class, and religious or social background shaped their chances of survival. The book also traces the complex efforts of these young survivors to reclaim both childhood and Jewish identity, revealing the gap between their hopes and the actual opportunities of the immediate post-war period.
Drawing on children’s diaries, letters, testimonies, and memoirs, Michlic illuminates how children experienced and remembered trauma: the destruction of their families, the loss of their pre-war worlds, and the struggle to adapt to a new reality, challenging myths that sentimentalize the children’s endurance and portray the Holocaust as neatly concluded.
Join us for a conversation with Michlic about this book, led by Samuel Kassow.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
book talk
book club
LBI Book Club: The Director - Live on Zoom
Anjeana K. Hans will join the LBI Book Club to discuss The Director by Daniel Kehlmann
G.W. Pabst, one of cinema’s greatest directors of the 20th century, was filming in France when the Nazis seized power. To escape the horrors of the new and unrecognizable Germany, he fled to Hollywood. But now, under the blinding California sun, the world-famous director suddenly looks like a nobody. Not even Greta Garbo, the Hollywood actress whom he made famous, can help him.
When he receives word that his elderly mother is ill, he finds himself back in his homeland of Austria, which is now called Ostmark. Pabst, his wife, and his young son are suddenly confronted with the barbaric nature of the regime. So, when Joseph Goebbels—the minister of propaganda in Berlin—sees the potential for using the European film icon for his directorial genius and makes big promises to Pabst and his family, Pabst must consider Goebbels’s thinly veiled order. While Pabst still believes that he will be able to resist these advances, that he will not submit to any dictatorship other than art, he has already taken the first steps into a hopeless entanglement.
Kehlmann’s latest oeuvre explores the complicated relationships and distinctions between art and power, beauty and barbarism, cog and conspirator.
(Review: Amazon).
About the Speakers
Daniel Kehlmann was born in Munich and lives in Vienna, Berlin and New York
His novels include: Measuring the World, Me & Kaminski, Fame, F, You Should Have Left and Tyll, and he has won numerous prizes, including the Candide Prize, the Literature Prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, the Doderer Prize, The Kleist Prize, the WELT Literature Prize, and the Thomas Mann Prize.
Tyll, in a translation by Ross Benjamin, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2020. Measuring the World was translated into more than 40 languages and is one of the biggest successes in post-war German literature. The Director, his 14th novel, also translated into English by Ross Benjamin, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026.
Anjeana K. Hans is Professor of German Studies and affiliated faculty in Cinema and Media Studies at Wellesley College. Her research focuses on early silent film and on German and Austrian film of the 1930s, with emphases on questions of gender, identity, and subjectivity, on the representation of difference, and on exile and migration. Her publications include work on gender in Weimar cinema (Gender and the Uncanny in Films of the Weimar Republic, Wayne State UP, 2014), on the varied cultural anxieties and fascinations contextualizing Weimar film (Warning Shadows, Camden House, 2021), and on independent films in Austria (“‘Komisch ist die Welt, wie ein Traum:’ Franziska Gaal’s Verwechslungskomödien and the Exile’s Crisis of Identity,” in Rethinking Jewishness in Weimar Film, eds. Barbara Hales and Valerie Weinstein, Berghahn Books, 2021). She is currently working on a study of films produced in Austria between 1933 and 1938 by filmmakers forced out of the German film industry, in which she examines how they engage with the experience of exile and expulsion through narrative and aesthetic.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
Presented by:
book club
book talk
A Very Jewish Christmas: Christmas in Yiddish Tradition – In-person Program and Live on Zoom
Back in Europe, Yiddish-speaking Jews traditionally let loose on Christmas Eve with feasting, drinking, dancing, and gambling. Scholars have previously assumed this Christmas Eve vacation from Torah study to have been some sort of antagonistic counterculture to Christians celebrating Christmas. But Christmas in Yiddish Tradition reveals that the Christmas traditions transmitted in Yiddish were very similar to those transmitted in other European languages. Drawing on a wealth of documents, Jordan Chad argues that rather than European Jews being antagonistic towards Christmas, their Christmas Eve celebrations were exactly what they looked like: Jews celebrating Christmas. The volume offers the surprising argument that while Jews never celebrated the birth of Jesus, Christmas did not actually become the strictly Christian holiday that it is today until the period when Jews migrated to the New World.
Join YIVO for a very Jewish Christmas celebration featuring a talk by Chad uncovering the story of how Christmas once flourished in a language exclusive to non-Christians—and how modern Jews and Christians ultimately came to forget about the time when they celebrated Christmas in tandem. A kosher Chinese food dinner will follow the presentation.
Ticket Info: $10; YIVO members & students: $5
Livestream: Free
Presented by:
book talk
concert
Music of the Third Seder: A Yiddish Passover Concert – In-person Program and Live on Zoom
Join us for an evening exploring the musical legacy of the Third Seder, the secular Passover celebration that became a vibrant feature of Yiddish cultural life in twentieth-century America. Presented in collaboration with the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, this concert brings together rarely heard works and newly revived repertoire from this rich tradition.
The program features the world-premiere of two-piano arrangements of music by Lazar Weiner and Gershon Kingsley. A highlight of the evening Der Farshterter Peysekh (The Ruined Passover), a short ballet with narration based on Sholem Aleichem’s beloved Passover story. Featuring Zalmen Mlotek and Joyce Rosenzweig, along with special guest artists, the performance will also include additional musical treasures from the Third Seder tradition.
Ticket Info: $10; YIVO members: $5
Presented by:
concert
