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
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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
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family history today
conversation
At Lunch with Joshua Jelly-Schapiro – Live on Zoom
Julie Salamon, New York Times best-selling author, sits down with Joshua Jelly-Schapiro to discuss his latest book, Daylight Come: Harry Belafonte and the World He Made. Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is a geographer and writer whose books include Names of New York: Discovering the City’s Past, Present, and Future Through Its Place-Names; Island People: The Caribbean and the World; and, with Rebecca Solnit, Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas. His work appears regularly in publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The New York Review of Books. Jelly-Schapiro teaches journalism at New York University and is director of publishing at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, where he hosts the popular Author Talks series and is coeditor-in-chief of Pioneer Works Broadcast.
Ticket Info: Free; register online for a Zoom link
Presented by:
conversation
lecture
‘Making a Scene’: Returning a Jewish Comic Opera Star to the Stage – Live on Zoom
Leonora Braham (1853-1931), creator of five principal soprano roles in Gilbert and Sullivan’s operettas between 1881 and 1887 (including Yum-Yum in The Mikado, 1885), first appeared in Dr. Danielle Padley’s research during a visit to the West London Synagogue archives in 2015. As Leonora Abraham, she sang in the Synagogue’s choir between 1870 and 1874, prior to her first professional engagement with the German Reed Entertainments. Having featured Braham’s life and work in two further pieces of scholarship, Padley was inspired by her opening words in a 1930 interview, “So someone has found me at last,” to write The Sun and I: a new 45-minute play with music which returns Braham to the environment in which she was happiest and best known.
This presentation gives an overview of Braham’s life on- and off-stage and describes the reasons for and methods involved in giving her a platform beyond traditional scholarly materials. Padley will discuss the challenges of incorporating the subject of a performer’s Jewish background into theatre intended to appeal to and educate a wide and varied audience, and will look ahead to plans for incorporating more performative media into her research on Jewish music-making in Victorian England.
About the Speaker
Dr. Danielle Padley is a musicologist specializing in Jewish music-making in nineteenth-century England. She investigates musical activities within geographically and socially diverse Jewish communities to enhance and challenge accepted narratives about Jewish life in England. She recently concluded a Research Fellowship at the Woolf Institute, Cambridge, where she is now an Affiliated Researcher, and is also an Affiliated Lecturer at the Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge, where she teaches the module “Music at the Margins of Victorian Society.” Padley has an interdisciplinary publication and research record, which explores Jewish musical activity in a variety of contexts, including synagogue worship, education, theatre, concert and drawing-room entertainments, and literary fiction. She is a trained singer and theatre performer, regularly performing both established and new writing within Cambridge’s local theatre scene. She grew up singing in and conducting synagogue choirs, and for nearly 12 years was Musical Director of Cambridge’s Hebrew choir, Kol Echad. Padley also sings and plays violin, keys, and folk harp with folk-rock band Once Again.
Ticket Info: Free
Presented by:
lecture
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
lecture
Jewish Refugees in the Dominican Republic - Live via Zoom
In this lecture, Marion Kaplan willl describe several Latin American refugee destinations while focusing on Sosua, in the Dominican Republic. Whereas most countries around the globe restricted Jewish immigrants, why did the Dominican government extend a welcoming hand, and who arrived in Sosua? The refugees’ journeys had started off desperately, escaping an expanding Nazi Germany and its concentration camps. After long treks, they found themselves on a sunny island, miles from the nearest town. There these urban dwellers became farmers – or tried to become farmers – with the crucial help of their Dominican neighbors. This is the story of how the Dominican Republic saved Jewish lives.
This event is the final installment of Many Promised Lands, LBI's 2026 lecture series covering migration of German-Jewish refugees after 1946.
This programming is made possible through the generous support of the Levi-Thalheimer Fund for Research and Public History.
Marion Kaplan is the Skirball Professor of Modern Jewish History Emerita at New York University. She is a three-time winner of the National Jewish Book Award for her books: The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York, Oxford University Press, 1991); Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (Oxford University Press, 1998); and Gender and Jewish History, co-edited with Deborah Dash Moore (Indiana, 2011). Her most recent book is Hitler's Jewish Refugees: Hope and Anxiety in Portugal (Yale, 2020). All of her monographs have been translated into German.
Ticket Info: Free; registration 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
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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
book club
LBI Book Club: Madonna in a Fur Coat - Live on Zoom
Professor Didem Uca will join the LBI Book Club to discuss Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali.
This best-selling Turkish classic of love and alienation in a changing world captures the vibrancy of interwar Berlin.
A shy young man leaves his home in rural Turkey to learn a trade and discover life in 1920s Berlin. There, amidst the city’s bustling streets, elegant museums, passionate politics, and infamous cabarets, a chance meeting with a beautiful half-Jewish artist transforms him forever. Caught between his desire for freedom from tradition and his yearning to belong, he struggles to hold on to the new life he has found with the woman he loves.
Emotionally powerful, intensely atmospheric, and touchingly profound, Madonna in a Fur Coat is an unforgettable novel about new beginnings, the relentless pull of family ties, and the unfathomable nature of the human soul. First published in 1943, this novel, with its quiet yet insistent defiance of social norms, has been topping best-seller lists in Turkey since 2013.
(Description: Penguin / Random House)
The Author: Sabahattin Ali
Sabahattin Ali was born in 1907 in the Ottoman town of Egridere (now Ardino in southern Bulgaria) and was killed on the Bulgarian border in 1948 as he attempted to leave Turkey. A teacher, writer, and journalist, he owned and edited a popular weekly newspaper called Marko Pasa and was imprisoned twice for his political views. In Turkey, he holds a position as one of the country's leading authors.
His short novel "Madonna in a Fur Coat" (1943) is considered one of the best novellas in Turkish literature. Translated versions have recently hit bestsellers lists and have sold a record number of copies in his country of birth. With this novel, Sabahattin Ali became one of 2 Turkish novelists whose works were published as Penguin Classics.
Our Guest: Didem Uca
Didem Uca is Assistant Professor of German Studies and associated faculty in the Departments of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies at Emory University. With a focus on intersectional approaches to post/migration cultures, Dr. Uca’s research has appeared in journals including Gegenwartsliteratur, Die Unterrichtspraxis / Teaching German, Seminar, and Monatshefte, for which she wrote about how the protagonist of Irmgard Keun's novel Child of All Nations can be interpreted as an adaptation of the character of Mignon from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. As a literary translator from German and Turkish, her work has appeared in venues such as TRANSIT, Konturen, SAND Journal, and Turkish German Studies. A dedicated pedagogue, Dr. Uca's teaching has been honored with the Goethe-Institut/American Association of Teachers of German Certificate of Merit (2020) and the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages German Special Interest Group's Early Career Award (2024)., was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
Presented by:
book club
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
