book talk
Polish Jewish Collecting and Museums, 1891–1941 - Live on Zoom
Displays of Belonging illuminates the lives and work of Polish Jewish collectors and museologists, who sought to preserve the treasures of the Jewish past while demonstrating Jewish belonging on Polish soil during the interwar period. At the turn of the century, Jewish ethnographers and museum creators staked their claim to belonging to the civic nation through the display of Jewish folk art, fine art, and Judaica. After World War I, the nearly three million Jews in the Second Polish Republic were suddenly challenged with finding a place for themselves in a state that increasingly defined itself as a creation of the ethnic Polish nation, to which Jews, by many accounts, did not belong.
By tracing emergent documentation and display practices in partitioned Poland and in the interwar Second Polish Republic, Sarah Ellen Zarrow offers an analysis of how integrated Jews identified with Polish culture and history and with non-Jewish Poles, and how they conceived of, negotiated, and argued their collective place within Poland. The book places Jewish ethnographic practice and art collection within a Polish context, and sheds light on ways in which ideas about belonging and national identity were negotiated in the space of museums.
Join YIVO for a discussion with Zarrow about this book, led by Jeffrey Shandler.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
About the Speakers
Sarah Ellen Zarrow is Associate Professor of History at Western Washington University, where she holds an endowed chair in Jewish History. Her ongoing research focuses on Jewish life in Eastern Europe, particularly in Poland. I am especially interested in Jewish museum practices, language politics, and schooling. She previously was a Research Fellow at New Europe College Institute for Advanced Studies in Bucharest, Romania, and a Visiting Scholar at the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies at New York University. She holds a doctorate from the joint program of the Skirball Department of Hebrew & Judaic Studies and the History Department at NYU. Zarrow has also served as a consultant to archival and museum projects at YIVO and POLIN: Museum of the History of Polish Jews, designing exhibits and creating educational programming.
Jeffrey Shandler is Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University. His publications include Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (University of California Press, 2005); Shtetl: A Vernacular Intellectual History (Rutgers University Press, 2014); Yiddish: Biography of a Language (Oxford University Press, 2020); and Homes of the Past: A Lost Jewish Museum (Indiana University Press, 2024). Among other titles, he is editor of Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust (Yale University Press, 2002) and translator of Emil and Karl (Square Fish/Macmillan, 2006), a Holocaust novel for young readers by Yankev Glatshteyn.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
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book talk
lecture
Taking Yiddish Science Global: YIVO’s Foreign Branches, 1925-1994 - Live on Zoom
“Hoops are rolling, one after the other,
From the East, from the North, from the South,
They all come together in YIVO
In the treasury of books and sforim [holy books].”
— Daniel Charney, “Hoops are Rolling” (Also known as the “YIVO March”).
From almost its very inception, YIVO was a global organization. Yiddish speaking communities, inspired by the diaspora nationalism and Yiddishism of YIVO, created local branches across the world, which came to be known as YIVO’s foreign sections. The “YIVO March,” cited above, rang out in Havana, Cuba, in 1953, for example; YIVO branches flourished across North and South America, in South Africa and even in Australia and China. These foreign sections used the techniques that YIVO had pioneered: surveys, autobiography competitions, material collection, and Yiddish historical writing and exhibition curation, to write new histories of immigration and demonstrate the ongoing viability of Yiddish as a language of scholarship. During and after the Holocaust, these branches, swelled by recent refugees from Nazism, turned their expertise towards some of the first exhibitions that commemorated the victims of the Holocaust — and set a program for the reconstruction of Yiddish culture. This lecture by William Pimlott tells the story of how YIVO became a global institution and the new and different stories that YIVO's Friend Societies tell about 20th century Jewish history.
About the Speaker
William Pimlott is the inaugural Postdoctoral Research Associate at the NYU Center for the Study of Antisemitism. He recently completed his PhD on the Yiddish press in Britain, 1896-1910, at UCL and has subsequently held two research fellowships at the University of London: at the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism and the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, respectively. Dr. Pimlott has published articles on Yiddish history-making in Britain, on the South African Yiddish press and Yiddish art history in Jewish Social Studies, Jewish Historical Studies, and Shofar. This year, he is the Dina Abramowicz Emerging Scholar Postdoctoral Fellow at the YIVO Institute in New York (2024-2025).
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
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lecture
book talk
Zionism and Jewish Culture: A Book Conversation with Yitzhak Conforti – In-Person Program
Join Yitzhak Conforti for a talk on his new book, Zionism and Jewish Culture: A Study in the Origins of a National Movement, which examines the history of Zionism from a new perspective, arguing that Zionism was not only a political project, but also a major cultural force in modern Jewish life. The book examines the cultural world of pre-state Zionist activists, offering an understanding of the basic ideological challenges they faced—challenges that Israel is still grappling with today. How did the early Zionists define the relationship between Israel and Jewish tradition? How did they envision the ideal balance between the Jewish people’s welfare and the Land of Israel? What was their view on Western versus Eastern principles in defining the state? And what was their vision for the future of the Jewish state? In exploring these topics, this book enables a deeper understanding of the forces that continue to shape Zionism and Israel today.
About the Author
Yitzhak Conforti is Associate Professor in the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at Bar Ilan University in Israel. He is the author of Past Tense – Zionist Historiography and the Shaping of the Zionist Memory (in Hebrew; Jerusalem: Yad Ben Zvi, 2006); Shaping a Nation: The Cultural Origins of Zionism, 1882-1948 (in Hebrew; Jerusalem: Yad Ben Zvi, 2019); and Zionism and Jewish Culture: A Study in the Origins of a National Movement (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2024). He was a visiting scholar in various universities and research institutions such as Oxford University, NYU, Center for Jewish History, and Brandeis University, and a research fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at UPenn. He has published extensively on modern Jewish historiography, Zionist history and memory, Jewish nationalism, and Zionism. His current project is Zionism and the Hebrew bible.
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book talk
conversation
At Lunch with Barry Diller – Live on Zoom
Julie Salamon, New York Times best-selling author, sits down with business media executive Barry Diller to discuss his career and latest memoir Who Knew. Barry Diller’s business career has ranged from the end of the golden age of Hollywood to the frontiers of media and technology. He began his career at ABC in the 1960s, where he invented the Movie of the Week format, revolutionizing television programming. Diller later became the CEO of Paramount Pictures from 1974 to 1984, where he oversaw the production of classic films such as Saturday Night Fever, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Grease. In 1984, Diller joined 20th Century Fox, where he launched the Fox Broadcasting Company, introducing hit shows such as The Simpsons, Married…with Children, and Cops. In 1995, Diller founded IAC, a conglomerate focused on e-commerce, media, and internet companies. Under Diller’s leadership, IAC has grown into a digital powerhouse, owning brands such as Vimeo, Angi, and the Match Group (Tinder, Hinge, and OkCupid). Diller also chairs Expedia Group, one of the world’s largest travel companies. He is married to fashion designer and businesswoman Diane von Furstenberg and lives in New York City.
Ticket Info: Free; register online for a Zoom link
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conversation
book talk
Antisemitism, an American Tradition – In-person Program and Live on Zoom
Join author Pamela S. Nadell in conversation with Franklin Foer of The Atlantic.
In Antisemitism, an American Tradition, scholar Pamela S. Nadell investigates the depth of this fraught history. She explores how Jews fought antisemitism through the law and by creating organizations to speak for them. Jews would also fight back with their fists or join with allies in fighting all types of hate. This momentous work sounds the alarm on a hatred that continues to plague our country.
The discussion is jointly presented by Tulane University’s Stuart and Suzanne Grant Center for the American Jewish Experience, the American Jewish Historical Society and The Center for Jewish History. This event will take place at The Center for Jewish History.
Professor Pamela Nadell holds the Patrick Clendenen Chair in Women’s and Gender History at American University. Her book America’s Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today won the 2019 National Jewish Book Award’s Everett Family Foundation “Book of the Year” The University of Haifa’s Ruderman Program in American Jewish Studies published its Hebrew translation. Her new book Antisemitism, an American Tradition will be published by W.W. Norton in October. A past president of the Association for Jewish Studies, she consults to the museum planned for the rebuild of Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life and has testified before Congress three times. Professor Nadell was the past chair of the AJHS Academic Council, book review editor of the journal American Jewish History, and recipient of the Lee Max Friedman Award in 2010 for Distinguished Service to the field of American Jewish History.
Franklin Foer is a staff writer at the Atlantic. For seven years, he was the editor of the New Republic. He’s the author of several books, including the Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future, which was a New York Times bestseller. He also wroteHow Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization has been translated into 29 languages. He is a winner of a National Jewish Book Award and the Premio Terzani.
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book talk
lecture
Family History Today: Researching Your LGBTQ+ Ancestors – Live on Zoom
Discover the rich legacy of the LGBTQ+ community through examples from the centuries-long history of LGBTQ+ people in the United States, including excerpts from historical court cases and newspapers. Tune in to learn about these important stories, especially considering the increasing prejudice against this population today.
About the Speaker
Michael J. Leclerc is a popular genealogical presenter, teacher, author, and editor around the world. For more than a decade he has been a facilitator and instructor in Boston University’s Genealogy Studies Program, where he currently teaches research and writing skills.
He has edited a number of books, including Genealogical Writing in the 21st Century: A Guide to Register Style and More, Second Edition, with Henry Hoff, and the fifth edition of the Society’s seminal guidebook Genealogist’s Handbook for New England Research. He was a contributing editor for American Ancestors magazine, and a consulting editor for the New England Historical and Genealogical Register.
Michael wrote the “Crafting Family Histories” chapter for Professional Genealogy: Preparation, Practice, & Standards (Baltimore, Genealogical Publishing Co., 2018). He is former managing editor of the Association of Professional Genealogists Quarterly.
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lecture
lecture
"Yiddish Pills" and Summer Thrills: Reconstituting Yiddishism at Camp Hemshekh - In-person Program & Live on Zoom
In the decades directly following the Holocaust, Jewish leaders anxiously debated how to preserve and produce what they considered authentic Jewish culture, fearful that upward mobility and suburbanization threatened the integrity of Jewish life in America. In their searches for solutions to the problem of cultural decline, post-war Jews came to see residential summer camps as panaceas to their communal ills, constructing deeply educational and ideological camp programs with an eye towards collective transformation. Yiddishists — Jews who dedicated their efforts to the future of Yiddish culture and speech in America — not only set the groundwork for Jewish educational camping to take off, but also participated in this wider phenomenon of anxiety over the state of post-war Jewry. And yet despite their vital roles, Yiddishists are often left out of the story of Jewish camping, education, and identity-building in post-war America. In this talk, Sandra Fox will discuss how the founders and leaders of Camp Hemshekh embraced the sleepaway camp as a potential cure for Yiddish cultural and linguistic decline, and how the generations at the camp created a new purpose for and style of Yiddishism for the post-war moment.
This evening’s program is the second in a series of programs held in conjunction with YIVO’s current digitization of the Jewish Labor and Political Archives (JLPA). Consisting of nearly 200 collections encompassing 3.5 million pages of archival documents that were collected by the Bund Archives, the JLPA forms the world’s most comprehensive body of material pertaining to Jewish political activity in Europe and the United States.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
About the Speaker
Sandra Fox is the incoming Robert S. Rifkind Chair in American Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary. She was previously a Goldstein-Goren Visiting Assistant Professor of American Jewish History at New York University and director of the Archive of the American Jewish Left in the Digital Age. Her research interests include American Jewish history, the history of youth and childhood, Yiddish culture, and the history of sexuality. Her book,The Jews of Summer: Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America (Stanford University Press) addresses the experiences of youth in post-war Jewish summer camps and the place of intergenerational negotiation in the making of American Jewish culture.
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lecture
conversation
At Lunch with Julia Ioffe – Live on Zoom
Julie Salamon, New York Times best-selling author, sits down with Russian-born author and American journalist Julia Ioffe. Her articles have appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the New Yorker, Foreign Policy, Forbes, Bloomberg Businessweek, The New Republic, Politico, and The Atlantic. Ioffe has appeared on television programs on MSNBC, CBS, PBS, and other news channels as a Russia expert. She is a founding partner and Washington correspondent at Puck. Her book Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, From Revolution to Autocracy from Harper Collins, can be found in bookstores starting October 21st, 2025.
Ticket Info: Free; register online for a Zoom link
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conversation
book talk
The Tourist's Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City - Live on Zoom
The Tourist's Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City offers a new look at over a century of Yiddish culture in New York City. Author Henry H. Sapoznik focuses on theater, music, architecture, crime, Black-Jewish cultural interactions, restaurants, real estate, and journalism to tell the history of New York’s Yiddish popular culture from 1880 to the present. Culled from over five thousand Yiddish and English newspaper articles of the period, and thanks to new research from previously inaccessible materials, the book reveals fresh insights into the influence of Yiddish culture on New York City and showcases the culture’s persistent resiliency.
Join YIVO for a discussion with Sapoznik about this new book, led by Eddy Portnoy.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
About the Speakers
Henry H. Sapoznik is an award winning producer, musicologist, performer, and writer in the fields of traditional and popular Yiddish and American music and culture. Sapoznik, a native Yiddish speaker and child of Holocaust survivors, is one of the founders of the klezmer revival, the founder of the Max and Frieda Weinstein Archive of YIVO Sound Recordings, and a five-time Grammy nominated producer and winner of the 2002 Peabody award for his 10 part NPR series “The Yiddish Radio Project.” The collection upon which it was based contains over 10,000 unique items and is housed at the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress in Washington DC.
Eddy Portnoy is the Senior Academic Advisor and Director of Exhibitions at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. The exhibitions he has created for YIVO have won plaudits from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, VICE, The Forward, and others. He has written numerous articles on topics relating to Jewish popular culture and is also the author of Bad Rabbi and Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press (Stanford University Press, 2017).
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
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book talk
book talk
Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children's Literature - Live on Zoom
As migration carried Yiddish to several continents during the twentieth century, an increasingly global community of speakers and readers clung to Jewish heritage while striving to help their children make sense of their lives as Jews in the modern world. In Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children’s Literature, Miriam Udel traces how the stories and poems written for these Yiddish-speaking children underpinned new formulations of secular Jewishness. Udel discusses how Yiddish children’s literature espoused various political ideologies and constituted a project of Jewish cultural nationalism before the Holocaust. Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children’s Literature shows how Yiddish authors, educators, and cultural leaders, confronting practical limits on their ability to forge a fully realized nation of their own, focused instead on making a symbolic and conceptual world for Jewish children to inhabit with dignity, justice, and joy.
Join YIVO for a conversation with Udel about this new book, led by Marjorie Ingall.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
About the Speakers
Miriam Udel is Associate Professor of German Studies and Jewish Studies at Emory University, focusing on Yiddish language, literature, and culture. Udel’s academic research interests include twentieth-century Yiddish literature and culture, Jewish children’s literature, and American-Jewish literature. She is the author of Never Better!: The Modern Jewish Picaresque (University of Michigan Press, 2016), winner of the 2017 National Jewish Book Award in Modern Jewish Thought and Experience, and Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children’s Literature (Princeton University Press, forthcoming 2025). She is also the editor and translator of Honey on the Page: A Treasury of Yiddish Children’s Literature (New York University Press, 2020).
Marjorie Ingall is the author of Mamaleh Knows Best: What Jewish Mothers Do to Raise Successful, Creative, Empathetic, Independent Children and Sorry Sorry Sorry: The Case for Good Apologies (with New York Times-bestselling author Susan McCarthy), as well as co-creator of the website SorryWatch, which analyzes apologies in the news, in history, and in the arts. She is also the author of Hungry (with Crystal Renn), The Field Guide to North American Males, and Smart Sex (with Jessica Vitkus). She often writes about children’s books for the New York Times Book Review. She has been a columnist for Tablet Magazine and The Forward; a contributing writer for Glamour and Self; and Senior Writer at Sassy, where she was also the books editor.
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book talk
panel discussion
The Jewish Inn in Polish Culture - Live on Zoom
The Jewish inn was a center of economic and social life in Polish lands before the World War II. While its primary role was to provide hospitality, it also functioned as a multifaceted hub for business, leisure, and religious festivities, reflecting its vital role in the community. In The Jewish Inn: Between Practice and Phantasm, editors Halina Goldberg and Bozena Shallcross present 11 articles that delve into the inn's significance as a symbolic incubator of Jewish cultural possibilities. From exploring the intricate connections between music, dance, and other arts within the inn, to highlighting the increasing prominence of women in the inn's family dynamics, this collection offers an interdisciplinary look at this central pillar of Jewish Polish culture.
Join YIVO for a panel discussion with Goldberg and contributors Glenn Dynner, Beth Holmgren, and Eliza Rose about this book.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
About the Speakers
Halina Goldberg is Professor of Musicology and Director of the Robert F. Byrnes Russian and East European Institute in the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. She is Director of the digital project, “Jewish Life in Interwar Lodz,” and the author of Music in Chopin's Warsaw.
Glenn Dynner holds the Jay Berkowitz Chair in Jewish History at the University of Virginia. A recent Guggenheim Fellow, he is the author of Men of Silk: The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society (Oxford University Press, 2006); Yankel’s Tavern: Jews, Liquor & Life in the Kingdom of Poland (Oxford University Press, 2014); and The Light of Learning: Hasidism in Poland on the Eve of the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2024). He is also Editor of the journal Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies.
Beth Holmgren, Professor Emerita of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at Duke University, has published widely on Polish literature, theater, popular culture, and film—scholarship ranging from the award-winning books Rewriting Capitalism: Literature and the Market in Late Tsarist Russia and the Kingdom of Poland to Starring Madame Modjeska: On Tour in Poland and America. Over the last decade, she produced a series of articles exploring the Polish Jewish foundations of sophisticated popular culture in the interwar period and the wartime and postwar diaspora. Holmgren is currently completing the final, separately published American chapter of the biography, Warsaw is My Country: The Story of Krystyna Bierzynska, 1928-1945 (2018). After Krystyna Bierzynska lost most of her Jewish family to Nazi round-ups, killing centers, and the razing of the Warsaw Ghetto, she served as a 16-year-old orderly in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising and emigrated to the United States in 1951 as co-combatant in the Allied forces.
Eliza Rose is Assistant Professor and Laszlo Birinyi Sr. Fellow of Central European Studies at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. She received her Ph.D. in Slavic languages at Columbia University in 2020. Her articles on visual cultures of state socialism have been published in journals such as Slavic Review and Studies in Eastern European Cinema. Her current research investigates an ambitious campaign in late-socialist Poland to integrate industry and the visual arts. Her translations of Polish scholarly and art writing have been published widely.
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panel discussion
symposium
The Past, Present, and Future of Jewish History – In-Person Program
The Past, Present, and Future of Jewish History will gather twenty prominent Jewish historians to discuss a series of pressing questions pertaining to the recent evolution and future development of Jewish history as a field of scholarly inquiry. Ranging from the metahistorical to the methodological, the questions address how Jews have navigated the vexed relationship between tradition and modernity, assimilation and dissimilation, place and mobility, radicalism and conservatism, acceptance and antisemitism, diaspora and nationhood, power and powerlessness, structure and agency, and universalism and particularism. In exploring these and other universal themes, the symposium seeks to underscore the importance of Jewish history to the study of the humanities.
The sessions include: “What is Jewish about Jewish History?,” “How Significant is Antisemitism in Jewish History?,” “Who Counts in Jewish History?,” “Is Israeli History Jewish History?,” and “What is the Future of Jewish History?”
The Past, Present, and Future of Jewish History is the latest symposium in the Center for Jewish History’s Jewish Public History Forum which, since its founding in 2023, has convened numerous public symposia on historical issues of contemporary relevance.
Organized with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and NYC Department of Cultural Affairs.
Ticket Info: $18 general; $9 CJH members; click here to register
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symposium
lecture
Family History Today: A Moroccan Jewish Genealogical Journey - Live on Zoom
Upon discovering from a family member that her great-grandfather was born in Manchester, speaker Raquel Levy-Toledano undertook an immediate quest to uncover his origins. Did he belong to an Ashkenazi family that migrated to England from Prussia at the start of the 19th century? This hypothesis could elucidate certain Ashkenazi customs observed within her family. Alternatively, could he have been born in England by chance? This second possibility is plausible given that her family hails from Mogador (now Essaouira), a city with strong trade connections to England throughout the 19th century.
This marked the start of a long and arduous but enlightening journey for Raquel. Through both traditional document-based genealogy and genetic testing, she uncovers a new branch of her family, the Levy Belfsahi. Her research journey took her from Mogador in Morocco, to Manchester in England, Faro in Portugal, Ponta Delgada in the Azores, and finally to San Anton and Praia in Cape Verde. Along the way, she embarked many distant relatives now residing in various countries including Morocco, France, Israel, Canada, the United States, Switzerland, Portugal, England, and Cape Verde.
Raquel’s genealogical journey highlights the urgent need for more systematically organized research on Moroccan Jewish genealogy. While some rabbinic lineages are well-documented, information on other families remains either inaccessible or entirely absent. In numerous cases, oral tradition is still the primary -- sometimes only -- source of knowledge. To address this gap, she created the Jewish Moroccan Genealogy group on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/groups/genealogiedesjuifsdumaroc) aimed at reconnecting families and reconstructing a unified Moroccan Jewish family tree. Today, this tree includes over 400,000 interconnected profiles of Moroccan and Algerian Jews.
About the Speaker
Raquel Levy-Toledano was born in Morocco, then moved to France where she received her MD in gynecology and PhD in molecular endocrinology, followed by postdoctoral training at the NIH in Maryland. She is a board member of IAJGS, a board member of the Cercle de Généalogie Juive where she manages the Genetic Genealogy Group, a member of the General Assembly of the International Institute for Jewish Genealogy in Israel, president of NAJMA (Nos Ancêstres Juifs Marocains et Algériens) Genealogical Society, an expert curator of Geni’s Moroccan and Algerian Jewish family tree, co-administrator of the Avotaynu DNA project section involving North African Jews and founder of the Généalogie des Juifs Marocains Facebook Group, which has 13,000 members. She has published several articles in Généalo-J and other journals and has presented at numerous conferences and Zoom meetings.
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lecture
book talk
Crisis, War, and the Holocaust in Lithuania - Live on Zoom
Crisis, War, and the Holocaust in Lithuania is the first scholarly English-language study of Lithuania during World War II. The book utilizes previously inaccessible archives as well as academic works published in that country in the post-Soviet era. In the first chapters, the book examines the multifaceted relations of Lithuania’s national communities before World War II and the international and domestic crises which led to the destruction of the Lithuanian state in 1940. Author Saulius Suziedelis describes the process of the mass persecution and murder of the country’s Jews during the Holocaust, the role of Nazi and collaborationist forces, and acts of resistance, as well as the society’s responses. The book concludes with an examination of the postwar struggle within Lithuania to confront this legacy of unprecedented violence.
Join YIVO for a discussion with Suziedelis about this new book, led by Jonathan Brent.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
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book talk
book talk
Voices of Jewish Literary Giants: Hayim Nahman Bialik and Philip Roth - In-person Program and Live on Zoom
Philip Roth and Hayim Nahman Bialik are some of the most celebrated writers in contemporary Jewish literature. In his newly published biography of Roth (1933–2018), Philip Roth: Stung by Life, Steven J. Zipperstein explores the complex life and astonishing work of one of America’s most celebrated novelists. Born in Newark, New Jersey, Roth wrote with relentless ambition, producing a wide-ranging body of work—from Goodbye, Columbus to American Pastoral—that grappled with sex, identity, and American Jewishness. Simultaneously charismatic and reclusive, Roth lived, in his own words, like an “unchaste monk,” obsessively committed to the craft of writing.
In On the Slaughter, translated and introduced by MacArthur-winning poet Peter Cole, the poetry of Hayim Nahman Bialik (1873–1934) emerges with renewed force. Born in a Ukrainian village and hailed by Maxim Gorky as “a modern Isaiah,” Bialik transformed Hebrew literature, bridging traditional Jewish thought with modern humanism. This compact collection reveals a poet far more politically and psychologically unsettling than his image as a national icon suggests—ranging from furious responses to pogroms to luminous introspection and children’s verse.
Join YIVO for a conversation with Zipperstein and Cole about the enduring legacies of Roth and Bialik.
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: Free; registration is required
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book talk
panel discussion
YIVO Centennial Celebration - In-person Program and Live on Zoom
Join us for a Yiddish evening celebrating YIVO’s 100th anniversary! Panelists Zalmen Mlotek, David Roskies, Samuel Kassow, and others will reminisce about YIVO’s past and reflect on the organization’s enduring legacy, in a discussion led by Cecile Kuznitz. This event will take place in Yiddish. A celebratory reception will follow the panel discussion.
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
Zalmen Mlotek is an internationally recognized authority on Yiddish folk and theater music as well as creator of new musicals such as The Golden Land which toured Italy under the sponsorship of Leonard Bernstein and Those Were The Days, nominated for two Tony Awards. As the artistic director of the NYTF for the past twenty years, Mlotek helped revive Yiddish classics, instituted simultaneous English and Russian supertitles at performances and brought leading creative artists of television, theatre and film, such as Itzhak Perlman, Mandy Patinkin, Sheldon Harnick, Ron Rifkin and Joel Grey to the Yiddish stage. His vision has propelled classics, including NYTF productions of the world premiere of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Yentl in Yiddish (1998), Di Yam Gazlonim (The Yiddish Pirates of Penzance, 2006) the 1923 Rumshinky operetta The Golden Bride (2016), and the critically acclaimed Fidler Afn Dakh (Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish, 2018). During his tenure at the NYTF, the theatre company has been nominated or received over ten Drama Desk Awards and four Lucille Lortel Awards.
David G. Roskies is the Sol and Evelyn Henkind Chair emeritus in Yiddish Literature and Culture and a professor emeritus of Jewish literature at The Jewish Theological Seminary. He also served as the Naomi Prawer Kadar Visiting Professor of Yiddish Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Dr. Roskies was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012. Dr. Roskies is a cultural historian of Eastern European Jewry. A prolific author, editor, and scholar, he has published nine books and received numerous awards. In 1981, Dr. Roskies cofounded with Dr. Alan Mintz Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History, and served for seventeen years as editor in chief of the New Yiddish Library series, published by Yale University Press. A native of Montreal, Canada, and a product of its Yiddish secular schools, Dr. Roskies was educated at Brandeis University, where he received his doctorate in 1975.
Samuel Kassow, Charles H. Northam Professor of History at Trinity College, holds a PhD from Princeton University and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Jewish Research. From 2006 until 2013, he was the lead historian for two galleries of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, which opened in 2014. Professor Kassow is the author of Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum and the Secret Ghetto Archive (Indiana University Press, 2007), which received the Orbis Prize of the AAASS; was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award; and has been translated into eight languages. A child of Holocaust survivors, Professor Kassow was born in a displaced-persons camp in Germany.
Cecile E. Kuznitz is Associate Professor and Patricia Ross Weis ‘52 Chair in Jewish History and Culture at Bard College. She is the author of YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture: Scholarship for the Yiddish Nation (Cambridge University Press, 2014; Lithuanian translation, 2025) as well as articles on the Jewish community of Vilna, the field of Yiddish Studies, and Jewish urban history. She has held fellowships at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
panel discussion
conversation
At Lunch with Jonathan Mahler – Live on Zoom
Julie Salamon, New York Times best-selling author, sits down with Jonathan Mahler, author of The Gods of New York. Mahler is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine and the author of the bestselling Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning, which was adapted as an ESPN miniseries, and The Challenge, a New York Times Notable Book. His journalism has received numerous awards and been featured in The Best American Sports Writing. He lives in Brooklyn.
Ticket Info: Free; register online for a Zoom link
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conversation
panel discussion
Jewish Religious Life in Lithuania in the 18th-20th Centuries - Live on Zoom
Jewish Religious Life in Lithuania in the 18th-20th Centuries is a newly published volume that addresses the complicated issue of distinctive characteristics of Jewish religious life in Lithuania. Its authors and editors deal with the range of religious expressions, with the religious life of different sectors of the Jewish community of Lithuania, and with the dynamics of change in religious life in Lithuania over time. In this volume, Lithuania is more a historical and social concept than a geographical territory with clearly delineated borders and political identity. The authors deliberate how “Lithuanian” are the religious phenomena they discuss and what the historical agents understood as Lithuania in their given period, area, and historical circumstances.
Join YIVO for a panel discussion about this book led by Andrew Silow-Carroll, featuring editors Shaul Stampfer and Lara Lempertiene and contributors Tzipora Weinberg and Daniel Reiser.
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: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
panel discussion
book talk
Vladka Meed's 'On Both Sides of the Wall' - Live on Zoom
Vladka Meed, born Feigele Peltel, was just a teenager when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939. Increasingly devastated by the deportation and murder of 300,000 Jews—including her mother, brother, and sister—who were sent from Warsaw to the death camp of Treblinka, she heeded the call for armed resistance, joining the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB), established in Warsaw in July 1942. With her typically “Aryan” looks and fluency in Polish, Vladka could pose as a Gentile, so the ZOB asked her to live on the Aryan side of the wall and serve as a courier. In this role, she smuggled weapons across the wall, helped Jewish children escape from the ghetto, assisted Jews hiding in the city, and established contact with both Jews in the labor camps and with the partisans in the forest.
In this newly revised translation of the original Yiddish memoir, which was published in 1948, Vladka’s son, Steven D. Meed, preserves the testimony and memory of his mother for a new generation of readers. Join YIVO for a discussion with Steven D. Meed about this translation, led by Samuel Kassow.
Buy On Both Sides of the Wall.
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
Steven D. Meed is a retired internist and rheumatologist who earned his medical degree from New York University, where he also later served as an assistant professor of medicine. A founder of the Second-Generation group in New York City, he has spoken widely on his parents’ experiences in the Warsaw ghetto.
Samuel Kassow, Charles H. Northam Professor of History at Trinity College, holds a PhD from Princeton University and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Jewish Research. From 2006 until 2013, he was the lead historian for two galleries of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, which opened in 2014. Professor Kassow is the author of Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum and the Secret Ghetto Archive (Indiana University Press, 2007), which received the Orbis Prize of the AAASS; was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award; and has been translated into eight languages. White Goat Press recently published his translation of Warsaw Testament by Rokhl Auerbach, which received a National Jewish Book Award. A child of Holocaust survivors, Professor Kassow was born in a displaced-persons camp in Germany.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
book talk
panel discussion
'Yiddish Voices': A Translation Series by YIVO and Bloomsbury - In-person Program and Live on Zoom
Join us for the launch of the latest two volumes in the Yiddish Voices series, a partnership between YIVO and Bloomsbury. The first, The Destruction of Dubova: Chronicle of a Dead City, is a searing account of pogrom violence by the writer and documentarian Rokhl Faygenberg, and the second, The Mother of Yiddish Theatre: Memoirs of Ester-Rokhl Kaminska, is the memoir of the Yiddish actress and diva Ester-Rokhl Kaminska. Extraordinarily, both of these works were published exactly a century ago, in Warsaw in 1926. Both Kaminska and Faygenberg were exceptional as women cultural pioneers, and both were witness to the vitality and fragility of Ukrainian Jewish life and interwar Polish culture. The event will explore these works through image, conversation, and readings, with Elissa Bemporad (editor, The Destruction of Dubova), Mikhl Yashinsky (translator and editor, The Mother of Yiddish Theatre), historian Glenn Dynner (University of Virginia), and a live performance. Book signing and cocktails will follow.
This program is supported by the family of Harriet Yassky and by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
panel discussion
book talk
Sugihara’s List - Live on Zoom
In the summer of 1940, Chiune Sugihara (1900–1986), a Japanese diplomat and spy, serving as consul of the Empire of Japan in Kaunas, issued several thousand Jews, mainly refugees from Poland, transit visas enabling them to travel through Japan on their way to the Dutch island of Curaçao in the Caribbean. It was all fiction; in reality, no one was going to Curaçao, and most of the Jews who were saved eventually found refuge in Japan, the Shanghai ghetto, Australia, or New Zealand. In Sugihara’s List, author Zofia Hartman analyzes the legacy of Sugihara and the thousands of Jews he saved during the Holocaust.
Join YIVO for a discussion with Hartman about this book, led by Agnieszka Legutko.
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: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
book talk
lecture
A Very Jewish Christmas: Jesus in Modern Jewish Literature - In-person Program and Live on Zoom
“Other, and indeed banned, and yet one of my brothers” was how the renowned Yiddish and Hebrew modernist, Uri Zvi Greenberg, expressed his ambivalence toward Jesus in one of his many poems about this towering figure. Greenberg’s contemporaries shared this sentiment. For them, Jesus was inextricably bound up with the history of violence towards Jews committed in his name. At the same time, he also embodied an “authentic national Jew,” whose suffering and resistance to the authorities of his time created a powerful image that played a significant role in rethinking Jewish identity.
In this talk, Neta Stahl will examine how Jewish writers portrayed Jesus during periods of significant transformations in Jewish life. She will demonstrate that Jesus serves a range of ideological, theological, aesthetic, political, social, and psychological functions that not only relate to the long history of Jewish-Christian relations in Europe but also reflect attempts to reframe Jewish national lives in the diaspora and Israel.
A kosher Chinese food dinner will follow the presentation.
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:
lecture
