Wed, Nov 05
01:00PM
Wed, Nov 05
01:00PM

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.

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book talk

Wed, Nov 05
06:30PM
Wed, Nov 05
06:30PM

lecture

Erich Fromm, Fascism, and the Holocaust: Psychoanalysis in German-Jewish History - In-person Program

On November 5, Roger Frie will kick off the series with a presentation of his book Erich Fromm, Fascism, and the Holocaust. Fromm is known for his bold stance against fascism and racism in his psychoanalytic practice and publications–Frie’s recent book uses previously unpublished correspondence to outline how Fromm’s personal family experience with the Holocaust shaped his views and work on trauma, social responsibility, and justice. Frie will engage in conversation with Michael Thompson, a professor of political theory and political philosophy.

About the Series:
This fall, the Leo Baeck Institute presents the Forum on Psychoanalysis and Society, a series of three conversations exploring the German-Jewish legacy of psychoanalysis and its echoes in both academia and popular psychology today. Our speakers will present their recent projects, all of which tell stories of German-speaking Jewish individuals who, in reacting and reflecting on their own changing social and political worlds, made an immeasurable impact on the study of psychoanalysis. As these authors engage in conversation with interlocutors, they will reflect on the ways these groundbreaking psychoanalytic strides in German-Jewish history fit in with drastic social changes throughout 20th century Europe.

About the Speakers:
Roger Frie is University Professor of Psychoanalysis in the Faculty of Philosophy and Education at the University of Vienna, Austria. He is also Professor Emeritus at Simon Fraser University and Affiliate Professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. He is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst as well as a historian and social philosopher. Author most recently of Edge of Catastrophe: Erich Fromm, Fascism and the Holocaust (Oxford 2024) and Not in My Family: German Memory and Responsibility after the Holocaust (Oxford 2017). His newest book, out next year, is Wounds of Silence: Legacies of Genocide and Racial Violence (also with Oxford). His most recent edited book is Culture, Politics and Race in the Making of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2022). www.rogerfrie.ca

Michael J. Thompson is Prof. of Political Theory at William Paterson University and is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Manhattan. HIs recent books include: Descent of the Dialectic: Phronetic Criticism in an Age of Nihilism (Routledge, 2025) as well as Twilight of the Self: The Decline of the Individual in Late Capitalism (Stanford University Press, 2022).

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lecture

Mon, Nov 10
07:00PM
Mon, Nov 10
07:00PM

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 LifeSteven 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.

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book talk

Tue, Nov 11
07:00PM
Tue, Nov 11
07:00PM

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 MlotekDavid RoskiesSamuel 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.

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panel discussion

Wed, Nov 12
12:00PM
Wed, Nov 12
12:00PM

lecture

Lunchtime Lecture: Marsha Rozenblit on Austria in German-Jewish History - Live on Zoom

On November 12 at 12:00 PM EDT, Marsha Rozenblit will discuss Austria in German-Jewish historiography over the past decades.

As we look back at the last 70 years of German-Jewish historiography since the founding of the Leo Baeck Institute, LBI presents a series of seven events focusing on the most important topics in German Jewish history. Each generation of historians witnesses the appearance of different approaches to historical writing. After decades of focusing on the main political events in German-Jewish history and biographies of political leaders, there has been a turn to microhistory, the role of common people, women and children, minorities, stories dominated by struggles and failures, etc. In the new series, the LBI will present a comprehensive view of seven overarching topics in German Jewish history and ask how their historiography has changed over the decades.

About the Speaker
Marsha L. Rozenblit is the Harvey M.Meyerhoff Professor of Modern Jewish History at the University of Maryland, where she has been on the faculty since 1978. A social historian of the Jews of the Habsburg Monarchy and its successor states, she is the author of two scholarly books: The Jews of Vienna, 1867-1914: Assimilation and Identity (State University of New York Press, 1983); and Reconstructing a National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria during World War I (Oxford University Press, 2001). She has also co-edited two books: Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe(Berghahn Press, 2005); and World War I and the Jews: Conflict and Transformation in Europe, the Middle East, and America (Berghahn Press, 2017); and she has written over 35 scholarly articles on such topics as Jewish religious reform in nineteenth century Vienna, Jewish courtship and marriage in 1920s Vienna, and German-Jewish schools in Habsburg Moravia. She served as the president of the Association for Jewish Studies, 2009-2011.

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lecture

Wed, Nov 12
06:30PM
Wed, Nov 12
06:30PM

lecture

The Secret Mind of Bertha Pappenheim: Psychoanalysis in German-Jewish History - In-person Program

On November 12, Gabriel Brownstein will present his book, The Secret Mind of Bertha Pappenheim, in conversation with Abby Kluchin. Bertha Pappenheim, who became an outspoken feminist and social pioneer in Vienna, was treated for hysteria by Sigmund Freud’s mentor, Josef Breuer. Later, Freud appropriated many of Pappenheim’s ideas to form his theory of psychoanalysis.

About the Series:
This fall, the Leo Baeck Institute presents the Forum on Psychoanalysis and Society, a series of three conversations exploring the German-Jewish legacy of psychoanalysis and its echoes in both academia and popular psychology today. Our speakers will present their recent projects, all of which tell stories of German-speaking Jewish individuals who, in reacting and reflecting on their own changing social and political worlds, made an immeasurable impact on the study of psychoanalysis. As these authors engage in conversation with interlocutors, they will reflect on the ways these groundbreaking psychoanalytic strides in German-Jewish history fit in with drastic social changes throughout 20th century Europe.

About the Speakers:
Gabriel Brownstein is the author of two books of fiction and two books of non-fiction, most recently THE SECRET MIND OF BERTHA PAPPENHEIM. He is a Professor in the English department at St. John's University. For his short stories, he's won a PEN/Hemingway Award and a Pushcart Prize.

Abby Kluchin is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Ursinus College, where she also coordinates the Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies program. She is co-founder and Associate Director at Large of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and co-host of the psychoanalysis podcast Ordinary Unhappiness.

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lecture

Sun, Nov 16
02:00PM
Sun, Nov 16
02:00PM

lecture

Postcards From the Past: Bringing Deltiology to Jewish Genealogy – In-Person and Live on Zoom

Postcards can be an overlooked and occasionally invaluable means of peering further into the lives of our ancestors. Not only can they illuminate microhistory (in ways that may otherwise be lost to the ages), but both the front and the back of postcards can contribute mightily to any genealogical study. Images on the front of a card can offer illustrations of long-demolished places of interest, while messages on the back may shed light on an ancestor’s travels and happenings, giving the researcher a clearer sense of the writer’s concerns of a long-forgotten moment. These are only a few of the many ways in which genealogy and deltiology (the study and collection of postcards) can intersect. This talk will include unique imagery and case studies to demonstrate the special role postcards can play in Jewish genealogy.

About the Speaker
Michael Cassara is a professional genealogist and lecturer based in New York City, specializing in Italian/Sicilian genealogy, New York and New Jersey research, and genealogical technology. He has frequently presented at regional societies as well as national conferences, including six years of presentations at RootsTech, the 2018 Association of Professional Genealogists Professional Management Conference, a popular 2019 APG Webinar on genealogical technology, as well as talks at FGS, OGS, the New York State Family History Conference, Allen County Public Library, and more. Michael holds a Certificate in Genealogical Research from Boston University (OL19) and is a graduate of the ProGen Study Group (ProGen 43). He is the Past President of the Italian Genealogical Group (ItalianGen.org) and currently serves as President of the Metropolitan Postcard Club, the oldest continuously operated deltiological organization in the United States. In his "other life" he is a leading New York City-based casting director, specializing in musical theatre projects worldwide. He blogs about his research at http://www.digiroots.net and you can find him on Facebook at @DigiRoots.

Ticket Info:
In Person: RSVP to program@jgsny.org; $5 at the door for non-JGS members; free for JGS members
Zoom (non-JGS members): $5; click here to register
JGS members will receive an email with Zoom link.


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lecture

Wed, Nov 19
06:30PM
Wed, Nov 19
06:30PM

lecture

The Third Reich of Dreams: Psychoanalysis in German-Jewish History - In-person Program

On November 19, filmmaker Amanda Rubin will discuss Charlotte Beradt’s groundbreaking book The Third Reich of Dreams, which collected the dreams of witnesses of the rise of Nazism and, ultimately, provided invaluable insight into the effects that authoritarianism has on the unconscious mind. Rubin is the force behind the republication of The Third Reich of Dreams, the lost rights of which she discovered while researching her forthcoming film about Beradt. She will be joined in conversation by Gal Beckerman, senior books editor of The Atlantic and author of the National Jewish Book Award-winning When They Come For Us We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry.

About the Series:
This fall, the Leo Baeck Institute presents the Forum on Psychoanalysis and Society, a series of three conversations exploring the German-Jewish legacy of psychoanalysis and its echoes in both academia and popular psychology today. Our speakers will present their recent projects, all of which tell stories of German-speaking Jewish individuals who, in reacting and reflecting on their own changing social and political worlds, made an immeasurable impact on the study of psychoanalysis. As these authors engage in conversation with interlocutors, they will reflect on the ways these groundbreaking psychoanalytic strides in German-Jewish history fit in with drastic social changes throughout 20th century Europe.

Ticket Info: Free; registration required


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lecture

Thu, Nov 20
12:30PM
Thu, Nov 20
12:30PM

conversation

At Lunch with Jonathan Mahler     Live on Zoom

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, 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

Mon, Nov 24
01:00PM
Mon, Nov 24
01:00PM

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.

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panel discussion

Mon, Dec 01
01:00PM
Mon, Dec 01
01:00PM

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.

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book talk

Tue, Dec 02
07:00PM
Tue, Dec 02
07:00PM

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.

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panel discussion

Wed, Dec 03
12:00PM
Wed, Dec 03
12:00PM

lecture

Lunchtime Lecture: Deborah Hertz on Gender in German-Jewish History - Live on Zoom

On December 3 at 12:00 PM EDT, Deborah Hertz will discuss gender in German-Jewish historiography over the past decades.

As we look back at the last 70 years of German-Jewish historiography since the founding of the Leo Baeck Institute, LBI presents a series of seven events focusing on the most important topics in German Jewish history. Each generation of historians witnesses the appearance of different approaches to historical writing. After decades of focusing on the main political events in German-Jewish history and biographies of political leaders, there has been a turn to microhistory, the role of common people, women and children, minorities, stories dominated by struggles and failures, etc. In the new series, the LBI will present a comprehensive view of seven overarching topics in German Jewish history and ask how their historiography has changed over the decades.

About the Guest
Deborah's involvement with the Leo Baeck Institute began in Jerusalem in 1970, when she found the LBI Yearbooks and especially Hannah Arendt's biography of Rahel Varnhagen published by East and West Press in 1957. It was not until 1975 that she began to visit the East 73rd Street townhouse where the New York City Leo Baeck Institute office was located. And in the year 2002-03 she spent a year revising her How Jews Became Germans at the Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem on Bustani Street.

Deborah received a PhD in History at the University of Minnesota in 1979. She is currently the Herman Wouk Chair in Modern Jewish Studies at the University of California at San Diego. She taught at the State University of New York at Binghamton and Sarah Lawrence College before coming to UCSD in 2004. She has taught as a visiting professor at Harvard University, the Hebrew University, and Tel Aviv University. Her two major books are: Jewish High Society in Old Regime Berlin and How Jews Became Germans: The History of Conversion and Assimilation n Berlin, both published by Yale University Press and both translated into German. She is currently finishing a book called Visionaries, Lovers and Mothers: Jewish Women from Conspiracy to Kibbutz.

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lecture

Thu, Dec 04
06:30PM
Thu, Dec 04
06:30PM

lecture

Do You Believe in Miracles? Reviving the Trencin Synagogue - In-person Program

The synagogue in Trencin, Slovakia, built in 1912–1913 to designs by Berlin-based architects Richard Scheibner and Hugo Pal, is a landmark of synagogue architecture in Slovakia. With its striking domed form and blend of Art Nouveau and Oriental styles, it stands as an important monument of Jewish heritage in Central Europe.

Damaged during World War II and only partially restored in 1948, and then seized by the state in the 1950s, the synagogue survived threat of demolition in the 1970s. After decades of neglect, its interior has been restored in 2024—the most significant synagogue conservation project undertaken by the Slovak Jewish community. Today it serves the small but active revived Jewish community in Trencin.

On November 9, 2025, the building will be inaugurated as Synagogue Trencin – Space for Dialogue and Understanding. In 2026 it will also play a central role as one of the venues of the European Capital of Culture in Trencin. The synagogue is part of the Slovak Jewish Heritage Route, a nationwide network connecting important sites of Jewish history.

Maros Borsky will present both the history and the current activities of the Trencin Synagogue. He will also offer an update on the wider context of Slovak Jewish heritage and highlight new projects that are reshaping cultural memory and community life.

About the Speaker
Dr. Maros Borsky studied art history and Jewish studies in Bratislava, Regensburg, London, Jerusalem, and Heidelberg. He has worked for over 25 years on Jewish heritage in Slovakia. Since 2012, he has directed the Jewish Community Museum in Bratislava and from 2014 to 2025 also led the Jewish Cultural Institute of the Federation of Jewish Communities.

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lecture

Mon, Dec 08
01:00PM
Mon, Dec 08
01:00PM

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.

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book talk

Wed, Dec 17
07:00PM
Wed, Dec 17
07:00PM

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


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lecture