lecture
Family History Today: Illegitimacy in the Jewish Communities of Galicia – Live on Zoom
The Austrian Empire imposed many punitive and restrictive laws on the Jewish communities of Galicia to curtail their size and create boundaries between them and their non-Jewish neighbors. However, Galician Jews found ways to circumvent these laws, some of which can be deduced from the paper trail they left behind. For example, it’s not unusual to find your Galician ancestors described as “illegitimate” or listed with multiple or even hyphenated surnames in civil birth, marriage, and death registers. In this lecture, Dr. Janette Silverman, a Senior Genealogist and Research Team Manager at AncestryProGenealogists®, will explain the underlying meaning of these clues and discuss what they reveal about our ancestors’ lives.
Ticket Info: Pay what you wish; register here
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lecture
symposium
Fighting Fascism: A Symposium on Jewish Responses From the Interwar Period to the Present Day
Fighting Fascism marks the 90th anniversary of the Nazi seizure of power in Germany by examining how Jews in Europe and the United States responded to fascism from the 1920s up to the present day. Organized in partnership with the American Jewish Historical Society, the symposium is the second event sponsored by CJH’s new Jewish Public History Forum, which seeks to bring new and diverse audiences to the Center by organizing public programs addressing historical topics of contemporary relevance.
Opening Panel– “This is the Way the World Ends”: What is Fascism?
Panel Two– “The Empty Stomach of Germany”: Fighting Fascism in Europe
Panel Three– “Star Spangled Fascists”: Fighting Fascism in the U.S.
Panel Four– “The Language of the Good”: Fighting Fascism in Culture
Closing Panel– “In the Name of Humanity”: Fighting Fascism in the Postwar World
View the full slate of speakers and panels.
This event is generously sponsored by Leonard L. Milberg with additional support from the Achelis & Bodman Foundation
Ticket Info:
In-person tickets:
$36 General Admission; $10 Students; purchase tickets
Online: Free with RSVP; register here
Presented by:
symposium
yiddish club
Yiddish Club with Shane Baker – Live on Zoom
Nu, vilst redn a bisele yidish? An event for Yiddish enthusiasts the world over, the YIVO Yiddish club is an informal monthly gathering to celebrate Mame-loshn. Hosted by Shane Baker, sessions take place in English, and are liberally peppered with Yiddish. Each month Baker is joined by a different guest who discusses their work and a related Yiddish cultural theme. In the spirit of a club, sessions are held as interactive zoom meetings in which participants can see and hear one another. Each session includes ample time for audience questions, group discussion, and, time permitting, knock-down, drag-out arguments. Attendees need not know any Yiddish to attend, though some familiarity with the language is highly recommended.
This session features actor, translator, and YIVO Yiddish Club host, Shane Baker. His Yiddish translation of Waiting for Godot for the New Yiddish Rep, in which he also played Vladimir, has played Off-Broadway and internationally to critical acclaim. As director of the Congress for Jewish Culture, Baker has published numerous Yiddish books and journals and produced innumerable Yiddish events. Playwright and Tablet Magazine columnist Rokhl Kafrissenwill serve as the special guest host for this session.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/YiddishClub20 for a Zoom link
Made possible by:
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:
yiddish club
panel discussion
The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music Studies - Live on Zoom
The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music Studies is a handbook of Jewish music that addresses the diverse range of sounds, texts, archives, traditions, histories, geographic and political contexts, and critical discourses in the field. The thirty-one experts from thirteen countries who prepared the thirty original and groundbreaking chapters in this handbook are leaders in the disciplines of musicology and Jewish studies as well as adjacent fields. Chapters in the handbook provide a broad coverage of the subject area with considerable expansion of the topics that are normally covered in a resource of this type.
Designed around eight distinct sections—Land, City, Ghetto, Stage, Sacred and Ritual Spaces, Destruction/Remembrance, and Spirit—the range and scope of The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music Studies most significantly suggests a new framework for the study of Jewish music centered on spatiality and taking into consideration temporality and collectivity. Together the chapters form a truly global look at Jewish music, incorporating studies from Central and East Asia, Europe, Australia, the Americas, and the Arab world.
Join YIVO for a panel discussion of this new handbook with contributors Eléonore Biezunski, Jessica Roda, and Merav Rosenfeld-Hadad, introduced and led by editor Tina Frühauf.
About the Speakers
Tina Frühauf teaches at Columbia University and serves on the doctoral faculty of The Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the Executive Director of Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM) and Director of the Barry S. Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation at CUNY. Among her recent publications are Transcending Dystopia: Music, Mobility, and the Jewish Community in Germany, 1945-1989 and Dislocated Memories: Jews, Music, and Postwar German Culture (2014, with Lily E. Hirsch), which won the Ruth A. Solie Award and the Jewish Studies and Music Award of the American Musicological Society; as well as Postmodernity's Musical Pasts (2020). She has been serving on various committees of the American Musicological Society and as Council Member, and is on the board of the Louis Lewandowski Festival in Berlin and the DAAD Alumni Association USA.
Eléonore Biezunski is an award-winning Parisian singer/violinist/songwriter and scholar now living in NYC. An avid collector of Yiddish music, she has led several projects and has collaborated with a large number of well-known Jewish performers in the US and abroad. Her recordings include Yerushe (IEMJ, 2016) and Zol zayn (2014). Her composition “Tshemodan” was voted Best New Yiddish Song by São Paulo’s 2021 Bubbe Awards. As YIVO’s Sound Archivist since 2016, Eléonore has coordinated the Ruth Rubin Legacy website (ruthrubin.yivo.org). She has a PhD from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and has published several book chapters and articles on the history of Yiddish music and culture and co-edited a reissue of the complete recordings of the French Elesdisc label, 1948-1953 (2015, IEMJ). She is also a team member of the Klezmer Institute and is a recipient of an NYSCA Folk Arts Apprenticeship. www.eleonorebiezunski.com
Jessica Roda is an anthropologist and ethnomusicologist. She specializes in Jewish life in North America and France, and in international cultural policies. Her research interests include religion, performing arts, cultural heritage, gender, and media. Her articles on these topics have appeared in various scholarly journals, as well as edited volumes in French and English. The author of two books and the editor of a special issue of MUSICultures, her more recent book (Se réinventer au present, PUR 2018) was finalist for J. I. Segal Award for the best Quebec book on a Jewish theme. It also received the Prize UQAM-Respatrimoni in heritage studies. Her forthcoming monograph, For Women and Girls Only. Reshaping Jewish Orthodoxy Through the Arts in the Digital Age, investigates how music, films, and media made by ultra-Orthodox and former ultra-Orthodox women act as agents of social, economic, and cultural transformation and empowerment, and as spaces that challenge gender norms, orthodoxy, and liberalism.
Merav Rosenfeld-Hadad is a musicologist who specializes in all types of Arabic and Middle Eastern music prevalent among Jewish, Muslim, and Christian communities across and outside the Middle East. She focuses on the interaction of this music with issues of identity, nationalism, and Jewish-Christian-Muslim relations, in their wider historical, religious, and cultural contexts. Her PhD research was on the Paraliturgical Song of Babylonian Jews in the context of Arabo-Islamic culture and religion. Previously, she was a Research Associate, in both Royal Holloway and the Institute of Musical Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London, and a Research Fellow, in Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, New York. She has been a Visiting Scholar at St Edmund's College, Cambridge, since she completed her PhD studies, and taught at both the University of Cambridge and the Cambridge Muslim College.
Prior to her academic career, she was a senior economist and a lecturer at the United Mizrahi Bank, Tel Aviv, for eleven years; a nationwide bursar of fifty musical conservatories at the Israeli Ministry of Education, for three years; and an author of music programs for school children, aimed at developing values of peace between Jews and Muslims in Israel.
Ticket Info: Free, registration is required.
Made possible by:
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:
panel discussion
workshop
How to Do Research at YIVO: Pursuing Research Projects – Live on Zoom
The Archives and Library at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research represent the single largest and most comprehensive collection of materials on Eastern European Jewish civilization in the world. With 24 million unique items in the YIVO Archives and nearly 400,000 volumes in all European languages in YIVO's Library, the possibilities for research are endless.
Join YIVO Reference & Outreach Archivist Ruby Landau-Pincus for a workshop of how to pursue a research project using the YIVO archives. This program will cover the very basics of doing research at YIVO, including formulating a research question, finding existing research, identifying sources through bibliographies, and effectively using the Center for Jewish History’s catalog. This workshop will define the scope of YIVO’s materials and explain the holdings of the library and the archives, so that new researchers can be better equipped to find materials that pertain to their work.
This event is open to anyone interested in doing research at YIVO or learning more about YIVO’s vast collections.
About the Speaker
Ruby Landau-Pincus is YIVO’s Reference & Outreach Archivist. She holds a BA in Yiddish Studies from Columbia University and is earning her Master of Library and Information Science degree with an emphasis in Archival Studies from the University of Missouri. She loves that her work with YIVO allows her to meet a huge range of people, from established researchers to people who are just beginning to explore the wide world of Yiddishkeit YIVO has to offer.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/Research-Intro4 for a Zoom link
Made possible by:
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:
workshop
book talk
Mixed-Sex Dancing and Jewish Modernity - Live on Zoom
Dances and balls appear throughout world literature as venues for young people to meet, flirt, and form relationships, as any reader of Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, or Romeo and Juliet can attest. The popularity of social dance transcends class, gender, ethnic, and national boundaries. In the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jewish culture, dance offers crucial insights into debates about emancipation and acculturation. While traditional Jewish law prohibits men and women from dancing together, Jewish mixed-sex dancing was understood as the very sign of modernity—and the ultimate boundary transgression.
Writers of modern Jewish literature deployed dance scenes as a charged and complex arena for understanding the limits of acculturation, the dangers of ethnic mixing, and the implications of shifting gender norms and marriage patterns, while simultaneously entertaining their readers. In this book, Sonia Gollance examines the specific literary qualities of dance scenes, while also paying close attention to the broader social implications of Jewish engagement with dance. Combining cultural history with literary analysis and drawing connections to contemporary representations of Jewish social dance, Gollance illustrates how mixed-sex dancing functions as a flexible metaphor for the concerns of Jewish communities in the face of cultural transitions.
Join YIVO for a discussion of Gollance's book with Josh Lambert, professor and director of the Jewish Studies Program at Wellesley College.
About the Speakers
Sonia Gollance is Lecturer in Yiddish at University College London. She is a scholar of Yiddish Studies and German-Jewish literature whose work focuses on dance, theatre, and gender. Her first book, It Could Lead to Dancing: Mixed-Sex Dancing and Jewish Modernity, was published by Stanford University Press in 2021. Previously she taught at the University of Vienna, The Ohio State University, and the University of Göttingen (Germany). She received her PhD in Germanic Languages and Literatures from the University of Pennsylvania and her BA in Comparative Literature and Germanic Studies from the University of Chicago.
Josh Lambert is the Sophia Moses Robison Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and English, and director of the Jewish Studies Program, at Wellesley College. He's the author of The Literary Mafia: Jews, Publishing, and Postwar American Literature (2022) and Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture (2014), and coeditor of How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish (2020).
Ticket Info: Free, registration is required.
Made possible by:
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:
book talk
panel discussion
The Long History of Israeli Politics – Live on Zoom
This fall, the Center for Jewish History and Brandeis University’s Schusterman Center for Israel Studies are proud to announce the launching of a new Institute for Advanced Israel Studies. Each year, the Institute will bring together an elite international cadre of scholars in the field of Israel studies who are working on the same theme from different angles.
The Institute includes workshops for scholars to discuss research in progress, public talks, and other events throughout the academic year. Scholars will also produce short essays, presenting key aspects of their work in an accessible way for a public audience. The institute will culminate in a two-day public conference on April 7th and 8th, 2024.
The theme for the 2023-24 academic year is “Democracy and its Alternatives: Genealogies of Israeli Political Thought," which will focus on the histories and philosophies of Israeli politics and political thought, beginning in the decades before the establishment of the state. This year, we are proud to welcome 13 scholars in the inaugural cohort. They are a distinguished group who teach and research at institutions in Israel, the Netherlands, and the US. This year's scholars will work to unearth the many strands and global contexts of Israeli political ideologies, tracing their genealogies, and demonstrating the significance of these histories for contemporary debates.
The first public event of the Institute will be this roundtable discussion, entitled “The Long History of Israeli Politics,” that examines how political trends in pre-state Israel shed light on contemporary Israeli realities, including the state’s current crises. The participants in the discussion are Ahmad Agbaria (University of Texas at Austin), Julie Cooper (Tel Aviv University), Nimrod Lin (Tel Aviv University), and Orit Rozin (Tel Aviv University). The moderator is Schusterman Center Director, Professor Alexander Kaye.
For more on the new Institute for Advanced Israel Studies, visit https://www.brandeis.edu/israel-center/iais/index.html
Ticket Info: Pay what you wish; register here
Presented by:
panel discussion
book talk
Marty Glickman: The Life of an American Jewish Sports Legend with Author Jeffrey S. Gurock - In-person Event
Author Jeffrey S. Gurock joins us to discuss his new book with historian Beth Wenger.
For close to half a century after World War II, Marty Glickman was the voice of New York sports. His distinctive style of broadcasting, on television and especially on the radio, garnered for him legions of fans who would not miss his play-by-play accounts. From the 1940s through the 1990s, he was as iconic a sports figure in town as the Yankees’ Mickey Mantle, the Knicks’ Walt Frazier, or the Jets’ Joe Namath. His vocabulary and method of broadcasting left an indelible mark on the industry, and many of today’s most famous sportscasters were Glickman disciples. To this very day, many fans who grew up listening to his coverage of Knicks basketball and Giants football games, among the myriad of events that Glickman covered, recall fondly, and can still recite, his descriptions of actions in arenas and stadiums. In Marty Glickman, Jeffrey S. Gurock showcases the life of this important contributor to American popular culture.
In addition to the stories of how he became a master of American sports airwaves, Marty Glickman has also been remembered as a Jewish athlete who, a decade before he sat in front of a microphone, was cynically barred from running in a signature track event in the 1936 Olympics by anti-Semitic American Olympic officials. This lively biography details this traumatic event and explores not only how he coped for decades with that painful rejection but also examines how he dealt with other anti-Semitic and cultural obstacles that threatened to stymie his career. Glickman’s story underscores the complexities that faced his generation of American Jews as these children of immigrants emerged from their ethnic cocoons and strove to succeed in America amid challenges to their professional and social advancement. Marty Glickman is a story of adversity and triumph, of sports and minority group struggles, told within the context of the prejudicial barriers that were common to thousands, if not millions, of fellow Jews of his generation as they aimed to make it in America.
Ticket Info: $10 General Admission; $33 General Admission + Copy of the Book
Presented by:
book talk
panel discussion
The Legacy of Chaim Grade - Live on Zoom
Chaim Grade was born in 1910 in Vilna, Poland. In his youth, Grade was a student of the Novaredok Musar Yeshiva and of Avraham Yeshaya Karelitz. He was also a founding member of the Yung-Vilne literary group, known for its leftist politics, secular Jewish thinking, and literary influence. After losing both his mother and wife during the Holocaust, he emerged as one of the most prolific and defining Yiddish voices in post-war literature. Besides publishing several volumes of poetry, he is best known for his two acclaimed novels, The Agunah and The Yeshiva.
In early 2023, YIVO and the National Library of Israel (NLI) completed the digitization of the Papers of Chaim Grade and Inna Hecker Grade. The collection helps to illustrate Grade’s literary development and impact on Yiddish literature, from his earliest poetic works written in Vilna and the Soviet Union to his prolific and accomplished prose work composed mainly in the United States.
Join YIVO and NLI for a panel discussion of Grade’s legacy with Ruth Wisse, Ofer Dynes, and Curt Leviant, led by scholar and translator Justin Cammy.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
About the Speakers
Ruth R. Wisse was Professor of Yiddish literature and Comparative Literature at Harvard University from 1993–2014 and before that, helped found the Jewish Studies Department at McGill University. Currently a senior fellow at the Tikvah Fund and recipient of its Herzl Prize, she has written widely on cultural and political subjects for the Wall Street Journal, Commentary, National Affairs, and other publications. Her books include The Schlemiel as Modern Hero, The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey Through Literature and Culture, No Joke: Making Jewish Humor, If I Am Not for Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews, and Jews and Power. In 2007, she was awarded the National Medal for the Humanities, and in 2004, an Honorary Degree by Yeshiva University.
Ofer Dynes is Leonard Kaye Assistant Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Columbia University. He received his Ph.D. in Jewish Studies at Harvard University (September 2016) and held a postdoctoral fellowship at McGill University (2016-2018). Before coming to Columbia, he was an Assistant Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he taught classes in eastern European Jewish literature and history and served as the head of the Program in Yiddish Studies. Dynes specializes in the literature and cultural history of Eastern European Jewry from the 18th to 21st centuries. He has a particular interest in the nexus of literature and political thought. He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled The Fiction of the State: The Polish Partitions and the Beginning of Modern Jewish Literature (1772–1848). He has also recently co-edited a special volume of Prooftexts, entitled The Beginnings of Modern Jewish Literature in Europe,with Naomi Seidman (University of Toronto). Dynes is a co-founder and organizer of the Hebrew Lab Faculty Seminar, a New-York based workgroup for scholars in Hebrew Literature.
Curt Leviant has translated six collections of Sholom Aleichem’s works. Among his fifteen volumes of translations from Yiddish are novels by Chaim Grade, a memoir by Isaac Bashevis Singer, and collections of stories by Avraham Reisen and Lamed Shapiro. Some of Leviant’s 12 novels have been published in nine European languages, in Israel, and in South America. His novel, Diary of an Adulterous Woman, was an international best seller and was cited in France in 2008 as one of the “Seven Best Novels of the Year.” His most recent novels are the critically acclaimed King of Yiddishand Kafka’s Son, and Me, Mo, Mu, Ma & Mod. For his work with Yiddish and Hebrew literature, he has won several fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Justin Cammy is professor of Jewish Studies and World Literatures at Smith College. An alum of YIVO's Uriel Weinreich Yiddish Summer Program and a past recipient of YIVO's Dina Abramowicz Emerging Scholar fellowship, he also serves as on-site summer director of the Naomi Prawer Kadar International Yiddish Summer Program at Tel Aviv University. Cammy is a leading expert on the interwar Yiddish literary group Young Vilna. His translation of Abraham Sutzkever's From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg (McGill-Queen's) won the 2022 Leviant Prize in Yiddish Studies from the Modern Language Association.
Ticket Info: Free, registration is required.
Made possible by:
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:
panel discussion
yiddish club
Yiddish Club with Lorin Sklamberg – Live on Zoom
Nu, vilst redn a bisele yidish? An event for Yiddish enthusiasts the world over, the YIVO Yiddish club is an informal monthly gathering to celebrate Mame-loshn. Hosted by Shane Baker, sessions take place in English, and are liberally peppered with Yiddish. Each month Baker is joined by a different guest who discusses their work and a related Yiddish cultural theme. In the spirit of a club, sessions are held as interactive zoom meetings in which participants can see and hear one another. Each session includes ample time for audience questions, group discussion, and, time permitting, knock-down, drag-out arguments. Attendees need not know any Yiddish to attend, though some familiarity with the language is highly recommended.
This session features multi-instrumentalist and YIVO Sound Archivist Lorin Sklamberg. He is a founding member of the Grammy Award-winning Yiddish-American roots band, the Klezmatics, and has been heard on innumerable recordings and live shows, solo and in collaboration with such diverse artists as Itzhak Perlman, Jane Siberry, Chava Alberstein, Ehud Banai, Yoni Rechter, Emmylou Harris, Tracy Grammer, Neil Sedaka, Natalie Merchant, Tony Kushner and Theodore Bikel. He has composed and performed for film, dance, stage and circus, and has produced a number of recordings of world and theater music.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/YiddishClub21 for a Zoom link
Made possible by:
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:
yiddish club
celebration
Is Anything Okay? The History of Jews and Comedy in America - In-person and Live on Zoom
Celebrate the launch of our newest online course about Jewish comedy, which delves into the history of Jewish comedy and its development in the United States.
Ticket Info: Free, registration is required.
Made possible by:
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:
celebration
panel discussion
Remembering Vilna: The Fortunoff Archive's New Podcast - In-person and Live on Zoom
Meet the people behind Remembering Vilna: The Jerusalem of Lithuania, the third installment of Those Who Were There: Voices from the Holocaust, a podcast from the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. This latest 10-episode season of the podcast, which is produced in partnership with YIVO, brings to life the story of the destruction of Vilna’s vibrant Jewish community through recorded survivor testimonies and Herman Kruk’s extensive diaries.
Beginning in the mid-1930s with recollections of growing antisemitism, Remembering Vilna shares the experiences of a handful of witnesses to trace the upheaval that descended on the city with the start of World War II and an invasion by the Soviet Union, subsequent German occupation, the formation of the city’s Jewish ghettos, the Nazi’s wholesale murder of tens of thousands of Vilna’s Jews, through to the conclusion of the war and its aftermath.
Join YIVO for a discussion of this podcast with co-producers Nahanni Rous and Eric Marcus, the podcast’s host, Eleanor Reissa, and historical consultant Samuel Kassow, during which they will share excerpts from the series. This talk will be led by Eddy Portnoy, YIVO’s Academic Advisor and Director of Exhibitions.
About the Speakers
As lead producer of the series Remembering Vilna: the Jerusalem of Lithuania, Nahanni Rous listened to more than 60 testimonies of Vilna-born Holocaust survivors and wove together the stories that make up the tapestry of experiences in this ten-part audio documentary about Jewish life in Vilna leading up to, during and in the immediate aftermath of World War Two. Nahanni also hosts and produces “Can We Talk?,” the podcast of the Jewish Women’s Archive, which explores the intersection of gender and Jewish culture. She is a MacDowell fellow, an amateur cellist, and lives with her family in Washington, DC.
Journalist and author Eric Marcus is co-producer of Those Who Were There, a podcast drawn from Yale University’s Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, including this third season of the podcast, “Remembering Vilna.” Eric is also the founder and host of the award-winning Making Gay History podcast, which mines his decades-old audio archive of rare interviews to bring LGBTQ history to life through the voices of the people who lived it. Eric is the author and co-author of a dozen books, including, Making Gay History, Is It A Choice?, Why Suicide?, and Breaking the Surface, the #1 New York Timesbestselling autobiography of Olympic diving champion Greg Louganis.
Eleanor Reissa, the host of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimony’s Those Who Were There, is a Tony Award nominated director; a Broadway actress (Indecent); a television and film actress (HBO’s Plot Against America, AMC’s Walking Dead, and the upcoming series Die Zwieflers, for German television.) She is an award-winning playwright, choreographer; and a critically acclaimed singer in English and Yiddish, performing in every major musical venue in New York City and in festivals around the world. Her book, The Letters Project: A Daughter’s Journey was recently published by Post Hill Press.
Samuel Kassow, the Charles H. Northam Professor of History at Trinity College, holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University. He has been a visiting professor at many institutions and was on the team of scholars that planned the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. Among his various publications is Who will Write our History: Emanuel Ringelblum and the Secret Ghetto Archive (Indiana, 2007), which received the Orbis Prize of the AAASS, the Damals Prize in Germany for the best monograph of the year, and which was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award. It has been translated into eight languages. He is on the team of scholars chosen by Yad Vashem to write a one volume history of the Holocaust in Poland. Professor Kassow’s translation of Rachel Auerbach’s Warsaw ghetto memoirs will be published next year by the National Yiddish Book Center.
Eddy Portnoy is a specialist on Jewish popular culture. He currently serves as Academic Advisor for the Max Weinreich Center and Exhibition Curator at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. The exhibitions he has created for YIVO have won plaudits from The New York Times, VICE, The Forward, and others. He is the author of Bad Rabbi and Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press (Stanford University Press, 2017).
Ticket Info: Free, registration is required.
Made possible by:
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:
panel discussion
book talk
Sholem Asch: Underworld Trilogy - In-person and Live on Zoom
The newly published translated collection Sholem Asch: Underworld Trilogy includes three of Asch’s Yiddish dramas which take place in the world of the criminals and the literal underworld. Translated by Caraid O'Brien, the “Underworld Trilogy” is comprised of: God of Vengeance (1907), Motke Thief (1917), and The Dead Man (1922). All three works were successfully produced on the Yiddish stages of America and Europe, and their influence continues to be felt throughout the world’s theater today. Sholem Asch remains one of the most translated and performed Yiddish playwrights in history.
Join YIVO for a discussion of Sholem Asch: Underworld Trilogy, complete with performances of scenes from the book.
Ticket Info: Free, registration is required.
Made possible by:
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:
book talk
book talk
Celebrating Yiddish Voices: YIVO’s New Translation Series - In-person and Live on Zoom
Yiddish Voices is an exciting new series of translated works that connects today’s readers with Yiddish literature, in its full range of authors, genres, and subject matter. Published in partnership with the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and Bloomsbury Academic, each volume presents a rich and engaging literary work in English translation with a well-matched historian’s introduction, one that is both erudite and readable. Expertly curated by Alyssa Quint and Elissa Bemporad, the series is organized to showcase first-time translations of enduring Yiddish texts—memoirs, novels, and plays—from which arise topics and themes that have powerful resonance today.
The first volume of Yiddish Voices, Three Yiddish Plays by Women, brings together plays penned in Russia, Poland, and the United States from over a century ago. Each play grapples with enduring women’s issues, including motherhood, pregnancy and abortion, financial independence, and self-realization, and each from a woman’s perspective.
Join YIVO as we celebrate the launch of Yiddish Voices, complete with performances of scenes from the first volume of the series led by Allen Lewis Rickman, and discussion with editors Quint and Bemporad and translators Rickman and Miro Miniewski.
Ticket Info: Free, registration is required.
Made possible by:
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:
book talk
yiddish club
Yiddish Club with Dylan Seders Hoffman - Live on Zoom
Nu, vilst redn a bisele yidish? An event for Yiddish enthusiasts the world over, the YIVO Yiddish club is an informal monthly gathering to celebrate Mame-loshn. Hosted by Shane Baker, sessions take place in English, and are liberally peppered with Yiddish. Each month Baker is joined by a different guest who discusses their work and a related Yiddish cultural theme. In the spirit of a club, sessions are held as interactive zoom meetings in which participants can see and hear one another. Each session includes ample time for audience questions, group discussion, and, time permitting, knock-down, drag-out arguments. Attendees need not know any Yiddish to attend, though some familiarity with the language is highly recommended.
This session features actor, singer, and filmmaker, Dylan Seders Hoffman. She is the founder and artistic director of Chava Productions, a film production company which presents original works located at the intersection of pop culture and 21st century Jewishness with a generous dose of Yiddish. Chava Productions’ first short film Yiddish Mean Girls premiered in the fall of 2022. As an actor, she has performed Off-Broadway with the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, including in their New York Times Critic's Pick production The Sorceress, with the New Yiddish Rep, and at the New York Theatre Festival.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/YiddishClub22 for a Zoom link
Made possible by:
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:
yiddish club
lecture
A Very Jewish Christmas: When Jesus Spoke Yiddish - In-person and Live on Zoom
It is a curious fact that among the first Yiddish books ever printed was a translation of the New Testament, which appeared in 1540, only 18 years after Luther's famous translation (which it shamelessly cribbed). In the centuries that followed, another dozen or so missionary translations directed to Yiddish-speaking Jews followed. This talk will explore a dramatic change in the character of these translations in the twentieth century, when new conceptions of the Yiddish language, new cosmopolitanism in Yiddish culture, and new understandings of Jewish-Christian conversion converged to create new translation styles that aimed to express Jesus's Jewishness through a rich and haymish Yiddish.
Join YIVO for a very Jewish Christmas celebration featuring a talk on Yiddish translations of the New Testament by Naomi Seidman. A kosher Chinese food dinner will follow the presentation.
About the Speaker
Naomi Seidman is the Jackman Humanities Professor at the University of Toronto, in the Department for the Study of Religion and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies. Her fourth book, Sarah Schenirer and the Bais Yaakov Movement: A Revolution in the Name of Tradition, won a National Jewish Book Award in Women's Studies in 2019. A 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, Professor Seidman is presently completing a study of the Hebrew and Yiddish translations of Freud's writings during his lifetime. Her podcast on leaving the ultra-Orthodox Jewish world, Heretic in the House, was recently released by the Shalom Hartman Institute.
Ticket Info:
In Person: $15; YIVO members & students: $10
Zoom Livestream: Free; registration is required.
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
The Reality of Myth for Yiddish Writers in Weimar Germany - Live on Zoom
Berlin in the Weimar Republic (1918-1933) — though peripheral to the centers of Yiddish culture in the United States, Poland, and the Soviet Union — offered financial windfalls and business opportunities for migrants with foreign currency, particularly for writers with contact to the American Yiddish press. Moreover, Germany, unlike Poland, maintained diplomatic and economic relations with the Soviet Union, which allowed writers sympathetic to the Bolshevik Revolution a safe haven.
The heyday of Yiddish culture in Berlin was relatively short-lived, dating from about 1921 until about 1926, after which the Soviet Union had achieved political stability and began to invest, at least for the next decade, in a wide series of Yiddish-language cultural institutions. Nevertheless, Berlin was an important way-station in the development of modern Yiddish culture and particularly a Yiddish avant-garde.
In historical terms, it is always necessary to distinguish between "myth" and "reality"; for Yiddish writers in interwar Berlin, however, what is fascinating is the degree to which myth and reality informed and interpenetrated one another. In this lecture, Marc Caplan will examine the historical significance and legendary allure of Weimar culture by considering three of its most significant Yiddish writers: Moyshe Kulbak, Dovid Bergelson, and Der Nister ("the hidden one," Pinkhes Kahanovitch).
About the Speaker
Marc Caplan is a native of Louisiana and a graduate of Yale University. In 2003 he earned his Ph.D. in comparative literature from New York University. Since then he has held professorial appointments at Indiana University, Johns Hopkins University, Yale, the University of Wroclaw (Poland), and Dartmouth College, as well as research fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, the Universität Konstanz (Germany), the Center for Jewish History (New York), and the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor). In 2011 he published How Strange the Change: Language, Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms—a comparison of Yiddish and African literatures—with Stanford University Press. His second book, Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin: A Fugitive Modernism, was published by Indiana University Press in 2021. Currently he is a senior lecturer in Yiddish literature for the Heinrich-Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
Made possible by:
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:
lecture
lecture
Yiddish and Hebrew Little Magazines in the Weimar Republic - Live on Zoom
In this talk, Barbara Mann will discuss the "little magazine," a staple of modernist Jewish culture which flourished in the Weimar Republic. The little magazine is a distinctively portable and collaborative genre, an appropriate venue for the migrant, cosmopolitan mix of Berlin’s interwar Jewish population. Each issue blended poetry, manifestos and visual arts to create a unique form of cultural expression. Mann will explore the publishing history of Yiddish and Hebrew little magazines, their content, physical features, and readership.
About the Speaker
Barbara E. Mann is the inaugural holder of the Stephen H. Hoffman Professorship in Modern Hebrew Language and Literature at Case Western Reserve University. She is the author of A Place in History: Modernism, Tel Aviv and the Creation of Jewish Urban Space (Stanford, 2006) and Space and Place in Jewish Studies (Rutgers, 2012).
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
Made possible by:
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:
lecture
