book talk
My Name is Stramer – In-person Program and Live on Zoom
Though he returned from America penniless, Nathan Stramer still daydreams of a better life, as he struggles to make ends meet back in the small Polish town of Tarnów. Raising six children with his wife Rywka, he chases hare-brained schemes to make money while she fantasizes about a trip to the seaside. Crammed into a two-room apartment on down-at-heel Goldhammer Street, the family gets by on very little, and everyone has to pitch into Nathan’s latest ventures, including an ill-fated Stramer family café.
As the years pass, their children begin to take steps into a changing world. While Nathan and Rywka try to hold the center of their raucous family life together, national conflicts begin to escalate in Europe, and sinister forces creep into the Stramers’ world that they don’t yet understand. Author Mikolaj Lozinski tells the tragic story of the interwar years through the ordinary triumphs and struggles of this sprawling Polish-Jewish family.
Join us for a discussion with Lozinski about the newly-released English translation of his historical fiction novel My Name is Stramer, in a discussion led by Irena Grudzinska Gross.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
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book talk
book talk
Truth on Trial: 80 Years After Nuremberg A Conversation with Natalie Livingstone, Nadav Eyal & Gavriel Rosenfeld - In-person Program
Eighty years after the Nuremberg verdicts, historian Natalie Livingstone, author of the Sunday Times bestseller The Nuremberg Women, joins award-winning Israeli journalist Nadav Eyal for a conversation about the Nuremberg Trials, justice after the Holocaust, and their legacy today. The conversation will be moderated by Gavriel Rosenfeld, President of the Center for Jewish History.
Livingstone will discuss the enduring importance of the trials and highlight the vital contributions of the overlooked women - prosecutors, journalists, witnesses, and activists - who helped shape the principles of modern international justice. Eyal will then turn to the present, exploring how those principles and institutions are interpreted and debated today, including their implications for Israel and Jewish communities around the world.
A book signing and light reception will follow the program.
About the Speakers
Natalie Livingstone is a British journalist and historian whose books recover the stories of remarkable women who shaped Jewish, European, and modern history.
Livingstone is the author of The Women of Rothschild, a sweeping history of the women of one of the world’s most prominent Jewish families, and The Mistresses of Cliveden, which tells the story of five extraordinary women connected to one of Britain’s most storied houses and has been optioned for television.
Livingstone began her career as a feature writer at the Daily Express and has contributed to publications including The Times, Tatler, Harper’s Bazaar, US Vogue, Elle, and The Mail on Sunday.
She is the founder and chair of the Cliveden Literary Festival, one of Britain’s leading forums for literary, political, and cultural debate.
Nadav Eyal is one of Israel's most prominent journalists and a winner of the Sokolov Award—Israel's equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. He writes for Yediot Ahronot and Ynet, Israel's most widely circulated newspaper and news website, respectively, and is a contributor to the Call Me Back podcast. He is a Senior Research Scholar at the Institute of Global Politics and an Adjunct Professor in the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.
Dr. Gavriel Rosenfeld is the President of the Center for Jewish History and the Robin and Joseph Kanarek Professor of History at Fairfield University. His areas of specialization include the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, memory studies, and counterfactual history.
He is the author of numerous books, including the two-volume study Predicting the Past: Counterfactual History from Antiquity to the Present (De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2026).
Ticket Info: $18, including a copy of The Nuremberg Women; registration required here
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book talk
lecture
More than a Symbol: The Jewish Labor Bund in History – In-person Program and Live on Zoom
More so than any other party on the Jewish left, the Jewish Labor Bund holds a particular mystique in the imagination of Jewish leftists, even decades after the Bund in Poland was dissolved. It is remembered as a potent symbol of Diaspora Socialism, anti-Zionism, and Yiddish activism. However, the Bund was more than a symbol. The Bund was a potent movement in the Jewish communities of Russia and Poland, shaping Jewish economic, political, and cultural life across Eastern Europe for half a century and continuing in the diaspora worldwide.
It is that reality that this talk by Joshua Meyers will explore. Using the Bund Archive, located and preserved at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, this talk will examine the history of the Bund from its origins through World War II, when the party served as the standard bearer of Diaspora Socialism in the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe. It will delve into the evolving relationships between the Bund and other major political movements—Zionists, Communists, and others—that it existed alongside and frame these relationships within their historical reality. It will explore the factors that made the Bund so attractive to Jews in the Russian Empire and interwar Polish Republic, as well as the limits to that attraction against the political, cultural, and social realities it lived in. Ultimately, it will offer a narrative of the Bund rooted not in our world or imaginations, but in the reality of the Bund’s own members, while exploring its legacy and that of Diaspora Socialism in the 21st century.
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.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
lecture
book talk
Jewish Women at Home in the World – Live on Zoom
Join author Melissa R. Klapper for a discussion of her new book Jewish Women at Home in the World: Gender, Judaism & American Identity in the Rise of Mass Tourism with AJHS historian Andrew Sperling.
While Americans have gone abroad for leisure and education since the early days of American history, the period between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of World War II saw the rise of mass tourism, with changes in the way travel operated opening up the world in new ways for millions of people. It was during this era that a wide range of American Jewish women began to travel more extensively, experiencing their journeys through their unique intersecting national, religious, and gender identities.
In Jewish Women at Home in the World, Melissa R. Klapper documents the remarkable number of American Jewish women who traveled abroad in the mid-19th to mid-20th century. These women went to school overseas, visited relatives and hometowns, worked abroad, attended international activist meetings, and took sightseeing trips alone, with family members or friends, or with organized tour groups. The volume looks specifically at the role that gender and Jewish identity, as well as their American background, played in the women’s choices of where to go, what to do, whom to see, and how to behave.
Ticket Info: Free; register online for a Zoom link
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book talk
panel discussion
It Started on Delancey Street! New York's Lower East Side in Jack Kirby's Comics - In-Person Event
AJHS’ exhibit The Jack Kirby Way: How a Boy from the Lower East Side Became the King of Comics features rare comics, drawings, and studies of the artist’s work. Several of the iconic characters in Marvel ‘s pantheon of superheroes were created by a man who was born into one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in the world. By Kirby’s birth in 1917, the Lower East Side had become famous as an immigrant hub and a nexus of culture, art, industry, and commerce. Throughout Kirby’s childhood and young adulthood, he experienced an evolving neighborhood as new immigration laws, financial crashes, and World Wars shaped the community, economy, and way of life. All of which found their way into his comics.
Pop culture historian / co-curator Roy Schwartz and Jack Kirby Museum and Research Center executive director / co-curator Randolph Hoppe will join Katie Vogel, public historian at Henry Street Settlement, to discuss the character of the Lower East Side in Kirby’s comics.
Join us after the panel for a trivia game with exclusive prizes!
All *attendees will receive an exclusive Jack Kirby Koozie in honor of the exhibition! (*Limited to 150, one per registered guest.)
Ticket Info: Free with RSVP
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panel discussion
symposium
Jews and American Democracy: 250 Years of Debate - In-Person Event
To mark the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and in conjunction with the new exhibition, All We Have Standing Between Us: 250 Years of Jews and American Democracy, the Center for Jewish History and the American Jewish Historical Society are proud to present a full-day symposium, Jews and American Democracy: 250 Years of Debate.
While Jews have been deeply involved in the American democratic experiment since 1776, they have seldom spoken in a unified voice about how best to achieve its guiding ideals. Across generations, Jews have vigorously debated the opportunities and challenges presented by the principles of freedom, equality, popular sovereignty, and economic opportunity, voicing their views from multiple political perspectives. Whatever their differences, however, Jews have remained united in their pursuit of the promise of American democracy.
Jews and American Democracy brings together a distinguished group of scholars to explore questions surrounding the history and present-day engagement of Jews in American political life. The symposium features four panels: “One Community, Many Voices: American Jewish Political Traditions”; “The Paradox of Belonging: Antisemitism in American Jewish History”; “The World at Large: American Jews and Foreign Policy”; and “After Exceptionalism: The Future of American Jewish History.”
Jews and American Democracy is made possible by the generous sponsorship of the Polonsky Foundation with support from the Leon Levy Foundation. The symposium is the latest installment of CJH’s Jewish Public History Forum, which regularly convenes public conversations on historical issues of contemporary relevance.
Breakfast will be served before the first session, with lunch served at 12:30 p.m. Coffee breaks will also be provided throughout the day.
Click here for more information.
Ticket Info: General: $18, $12: Students and Seniors, $9 CJH Members
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symposium
book talk
What can the lives of Jewish midwives reveal about Jewish communities in early modern Europe? - In-person Program
In Delivering Knowledge, Jordan Katz offers a new perspective on Jewish history by exploring the experiences of Jewish midwives in the aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War. As cities across northern and central Europe developed new systems for regulating healthcare and childbirth, Jewish midwives found themselves at the center of profound changes in both Jewish communities and the Christian municipalities around them.
Drawing on previously untapped archival sources, Katz reveals how these women crossed boundaries of gender, religion, and class through their work caring for pregnant women and newborns. Their experiences also illuminate previously overlooked relationships between Jewish communities and Christian civic authorities, as well as the growing role of medical bureaucracies and record-keeping.
Join author Jordan Katz for a conversation about Delivering Knowledge and what the history of Jewish midwives can teach us about women's healing practices, Jewish-Christian relations, and Jewish communal life in early modern Europe. The conversation will be moderated by Iris Idelson-Shein.
About the Speakers
Jordan Katz is an assistant professor in the Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her work emphasizes the interplay between healthcare, civic life, Jewish communities, and gender in early modern Europe.
Iris Idelson-Shein is an associate professor in the Department of Jewish History at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and currently a visiting professor at the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at NYU.
Ticket Info: Pay what you wish; registration required
Presented by:
book talk
panel discussion
World of Our Fathers at 50 – In-person Program and Live on Zoom
World of Our Fathers by Irving Howe, originally published in 1976, traces the journeys of Eastern Europe’s Jews to America over four decades. Beginning in the 1880s, it offers a portrayal of the Eastern European Jewish experience in New York and shows how the immigrant generation tried to maintain their Yiddish culture while becoming American. The book became a New York Times bestseller and remains a popular work for those interested in understanding why these forebears to many of today’s American Jews made the decision to leave their homelands and how they experienced immigrant life in the early part of the twentieth century.
Join us for a discussion reflecting on the legacy of World of Our Fathers in honor of its fiftieth anniversary with Hasia Diner, Tony Michels, and Sam Adler-Bell, moderated by Annie Polland.
Buy World of Our Fathers by Irving Howe.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
panel discussion
lecture
Modern Yiddish Literature – Live on Zoom
In celebration of YIVO's 101st year, join us for our Yiddish Civilization 101 series. Each program will highlight key topics in Ashkenazi history and culture, including shtetl life, film, and Ashkenazi foodways, amongst others. Guided by expert scholars, each lecture will provide a greater understanding of Jewish life in Eastern Europe and its diasporas.
When does modern Yiddish literature begin? What does "modern" even mean? Which works belong to the Yiddish literary canon—and why were women so often left out? Why are the works of Mendele Moykher-Sforim, Sholem Aleichem, and Y.L. Peretz revered as the "classics" of Yiddish literature? Why was the Yiddish literary world so famously divided into competing literary, political, and ideological movements? How has the multilingualism of virtually every Yiddish writer—and reader—shaped the literature they created? And what role has translation played in the creation, dissemination, and reception of Yiddish literature?
Readers and writers have debated these issues ever since the Haskole, the Jewish Enlightenment. This talk by Anita Norich will trace the development of Yiddish literature from the early nineteenth century onward, examining its major writers, movements, and cultural contexts.
About the Speaker
Anita Norich is Collegiate Professor Emerita of English and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the translator of Desires by Tsilye Dropkin (2024), Fear and Other Stories by Chana Blankshteyn (2022), A Jewish Refugee in New York by Kadya Molodovsky (2019), numerous short stories, among them the previously untranslated stories of Israel Joshua Singer and Esther Kreitman, and, with Ellen Cassedy, Hand to Hand by Rashel Veprinski (2025). She is also the author of Writing in Tongues: Yiddish Translation in the 20th Century; Discovering Exile: Yiddish and Jewish American Literature in America During the Holocaust; and The Homeless Imagination in the Fiction of Israel Joshua Singer.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
lecture
book talk
Predicting the Past: Counterfactual History from Antiquity to the Present - In-person Program
What if history had unfolded differently?
For centuries, historians, philosophers, theologians, politicians, journalists, and novelists have imagined alternative paths the past might have taken. In Predicting the Past: Counterfactual History from Antiquity to the Present, Dr. Gavriel Rosenfeld offers the first comprehensive history of this enduring and often misunderstood form of historical inquiry.
Join Dr. Gavriel Rosenfeld, President of the Center for Jewish History and author of Predicting the Past, for the celebration of his new book and a conversation with renowned historian Jeffrey S. Gurock, whose own groundbreaking work in counterfactual history includes The Holocaust Averted: An Alternate History of American Jewry, 1938 to 1967. Together, they will explore why we are drawn to historical “what ifs” and what imagining alternative outcomes can reveal about the past we actually inherited.
Spanning more than three millennia, Rosenfeld’s two-volume study examines counterfactual thinking from ancient Mesopotamia to contemporary America, from Herodotus and the Roman Empire to the Crusades, the French Revolution, the American Civil War, and World War II. Along the way, he considers the missed opportunities, close calls, fantasies, and nightmares that have shaped our understanding of history.
By asking what might have happened, Rosenfeld argues, we can gain new insight into what happened and why.
About the Speakers
Gavriel D. Rosenfeld is the Robin and Joseph Kanarek Professor of History at Fairfield University and President of the Center for Jewish History. He specializes in the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, memory studies, and counterfactual history. He is the author of numerous books, including What Ifs of Jewish History: From Abraham to Zionism (Cambridge University Press, 2015).
Jeffrey S. Gurock is the Libby M. Klaperman Professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University. His scholarship encompasses American Jewish history, Jewish sports history, and counterfactual history. He is the author of The Holocaust Averted: An Alternate History of American Jewry, 1938 to 1967 (Rutgers University Press, 2015).
Please join us for a cocktail reception at 6:30 p.m. The program will begin at 7:15 p.m. Rosenfeld's two-volume study will be available for purchase at a discounted rate.
Ticket Info: Pay what you wish; registration required.
Presented by:
book talk
family history today
Family History Today: The Interesting Things I Learned Painting My DNA - Live on Zoom
Featuring Jarrett Ross
You've taken the DNA test and have gotten the results, but how do you know which parts of your DNA have come from each ancestor? Join genetic genealogist, Jarrett Ross, for a fascinating lecture about DNA painting, where he'll show you how to use chromosome mapping to reveal surprising insights about the DNA that you've inherited. You'll learn how to identify how unknown DNA matches connect to specific branches of your family tree, how to analyze the chromosome maps for more in-depth understanding, and even how to use advanced DNA painting techniques, such as Visual Phasing.
Speaker Bio: Jarrett Ross, The GeneaVlogger, is a professional genetic genealogist who first caught an interest in genealogy as a young child, but began extensively researching in 2009 while a senior in college. Jarrett has built a special expertise in Genetic Genealogy, the Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam, southern New Jersey Jewish agricultural societies, and American Jewish genealogy, as well as extensive experience researching many other population groups. Jarrett recently left his job as the Lead Investigative Genealogist at DNA Labs International to pursue content creation full-time. Jarrett also volunteers as a Geni curator, a Search Angel, Vice President of the Triangle Jewish Genealogical Society, and is on the Board of Directors for the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies.
This program will not be recorded.
Ticket Info: Pay what you wish
Presented by:
family history today
book club
Plot Twist: Jewish Joy! - In-person Program
Jewish stories are about so much more than trauma. Join us for a quarterly book club and lively discussion exploring Jewish history, identity, culture, and memory through books that celebrate Jewish joy, love, humor, resistance, resilience, community, and survival. Together, we’ll share perspectives, make connections, and explore how the stories on the page reflect our own lives and experiences.
Our first book will be One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levy and the Search for a Lost World by Michael Frank.
Whether you’re a seasoned book club regular or simply looking for a reason to pick up something new and meet fellow readers, you’re welcome here. Come ready to share your thoughts, hear different perspectives, laugh, disagree, and maybe discover your next favorite book.
This book club meets quarterly in person at the Center for Jewish History (upcoming sessions on February 16, May 25, and July 20). Space is limited, so reserve your spot and join the conversation!
Please note: You do not need to be a 3G (third-generation descendant of Holocaust survivors) to participate. While some discussions will explore experiences and perspectives specific to 3Gs and descendants of Holocaust survivors, we welcome anyone interested in engaging with these conversations.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required.
Presented by:
book club
lecture
‘Making a Scene’: Returning a Jewish Comic Opera Star to the Stage – Live on Zoom
Leonora Braham (1853-1931), creator of five principal soprano roles in Gilbert and Sullivan’s operettas between 1881 and 1887 (including Yum-Yum in The Mikado, 1885), first appeared in Dr. Danielle Padley’s research during a visit to the West London Synagogue archives in 2015. As Leonora Abraham, she sang in the Synagogue’s choir between 1870 and 1874, prior to her first professional engagement with the German Reed Entertainments. Having featured Braham’s life and work in two further pieces of scholarship, Padley was inspired by her opening words in a 1930 interview, “So someone has found me at last,” to write The Sun and I: a new 45-minute play with music which returns Braham to the environment in which she was happiest and best known.
This presentation gives an overview of Braham’s life on- and off-stage and describes the reasons for and methods involved in giving her a platform beyond traditional scholarly materials. Padley will discuss the challenges of incorporating the subject of a performer’s Jewish background into theatre intended to appeal to and educate a wide and varied audience, and will look ahead to plans for incorporating more performative media into her research on Jewish music-making in Victorian England.
About the Speaker
Dr. Danielle Padley is a musicologist specializing in Jewish music-making in nineteenth-century England. She investigates musical activities within geographically and socially diverse Jewish communities to enhance and challenge accepted narratives about Jewish life in England. She recently concluded a Research Fellowship at the Woolf Institute, Cambridge, where she is now an Affiliated Researcher, and is also an Affiliated Lecturer at the Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge, where she teaches the module “Music at the Margins of Victorian Society.” Padley has an interdisciplinary publication and research record, which explores Jewish musical activity in a variety of contexts, including synagogue worship, education, theatre, concert and drawing-room entertainments, and literary fiction. She is a trained singer and theatre performer, regularly performing both established and new writing within Cambridge’s local theatre scene. She grew up singing in and conducting synagogue choirs, and for nearly 12 years was Musical Director of Cambridge’s Hebrew choir, Kol Echad. Padley also sings and plays violin, keys, and folk harp with folk-rock band Once Again.
Ticket Info: Free
Presented by:
lecture
book talk
New from Yiddish Voices: Mississippi and Hasidic Warsaw – In-person Program and Live on Zoom
Join us for the launch of the latest two translations in the Yiddish Voices series, a partnership between YIVO and Bloomsbury. The first, Mississippi: A Yiddish Play about the Scottsboro Affair, is a fictionalized retelling of the Scottsboro Affair, which began with the wrongful arrest of nine African American youths in Alabama in 1931. The play demonstrates how important it was to Yiddish writers of the 1920s and 1930s to grapple with the persecution of Black people in America.
The second, Hasidic Warsaw: Reb Zalmen and the Aleksander Shtibl, is an intimate portrait of the lives of those who went inside the Aleksander Hasidim's shtibl (prayer house) in the early 20th century to pray, eat, study, and argue. The book provides rich material for the ethnography of Polish Hasidism in the early 20th century.
The event will feature a discussion exploring both of these newly published translations. The program will also include a performance by Marques Hollie of a song from Mississippi and a nigun from the Aleksander Hasidim. Book signing and reception will follow.
This program is supported by the family of Harriet Yassky.
Buy Mississippi: A Yiddish Play about the Scottsboro Affair.
Buy Hasidic Warsaw: Reb Zalmen and the Aleksander Shtibl.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
book talk
lecture
History of Yiddish – Live on Zoom
In celebration of YIVO's 101st year, join us for our Yiddish Civilization 101 series. Each program will highlight key topics in Ashkenazi history and culture, including shtetl life, film, and Ashkenazi foodways, amongst others. Guided by expert scholars, each lecture will provide a greater understanding of Jewish life in Eastern Europe and its diasporas.
There are many public misconceptions about the origins and history of Yiddish, however much consensus has emerged on a lot of the basics. This lecture by Dovid Katz will start with the Jewish scene in Europe just over a thousand years ago and survey the new European Jewish culture areas, focusing in on Ashkenaz, Ashkenazim, and all three of their Jewish languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, and Yiddish), setting the table for understanding the contextual rise and early history of Yiddish, its eastward trek, role in society, and dramatic growth. The lecture will also focus on the language and dialect, cultural orientations, literature, and the 19th century rise of Yiddish modernity in Eastern Europe.
The lecture will conclude by considering the internal diversity of Yiddish culture—from ultra-Orthodox to revolutionary secular movements—as well as touch on debates over linguistic standardization of the language.
Those interested in reading more on Dovid Katz’s perspectives are welcome to look at his book Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish, which is available free online as a PDF.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
lecture
book talk
Through the Eyes of Jewish Child Survivors from Poland – Live on Zoom
Through the Eyes of Jewish Child Survivors from Poland offers an intimate social history of Jewish childhood during and after the Holocaust. Centered on children from German-occupied Poland but informed by experiences across Nazi-occupied Europe, the book highlights the child’s own perspective to illuminate rescue, survival, and relationships with adults under the Nazi occupation. Author Joanna Beata Michlic examines children’s wartime experiences, showing how agency, gender, class, and religious or social background shaped their chances of survival. The book also traces the complex efforts of these young survivors to reclaim both childhood and Jewish identity, revealing the gap between their hopes and the actual opportunities of the immediate post-war period.
Drawing on children’s diaries, letters, testimonies, and memoirs, Michlic illuminates how children experienced and remembered trauma: the destruction of their families, the loss of their pre-war worlds, and the struggle to adapt to a new reality, challenging myths that sentimentalize the children’s endurance and portray the Holocaust as neatly concluded.
Join us for a conversation with Michlic about this book, led by Samuel Kassow.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
book talk
book club
LBI Book Club: The Director - Live on Zoom
Anjeana K. Hans will join the LBI Book Club to discuss The Director by Daniel Kehlmann
G.W. Pabst, one of cinema’s greatest directors of the 20th century, was filming in France when the Nazis seized power. To escape the horrors of the new and unrecognizable Germany, he fled to Hollywood. But now, under the blinding California sun, the world-famous director suddenly looks like a nobody. Not even Greta Garbo, the Hollywood actress whom he made famous, can help him.
When he receives word that his elderly mother is ill, he finds himself back in his homeland of Austria, which is now called Ostmark. Pabst, his wife, and his young son are suddenly confronted with the barbaric nature of the regime. So, when Joseph Goebbels—the minister of propaganda in Berlin—sees the potential for using the European film icon for his directorial genius and makes big promises to Pabst and his family, Pabst must consider Goebbels’s thinly veiled order. While Pabst still believes that he will be able to resist these advances, that he will not submit to any dictatorship other than art, he has already taken the first steps into a hopeless entanglement.
Kehlmann’s latest oeuvre explores the complicated relationships and distinctions between art and power, beauty and barbarism, cog and conspirator.
(Review: Amazon).
About the Speakers
Daniel Kehlmann was born in Munich and lives in Vienna, Berlin and New York
His novels include: Measuring the World, Me & Kaminski, Fame, F, You Should Have Left and Tyll, and he has won numerous prizes, including the Candide Prize, the Literature Prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, the Doderer Prize, The Kleist Prize, the WELT Literature Prize, and the Thomas Mann Prize.
Tyll, in a translation by Ross Benjamin, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2020. Measuring the World was translated into more than 40 languages and is one of the biggest successes in post-war German literature. The Director, his 14th novel, also translated into English by Ross Benjamin, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026.
Anjeana K. Hans is Professor of German Studies and affiliated faculty in Cinema and Media Studies at Wellesley College. Her research focuses on early silent film and on German and Austrian film of the 1930s, with emphases on questions of gender, identity, and subjectivity, on the representation of difference, and on exile and migration. Her publications include work on gender in Weimar cinema (Gender and the Uncanny in Films of the Weimar Republic, Wayne State UP, 2014), on the varied cultural anxieties and fascinations contextualizing Weimar film (Warning Shadows, Camden House, 2021), and on independent films in Austria (“‘Komisch ist die Welt, wie ein Traum:’ Franziska Gaal’s Verwechslungskomödien and the Exile’s Crisis of Identity,” in Rethinking Jewishness in Weimar Film, eds. Barbara Hales and Valerie Weinstein, Berghahn Books, 2021). She is currently working on a study of films produced in Austria between 1933 and 1938 by filmmakers forced out of the German film industry, in which she examines how they engage with the experience of exile and expulsion through narrative and aesthetic.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
Presented by:
book club
film screening and discussion
The Barbie Tapes - In-person Program
Join us for a screening of Foeke de Koe’s The Barbie Tapes, a documentary retracing the secretive 1979 journey of Gerd Heidemann, a German undercover journalist, and Karl Wolff, a former high-ranking SS officer, as they traveled to South America to seek out Klaus Barbie, the former Gestapo official known as the “Butcher of Lyon.”
Heidemann brought a recorder along for the journey, capturing conversations that would remain hidden for decades. Now housed at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives at Stanford University, these recordings form the heart of the film, offering a rare glimpse into the lives and recollections of men responsible for some of the worst crimes of the Nazi regime.
Intimate and unsettling, the tapes capture these former Nazi officials speaking candidly about their pasts, far from the scrutiny of a courtroom or an interrogation. Through this extraordinary archival material, The Barbie Tapes bring a hidden chapter of the postwar world to light.
Following the screening, filmmaker Foeke de Koe and historian Thomas Weber, who collaborated on this film, will participate in a discussion about the film and the story behind these extraordinary recordings.
Foeke de Koe is an award-winning Dutch documentary filmmaker. For 15 years, he worked as an international correspondent, covering stories from the 9/11 attacks in New York and the war in Iraq to the Bataclan terror attacks in Paris. Over the years, de Koe interviewed dozens of international stakeholders, including Tariq Aziz in Baghdad, Nelson Mandela, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Mikhail Gorbachev. After leaving news and current affairs, de Koe transitioned to documentary filmmaking, focusing on untold historical stories. He won a prestigious European award for his three-part series The Downing of the SS Von Imhoff, which recounts the killing of 650 German civilians by a group of Dutch sailors in 1942. For his latest project, de Koe and his crew retraced the 1979 journey of German journalist Gerd Heidemann and former SS general Karl Wolff as they traveled to La Paz, Bolivia, to meet Klaus Barbie. The travel logs, audiotapes, and photographs from Heidemann’s archives serve as the foundation for his new documentary, The Barbie Tapes.
Thomas Weber is Professor of History and International Affairs at the University of Aberdeen as well as a Visiting Fellow of the Hoover Institution. An expert on extremism, national and international order, and democratic breakdown and resilience, he has taught or held fellowships at Harvard, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Chicago. The recipient of several publication prizes, including the Duc d’Arenberg History Prize for the best book on European History, Weber’s books include Hitler's First War, Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi, and Nach der Nacht: Holocaustüberlebende über die Zukunft der Demokratie.
A reception will follow the program.
This program is supported by DutchCultureUSA, a program of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in the United States.
Ticket Info: Pay what you wish; registration required.
Presented by:
film screening and discussion
book talk
A Very Jewish Christmas: Christmas in Yiddish Tradition – In-person Program and Live on Zoom
Back in Europe, Yiddish-speaking Jews traditionally let loose on Christmas Eve with feasting, drinking, dancing, and gambling. Scholars have previously assumed this Christmas Eve vacation from Torah study to have been some sort of antagonistic counterculture to Christians celebrating Christmas. But Christmas in Yiddish Tradition reveals that the Christmas traditions transmitted in Yiddish were very similar to those transmitted in other European languages. Drawing on a wealth of documents, Jordan Chad argues that rather than European Jews being antagonistic towards Christmas, their Christmas Eve celebrations were exactly what they looked like: Jews celebrating Christmas. The volume offers the surprising argument that while Jews never celebrated the birth of Jesus, Christmas did not actually become the strictly Christian holiday that it is today until the period when Jews migrated to the New World.
Join YIVO for a very Jewish Christmas celebration featuring a talk by Chad uncovering the story of how Christmas once flourished in a language exclusive to non-Christians—and how modern Jews and Christians ultimately came to forget about the time when they celebrated Christmas in tandem. A kosher Chinese food dinner will follow the presentation.
Ticket Info: $10; YIVO members & students: $5
Livestream: Free
Presented by:
book talk
