book talk
Songs of Translation: Bene Israel Performance from India to Israel - Live on Zoom
The Bene Israel are a Jewish community from western India who, over centuries, developed a distinctive identity in relation to other Jewish and non-Jewish communities, translating their sounds, words, and practices to have uniquely Marathi Jewish meanings. Some men sing Marathi Jewish songs, but over the past half century, women have assumed the important cultural role of stewarding these songs for the future. As author Anna C. Schultz demonstrates in her new book Echoes of Translation: Audibility and Relationally in Indian Jewish Women’s Songs, the Bene Israel women are translators who creatively mediate the worlds around them through song; while they may not always be visible, they are audible, and this book amplifies their relational soundings.
Schultz explores sonic translation among the Bene Israel through the metaphor of the echo: a resonant, transformative, relational phenomenon. The voices of Bene Israel women today, like Ovid's Echo, resonate empathically with loved ones they have survived, and, faintly, with those they never knew. Singing this repertoire teaches singers and listeners not only how to be Jewish, but also how to be Bene Israel. It also fosters sociality, providing a medium through which women echo one another, sharing cultural expertise while securing affective ties. But women also echo with one another; that is, they collectively and audibly translate sacred texts as embodied experience in the here and now. Women's repertories and practices were shaped in a richly diverse context, colored by interlinguistic translation between Hebrew, Marathi, Hindi, and English, as well as by other forms of cultural translation: translations from Cochin and Baghdadi Jewish to Bene Israel practice, Christian and Hindu religious discourse to Jewish religious discourse, from one ritual context to another, from men to women, from the written page to embodied performance, and from the past to the present.
About the Speaker
Anna C. Schultz is Professor and Chair of Music at the University of Chicago. As an ethnomusicologist and cultural historian, the twin issues animating her research are music’s power to activate profound religious experience and suture communities, and music as power, that is, music’s role in structuring and dismantling caste, race, gender, nation, and class. Her first book is Singing a Hindu Nation: Marathi Devotional Performance and Nationalism (Oxford University Press, 2013), and her second book is Echoes of Translation: Audibility and Relationality in Indian Jewish Women’s Song (Oxford University Press, 2026). Schultz also writes on race, place, and gender in American country music. With Sumanth Gopinath, she was awarded the H. Colin Slim Award by the American Musicological Society, and she received Honorable Mention for the Society of Ethnomusicology’s Jaap Kunst Prize. Dr. Schultz’s research has been supported by Fulbright-Hays, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Association of University Women, the Franke Institute of the Humanities, and the Neubauer Collegium, among other organizations.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
Presented by:
book talk
members only event
Meet the Fellows: Shiyong Lu - In-person Program and Live on Zoom
Join fellow CJH members for an exclusive lecture by Shiyong Lu, the Sid and Ruth Lapidus Graduate Student Fellow at the Center for Jewish History. Shiyong will present her research, “We Offer Chicken Chop Suey on Sundays: How Chinese Food Purveyors Encountered Jews in Twentieth-Century America.”
This 50-minute lecture offers a unique opportunity to engage directly with an emerging scholar and explore an intriguing intersection of cultural and culinary history.
Light refreshments will be served.
Ticket Info: This is an exclusive event for CJH members. To register or for membership questions please email membership@cjh.org. Please indicate how you plan to attend on your registration.
Presented by:
members only event
book talk
The Afterlife of Yiddish in German-Jewish Culture, 1818–1938 - Live on Zoom
From the late eighteenth century onwards, as growing circles of the German-Jewish population shifted from speaking Yiddish to German, the once-popular early modern corpus of Old Yiddish literature ceased to be published in the German-speaking lands. But this rich literary corpus did not entirely disappear from the cultural landscape of modern German Jews. In A Lingering Legacy: The Afterlife of Yiddish in German-Jewish Culture, 1818-1938, Aya Elyada shows how Old Yiddish texts continued to be retold, translated, adapted, discussed, and explored in the works of nineteenth and early-twentieth-century German Jewish authors.
In doing so, she uncovers a rich afterlife, in which these beloved Yiddish works were not only newly appreciated as historical monuments, but also served as the focus of lively discussions on a range of pertinent topics within modern German-Jewish culture, including tradition and secularization, acculturation and nostalgia, emancipation and antisemitism, gender relations, and religious reform. Illuminating how modern German-Jewish authors engaged with their premodern Yiddish heritage as central to modern Jewish experience and their distinctive cultural identity, this book unfolds a new dimension to German-Jewish history, culture, and literature.
Join YIVO for a discussion with Elyada about this book, led by Samuel Spinner.
About the Speaker
Aya Elyada is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research focuses on Yiddish-German encounters and the social history of language and translation. Before joining the Hebrew University in 2012, she was a visiting PhD student at the University of Munich and a postdoctoral fellow at Duke University. She is the author of A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish: Christians and the Jewish Language in Early Modern Germany.
Samuel Spinner is Associate Professor, Zelda and Myer Tandetnik Chair in Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture at Johns Hopkins University. He specializes in Yiddish and German-Jewish literature and culture from the nineteenth century to the present. He is the author of Jewish Primitivism and is currently working on a book on Holocaust memory. He co-edits the German Jewish Cultures series at Indiana University Press and serves on the editorial board of In geveb.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
Presented by:
book talk
panel discussion
The Future of Holocaust Memory: Poland and Beyond - Live on Zoom
Holocaust distortion in Poland involves reshaping or minimizing facts about the Holocaust, often emphasizing Polish victimhood while obscuring instances of local collaboration, participation, or indifference. It appears in political rhetoric, memory laws, public commemorations, and attacks on critical scholarship. YIVO’s Poland vs. Holocaust History series examines these dynamics and situates the Polish case within a broader European context.
This discussion panel will reflect on the future of Holocaust memory in Poland and in a broader international context. Bringing together Jan T. Gross, Elzbieta Janicka, and Jan Grabowski, the conversation will address the evolving challenges facing Holocaust remembrance amid political polarization, historical revisionism, and generational change. The panelists will consider the roles of scholarship, education, public debate, and cultural institutions in sustaining honest engagement with the past. The discussion will also explore how national and transnational perspectives can coexist, and what is at stake for historical truth, democratic values, and moral responsibility in shaping the future of Holocaust memory.
Buy Whitewash: Poland and the Jews by Jan Grabowski.
About the Speaker
Jan T. Gross is the Norman B. Tomlinson ‘16 and ‘48 Professor of War and Society, Emeritus at Princeton University. He was a 2001 National Book Award nominee for his widely acclaimed Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland. His most recent book, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz, was named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post.
Elzbieta Janicka is a historian of literature, cultural anthropologist, and visual artist. She received her M.A. at the Université Paris VII Denis Diderot and her Ph.D. and postdoctoral degree at Warsaw University. Janicka is the author of Sztuka czy Naród? [Art or the Nation?] (Kraków: Universitas, 2006) and Festung Warschau [Forteress Warsaw] (Warszawa: Krytyka Polityczna, 2011). She co-authored Philo-Semitic Violence. Poland’s Jewish Past in New Polish Narratives (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021; with Tomasz Zukowski) and This Was Not America: A Wrangle Through Jewish-Polish-American History (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2022; with Michael Steinlauf). Her individual exhibitions are: Ja, fotografia (1998); Miejsce nieparzyste [The Odd Place] (2006); and Inne Miasto [Other City] (2013, with Wojciech Wilczyk). Her research pertains to the identity and community building function of Polish antisemitism as well as the place and role of the Polish majority in the structure of the Holocaust. She works at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
Jan Grabowski is a Professor of History at the University of Ottawa and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His interests focus on the Holocaust in Poland and, more specifically, on the relations between Jews and Poles during the war. He has authored/co-authored or edited twenty books and published more than eighty articles published in learned journals in many languages. Grabowski’s book Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland has been awarded the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for 2014. In 2018 he co-edited and co-authored “Dalej jest noc” [Night Without End] (a two-volume study of the fate of the Jews in selected counties of occupied Poland). Night Without End was published in 2022 in English by Indiana University Press. Grabowski’s most recent book On Duty: The Role of the Polish “Blue” Police in the Holocaust was published in Poland in March 2020, and the English edition was published in May 2024 by Yad Vashem Presses.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
Presented by:
panel discussion
family history today
When Jokele Berkowicz Became Jakob Funkelstein: Reassessing the Adoption of Jewish Family Names in Galicia - Live on Zoom
In the 1780s, thousands of Jews in Habsburg Galicia adopted new family names, many of which are still in use today. The history of these surnames is often overshadowed by literary anecdotes of discriminatory naming practices. This lecture presents a historical reassessment of the topic based on recently discovered archival materials and a detailed analysis of thousands of surnames. In addition to examining the political background, we will explore the actual process of name creation, investigating the roles played by both Austrian officials and the Jewish population in establishing these new identities.
Participants will gain insight into the diverse origins of these names—ranging from fantasy creations and professional designations to personal characteristics and even literary influences. Crucially, these names often tell us more about the Jewish community than one might expect. Finally, the presentation will offer a practical overview of names in Galician genealogical sources, including metrical books, census lists, and gravestones. By understanding the administrative logic behind name adoption, researchers can better navigate the challenges of tracing biographies and family histories in Galician sources, even back into the era before hereditary surnames.
About the Speaker
Johannes Czakai, PhD, historian, is a postdoctoral fellow at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He studied History and Jewish Studies in Berlin, Potsdam, and Krakow and received his PhD from the Free University of Berlin. His research focuses on early modern Jewish history, names, genealogy, conversions, and espionage. In 2021, he published his multiple award-winning book Nochems neue Namen. Die Juden Galiziens und der Bukowina und die Einführung deutscher Vor- und Familiennamen 1772–1820 [Nochem’s New Names: The Jews of Galicia and Bukovina and the Adoption of German First and Family Names, 1772–1820] (Göttingen: Wallstein 2021). His current research project deals with Jewish conversions to Christianity in early modern and modern Silesia.
Presented by the Ackman & Ziff Family Genealogy Institute at the Center for Jewish History.
Ticket Info: Pay what you wish
Presented by:
family history today
book talk
Menachem Kipnis: Yiddish Folklore and Photographs from Interwar Poland - Live on Zoom
Menachem Kipnis (1878–1942) was one of the early twentieth-century’s greatest Jewish Eastern European ethnomusicologists, folklorists, and photographers. He had a weekly column in the Warsaw Yiddish newspaper Haynt, retelling humorous old folk stories about the fictional Polish town of Chelm, populated exclusively by fools. At the same time, his photographs of Jewish life in Eastern Europe regularly appeared in the Forverts (Forward), the most popular Yiddish daily newspaper in the United States.
Menachem Kipnis, edited by Sheila E. Jelen and translated by Raphael Finkel, brings these photographs and stories into dialogue with one another, bridging the Jewish communities in Poland and in America during the interwar period. This dialogue, between image and text, between European metropolis and American metropolis, captures a key historical moment when American Jews sought to imagine the lives of their coreligionists in the “Old Country” and Eastern European urban Jews sought to distinguish themselves from their Jewish compatriots who were still living in the shtetl.
Join YIVO for a discussion with Jelen and Finkel about this book, moderated by Natan M. Meir.
Learn more about Menachem Kipnis in the YIVO Encyclopedia.
About the Speaker
Sheila E. Jelen is a professor in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. Her scholarship is in the field of modern Jewish literature and culture, with a particular emphasis on gender and Jewish literacy and the intersection between ethnographic, photographic, and literary discourses in popular reconstructions of pre-Holocaust Eastern European Jewish life in Israel and the United States. She is the author of Salvage Poetics: Post-Holocaust American Jewish Folk Ethnographies and Testimonial Montage: A Family of Israeli Holocaust Testimonies from the Cracow Ghetto Resistance.
Raphael Finkel is professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Kentucky. He compiled the first version of the Jargon File. Finkel is also an activist for the survival of the Yiddish language.
Natan M. Meir is the Lorry I. Lokey Chair in Judaic Studies at Portland State University. He is the author of Kiev, Jewish Metropolis: A History, 1859-1914 and Stepchildren of the Shtetl: The Destitute, Disabled, and Mad of Jewish Eastern Europe, 1800-1939. He lectures widely on Jewish history and culture in Ukraine, Russia, Poland, and the Baltics; Jewish folklore and magic; and Jewish disability history. He is now working on a study of lived Judaism that explores the persistence of folk traditions and magical practices in the lives of ordinary Jews.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
Presented by:
book talk
lecture
Yiddish Theater, George Gershwin, and the Birth of an American Sound - Live on Zoom
As a teenager, George Gershwin attended Yiddish theater regularly. Khantshe in Amerike, by family friend Joseph Rumshinsky, featured a working-class woman asserting her rights and her desires. But not only did the show include a Suffragette Parade—it has also been described as the first Yiddish musical to incorporate American rhythm. This lecture by scholar Ronald Robboy will explore the idea that Gershwin’s internalization of Black Americans’ music was influenced by his early immersion in Yiddish theater.
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
Ronald Robboy is a musician and independent scholar based in San Diego, where he was a professional cellist for many years and, beginning in the 1970s, an early West Coast experimentalist in the klezmer revival. He has written and lectured extensively on Yiddish theater music, and in 1998 was named Senior Researcher for Michael Tilson Thomas’s Thomashefsky Project. Robboy is leading YIVO Institute’s reconstruction of the score to composer Joseph Rumshinsky’s operetta Khantshe in Amerike (1912), to be performed in New York at the Center for Jewish History in May 2026.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
Presented by:
lecture
book talk
Credit to the Nation, Rebecca Kobrin - In-person Program
Join us for a compelling book talk celebrating Credit to the Nation: Jewish Immigrant Bankers and American Finance, 1870–1930. Historian Rebecca Kobrin uncovers a powerful and often overlooked story: how Jewish immigrants, shut out of traditional financial institutions, built their own systems of credit to survive and thrive in the United States.
Arriving from the Russian Empire at the turn of the twentieth century, these immigrants created networks of lending that enabled others to secure passage to America, establish businesses, and gain a foothold in a new society. Drawing on rich archival materials in Russian, Yiddish, German, and English, Kobrin traces how these grassroots financial practices not only sustained immigrant communities but also reshaped New York’s urban and economic landscape. Their investments fueled real estate growth across the city, even as speculation contributed to the dramatic collapse of institutions like the Bank of United States during the Great Depression.
At once a story of innovation and caution, Credit to the Nation connects the past to the present, asking what happens when access to credit is denied and how marginalized communities respond.
Kobrin will be joined in conversation with Michael R. Cohen, Executive Director of the Grant Center for the American Jewish Experience and Stuart and Suzanne Grant Professor of the American Jewish Experience at Tulane University.
About the Speakers
Rebecca Kobrin is the Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History at Columbia University and Co-Director of the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies. A leading scholar of modern Jewish migration, her work spans international migration, urban history, American religion, and diaspora studies. She is the author and editor of several award-winning books, including Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora, recipient of the Jordan Schnitzer Prize, and a co-leader of the acclaimed Historical NYC Project, a digital map visualizing demographic change in New York City from 1850 to 1940. She has also received Columbia University’s Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award for excellence in teaching and mentorship.
Michael R. Cohen is Executive Director of the Grant Center for the American Jewish Experience and Stuart and Suzanne Grant Professor of the American Jewish Experience at Tulane University. A historian of American Jewish life, his scholarship explores Jewish politics, identity, and communal leadership in the United States. He is the author of The Birth of Conservative Judaism: Solomon Schechter’s Disciples and the Creation of an American Religious Movement, and his work has appeared in numerous academic journals and edited volumes. In addition to his research, Cohen is an engaged public historian and educator, frequently contributing to conversations on Jewish history and contemporary issues.
Book signing and dessert reception to follow the discussion.
Ticket Info: Free, pay what you wish; registration is required.
Presented by:
book talk
the blavatnik chamber music series at cjh
From Café to Concert Hall - In-Person Concert & Live on YouTube
Join Phoenix Chamber Ensemble pianists Vassa Shevel and Inessa Zaretsky with guest artists Anna Elashvili (violin), Daniel Panner (viola), and Serafim Smegelskiy (cello), for an evening of Paul Schoenfeld, Clara Schumann, and Robert Schumann.
Program:
Paul Schoenfeld - Café Music for Piano Trio
Clara Schumann, Three Romances for Viola and Piano, Op.22
Robert Schumann, Piano Quartet in E- Flat Major, Op.47
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
lecture
From Lublin to New York and Back: Yankev Glatshteyn and His Peregrinations – Live on Zoom
Yankev Glatshteyn (1896-1971), known in English as Jacob Glatstein, was a sophisticated Yiddish poet experimenting with form and language, as well as a novelist, short story writer, a versatile critic, editor and an important New York intellectual. Born in Lublin, Poland, Glatshteyn spent the first eighteen years of his life there before leaving in 1914, just before the outbreak of WWI, for New York where he, along with other Yiddish poets, established an important literary movement called Introspectivism in English and Inzikhism in Yiddish.
In the summer of 1934, he journeyed to Poland to visit his family and see his dying mother. The result of that visit were two travelogues: Ven Yash iz geforn (1938) and Ven Yash iz gekumen (1940]. In these books Glatshteyn combines his reminiscences and reflections from various times, but late 1930s journey and his early years in Lublin, juxtaposed with his American experience are central. Lublin and the surrounding region thus occupy an important place in these books.
Glatshteyn frequently returned to Lublin in his poetry as well. His first collection of poems from 1921 was entitled Yankev Glatshteyn, in agreement with the Inzikhist poetic credo to focus on the self. Forty-five years later, in 1966, Glatshteyn published a collection of poems entitled: A Yid fun Lublin [A Jew from Lublin]. No longer focusing primarily on himself, he becomes a Jew from Lublin, walking the streets of New York, feeling that he is part of the city.
In addition to focusing on the centrality of Lublin in Glatshteyn’s literary universe, new archival discoveries, including information about his post-WWII contacts with Yiddish writers and activists in Poland and his unfulfilled plan to visit the city of his birth in August 1964, thirty years after the first journey, will be explored.
About the Speaker
Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska is Professor of Comparative Literature at Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin; in the years 2000-2011 she was the Head of the Center for Jewish Studies. She is the author and editor of several books on Jewish topics in Polish and co-editor of Contemporary Jewish Writing in Poland: An Anthology (2001, with Antony Polonsky); Jewish Presence in Absence: The Aftermath of the Holocaust in Poland 1944-2010 (2014, with Feliks Tych); and Polin 28: Jewish Writing in Poland (2016, with Eugenia Prokop-Janiec, Antony Polonsky and Slawomir Zurek). She has translated more than twenty books from English and Yiddish into Polish. In 2004 she received the Jan Karski & Pola Nirenska Award for her research on Yiddish literature and language and in 2016 Irena Sendlerowa Memorial Award. She is the 2025-2026 Workmen’s Circle/Dr. Emanuel Patt Visiting Professorship in Eastern European Jewish Studies at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
Ticket Info: Free; register for an email reminder.
Presented by:
lecture
concert
Khantshe in Amerike — An Operetta by Joseph Rumshinsky - In-person Program and Live on Zoom
Join YIVO for a performance of the music of Khantshe in Amerike, a 1912 operetta with music by Joseph Rumshinsky, play by Nokhem Rakov, and lyrics by Isidore Lillian.
Premiered in New York City, Khantshe in Amerike was subsequently performed around the world. The show was a turning point in Rumshinsky’s output, noted for having put “American rhythm” on the Yiddish stage for the first time according to Yiddish theater historian Zalmen Zylbercweig (1894–1972). Khantshe was also a star vehicle which marked a pivotal moment in the career of singer, actor, and impresario Bessie Tomashefsky.
Khantshe in Amerike is a musical comedy whose action revolves around an independent minded young woman named Khantshe who dresses as a man and becomes the chauffeur for the wealthy Rubin Goldhendler. The show touches on serious topics including love, gender, women's suffrage and the changing social status of women in turn-of-the-century America.
Reconstructed from a variety of archival materials collected at YIVO—including from the recently donated Tomashefsky Archive from Michael Tilson Thomas—the operetta will be performed by students of the Bard Conservatory Vocal Arts Program.
The Sidney Krum Young Artists Concert Series is made possible by a generous gift from the Estate of Sidney Krum.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Ticket Info:
In Person: $15; YIVO members & students: $10
Livestream: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
concert
concert
Jewish Songs and Dances for Piano: Juliusz Wolfsohn’s 'Paraphrasen' - Book III – Live on YouTUbe
Join YIVO for a YouTube premiere performance by Ryan MacEvoy McCullough of Book III of Juliusz Wolfsohn’s Paraphrasen: a collection of 12 virtuosic piano fantasies based on Yiddish folksongs. Wolfsohn was a Warsaw- born pianist, critic, and composer who was active in the Association for the Promotion of Jewish Music in Vienna. Born in Warsaw in 1880, Wolfsohn later settled in the United States, where he died in 1944. Paraphrasen is one of multiple works Wolfsohn composed on Eastern European Jewish themes.
Register for the YouTube premiere performance of Paraphrasen, Book II taking place on March 9, 2026.
Watch the performance of Paraphrasen, Book I.
The Sidney Krum Young Artists Concert Series is made possible by a generous gift from the Estate of Sidney Krum.
About the Performer
Pianist Ryan MacEvoy McCullough has developed a rich musical life as soloist, vocal and instrumental collaborator, composer, recording artist, and pedagogue. His growing discography features many world premiere recordings, including solo piano works of Milosz Magin (Acte Prealable), Andrew McPherson (Secrets of Antikythera, Innova), John Liberatore (Line Drawings, Albany), Nicholas Vines (Hipster Zombies from Mars, Navona), art song and solo piano music of John Harbison and James Primosch (Descent/Return, Albany), and art song by Sheila Silver (Beauty Intolerable, Albany). He has also appeared on PBS’s Great Performances (Now Hear This, “The Schubert Generation”) and NPR’s From the Top. He has appeared as a concerto soloist with major orchestras including with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Toronto Symphony Orchestra and has collaborated with such conductors as Gisele Ben-Dur, George Benjamin, Fabien Gabel, Leonid Grin, Anthony Parnther, Larry Rachleff, Mischa Santora, and Joshua Weilerstein. He lives in Kingston, NY, with his wife, soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon.
Ticket Info: Free; register for an email reminder.
Presented by:
concert
book talk
Malka Owsiany Recounts by Mark Turkow - Live on Zoom
First published in Yiddish in 1946 and translated into Spanish in 2001, Malka Owsiany Recounts...: A Chronicle of Our Time by Mark Turkow is now available for the first time in English. Malka Owsiany was only 20 years old when she described the horrors of the Holocaust to Yiddish writer and Jewish community leader Mark Turkow. Malka’s account was among the first Holocaust testimonies available in the immediate postwar years. She discusses rebuilding her life and marrying a fellow survivor, Meir, as well as her memories of the rich Polish Jewish communal life from her youth that was destroyed by the Nazis.
Join us for a talk with translator Sandra Chiritescu about this English translation, in a discussion led by Rachelle Grossman.
About the Speakers
Sandra Chiritescu is Clinical Assistant Professor of Yiddish at New York University. She has previously taught Yiddish at Columbia University and the Worker’s Circle. She holds a BA in German philology from the University of Zurich and a PhD in Yiddish Studies from Columbia University. Her dissertation “Bubbes, Mames and Daughters: Uncovering Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century American Jewish and American Yiddish Feminist Genealogies” brings together her research interests in Yiddish literature and culture, American Jewish literature, feminist and queer theory, and translation theory. Her translation of an early Holocaust survivor testimony from 1946 by a woman is available under the title Malka Owsiany Recounts (Cherry Orchard Press, 2025).
Rachelle Grossman is an assistant professor of comparative literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her work focuses on the intersection of Yiddish and its transnational connections with other literatures, languages, and cultures. In her research, she develops a geopolitical approach to literature, focusing especially on the transformation of literary centers and peripheries in the postwar period. She is also interested in technologies of print and how they impact literature as material culture.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
Presented by:
book talk
concert
Leo Zeitlin and the Music of His World - In-person Program and Live on Zoom
Leo Zeitlin (1884–1930) was a composer, violinist, violist, and conductor born in Pinsk who specialized in classical works infused with Jewish themes. Best known for his Eli Zion for cello and orchestra, Zeitlin was an active member of the St. Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music and spent formative years teaching and conducting in Ekaterinoslav and Vilna before emigrating to New York, where he worked as an arranger and violist for the Capitol Theatre.
After his death, Zeitlin’s music fell into obscurity until cellist and musicologist Paula Eisenstein Baker (1939–2024) began studying and championing his work in the late 1980s. Eisenstein Baker’s publications in YIVO Annual and other journals, as well as her critical edition of Zeitlin’s complete chamber music for A-R Editions, were instrumental in reviving his legacy. This concert celebrates Eisenstein Baker’s scholarship and the recent donation of her archival collection to YIVO.
Performances by Julian Schwarz (cello), Marika Bournaki (piano), Peter Sirotin and Daniel Kurganov (violins), Colin Brookes (viola), and Ori Marcu (mezzo-soprano) will feature a variety of chamber and vocal music by Zeitlin, alongside works by composers with whom he was in dialogue, including Joseph Achron, Alexander Krein, Joachim Stutschewsky, Mikhail Gnesin, Lazare Saminsky, Joel Engel, Alexander Zhitomirsky, and Michael Lewin.
The Sidney Krum Young Artists Concert Series is made possible by a generous gift from the Estate of Sidney Krum.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Presented by:
concert
book talk
The Interracial Left and the International Workers Order, 1930–1954 - Live on Zoom
From Popular Front to Cold War tells the story of the International Workers Order (IWO), an organization founded in 1930 to provide life, burial, and health insurance to its members. The IWO broadened its mission to promote interracial solidarity, support labor unions, combat racism and antisemitism, and champion progressive social programs from the Great Depression into the postwar era.
At its height, the IWO had almost two hundred thousand members drawn from a broad ethnic and racial spectrum of the working class. It operated summer camps, published foreign-language newspapers, and supported a wide range of cultural activities. An early advocate for the United States' entry into World War II, the IWO was also ahead of its time in championing the nascent civil rights movement. After the war, it was declared a subversive organization due to its ties to the Communist Party and disbanded in 1954, though its legacy as a model for working-class cooperation across racial and ethnic differences endures to this day.
Join editor Elissa Sampson and contributors Jennifer Young and Felicia Bevel about this book, in a discussion led by Kate Rosenblatt.
About the Speakers
Elissa Sampson is a Research Associate in Cornell University's Jewish Studies Program. She is an urban geographer who studies how the past is actively used to create new spaces of migration, memory, heritage, and activism. Her life-long interest in migration, diaspora, re-diasporization, and culture has been pursued in the Lower East Side, Brooklyn, Jerusalem, Paris, and elsewhere and points to the dynamic interactions among diasporas in shared spaces/places.
Jennifer Young is the Education Program Manager at the Yiddish Book Center. Jennifer served as the Director of Education at the YIVO Institute, where she also worked as Digital Learning Curator to produce YIVO's first online class, Discovering Ashkenaz. She has also worked at the Tenement Museum, the Lower East Side Jewish Conservancy, and the New York Historical Society. Jennifer received a B.A. in Anthropology and Jewish Studies from McGill University and an M.A. in Anthropology from the University of Illinois. After completing doctoral studies in Jewish history at NYU, she received an M.Ed in Museum Curriculum and Pedagogy from the University of British Columbia. She also serves as part of a scholars' working group dedicated to research and scholarship of the Yiddish Left, sponsored by Cornell University.
Felicia Bevel is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Florida. Her research and teaching interests include African American history, twentieth century U.S. history, cultural history, and childhood studies. Her current research examines early twentieth century American cultural productions that romanticized the Old South and circulated outside the U.S. within the larger Pacific world, specifically in Canada and Australia. Her work has been supported over the years by the Ford Foundation, ACLS, and Florida Education fund. At UNF, she teaches courses such as the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Pacific, and Blackness in Archives and has served on the advisory boards of the Digital Humanities Institute and Africana Studies. She is also a faculty member on the Red Hill Cemetery Project, a collaboration between UNF and the Okefenokee Heritage Center and Black Hertiage Committtee to document the history of an African American cemetery in Waycross, GA.
Kate Rosenblatt is the Jay and Leslie Cohen Assistant Professor of Religion and Jewish Studies at Emory University. She is a historian of American religion with a focus on the history and experience of American Jews. She earned a BA in American history from Columbia University (2006), a BA in Bible and Ancient Semitic Languages from the Jewish Theological Seminary (2006), and both an MA in Jewish Studies (2009) and a PhD in American history (2016) from the University of Michigan. Her first book, Cooperative Battlegrounds: Farmers, Workers, and the Search for Economic Alternatives (under contract, History of American Capitalism series, Columbia University) details the efforts of a coalition of Americans – workers, farmers, religious clergy and their laities, labor activists, reforms, state and federal bureaucrats, and others – to put forward an alternative expression of American capitalism by way of producer and consumer cooperatives across the twentieth century. She is also at work on a second book project, a reappraisal of the post-World War II American Jewish left.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
Presented by:
book talk
book talk
Eastern European Jewish Immigrant Bankers and the Shaping of American Finance, 1873–1930 - Live on Zoom
What are immigrants to do when business opportunities abound in their new home, but banks refuse essential financial support? How could they make the journey in the first place without helping hands? In this lively history, Rebecca Kobrin chronicles the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Jewish immigrants who stepped up by doing the lending themselves. Arriving from the Russian Empire and settling primarily in New York, they made livelihoods by assisting fellow Jews, so they could purchase passage to the United States and, after arriving, obtain credit that other lenders would not dare provide. Drawing on previously unexamined archival materials in Russian, Yiddish, German, and English, Credit to the Nation traces the novel practices of bankers who not only enabled the flourishing of American Jewry, but also revolutionized the US financial industry.
Join us for a discussion with Kobrin about this book, led by Annie Polland.
About the Speakers
Rebecca Kobrin is the Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History at Columbia University. She works in the fields of immigration history, urban studies, business history, Eastern European history and American Jewish History, specializing in modern Jewish migration. She received her B.A. (1994) from Yale University and her Ph.D. (2002) from the University of Pennsylvania. She served as the Blaustein Post-Doctoral Fellow at Yale University (2002-2004) and the American Academy of Jewish Research Post-Doctoral Fellow at New York University (2004-6). Her book Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora (Indiana University Press, 2010) was awarded the Jordan Schnitzer prize (2012). She is the editor of Chosen Capital: The Jewish Encounter with American Capitalism (Rutgers University Press, 2012), Salo Baron: Using the Past to Shape the Future of Jewish Studies in America (Columbia University Press, 2022), and is co-editor with Adam Teller of Purchasing Power: The Economics of Jewish History (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).
Annie Polland is a public historian, author, and President of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, where she served as Vice President for Programs and Education from 2009 to 2017. Prior to her return to the Tenement Museum, she served as Executive Director of the American Jewish Historical Society. She is the co-author, with Daniel Soyer, of Emerging Metropolis: New York Jews in the Age of Immigration (New York University Press, 2013). She served as Vice President of Education at the Museum at Eldridge Street, where she wrote Landmark of the Spirit: The Eldridge Street Synagogue (Yale University Press, 2008).
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
Presented by:
book talk
book talk
Polish-Jewish Masculinities and the Challenge of Modernity - Live on Zoom
At the turn of the twentieth century, Jewish men in Eastern Europe lived in a social reality in which both Jewish and non-Jewish men and women tested, debated, and redesigned masculinities. Men of Valor and Anxiety by Mariusz Kalczewiak explores how religion, class divisions, antisemitism, new domesticity, and militarization changed masculine ideas and practices in Eastern Europe between the 1890s and 1930s. Kalczewiak’s study ventures into the military barracks, yeshivot study halls, fraternity parties, and Jewish homes to demonstrate how complex Jewish masculinities were between orthodoxy, acculturation, Polish and Jewish nationalisms, and changing notions of domesticity and profession. Men of Valor and Anxiety is the first book to demonstrate how the links between ethnicity and gender were constructed within both global and local contexts.
Join YIVO for a discussion with Kalczewiak about this book, led by Miriam Mora.
About the Speakers
Mariusz Kalczewiak is a Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland. He is a social and cultural historian of modern Jewish history, with a focus on Latin America and Eastern Europe. His award-winning book Polacos in Argentina: Polish Jews, Interwar Migration, and the Emergence of Transatlantic Jewish Culture was published in 2020 with the University of Alabama Press. His second book Men of Valor and Anxiety: Polish-Jewish Masculinities and the Challenge of Modernity came out in 2025 with Indiana University Press.
Miriam Mora is a historian of American immigration and ethnic history, with a focus on Jewish American gender identity. Her areas of research interest and specialization include modern Jewish history, gender and antisemitism, genocide studies, Holocaust memory and representation in pop culture, masculinity, history of Irish conflict, and American Jewish acculturation. Her first book, Carrying a Big Schtick: Jewish Acculturation and Masculinity in the Twentieth Century was released from Wayne State University Press in 2024. She previously served as Academic Director at the Center for Jewish History in New York City.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
Presented by:
book talk
