book club
People of the Book Club: The Thread Collectors – Live on Zoom
Featuring Authors Alyson Richman & Shaunna Edwards
Go behind the stories and peer into the archives at the CJH book discussion, led by Lauren Gilbert, Senior Manager for Public Services at the Center for Jewish History. This session will feature a discussion of The Thread Collectors,co-written by internationally bestselling author Alyson Richman and debut author Shaunna J. Edwards, who have come together to collaborate on a rich historical novel set during the Civil War. The book follows two women, one Black and yearning for freedom in New Orleans, the other a Jewish abolitionist in New York. We will look at some documents in the Center’s collections that are connected to the Civil War, and we will be joined by the authors for a presentation and Q&A after the discussion.
Participants will need to obtain their own copy of the book to read in advance.
NOTE: This is an interactive book discussion for all participants, not a lecture, so space is limited.
Ticket Info: Pay what you wish; register here for a Zoom link
Presented by:
book club
film and discussion
Eine Frau – In-Person Event
In Eine Frau (Germany, 2021), filmmaker Jeanine Meerapfel follows the traces of a woman and her life from France to Germany to exile in Argentina, reconstructing the various stages of exile and uncertainty like an archaeologist. Memories and passages from letters merge into the touching narrative of several broken biographies. At the same time, the director reflects on the fragmentary nature of memory. “What is remembered, what is forgotten? And why?”
Eine Frau had its world premiere at the 36th Mar del Plata International Film Festival in Argentina. In 2022, it was shown at numerous film festivals in Europe – including the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival and DOK.fest Munich. It opened the Jewish Film Festival Berlin | Brandenburg (JFBB) and won the prize for intercultural dialogue there.
Meerapfel will join us for a discussion of the film and a light reception after the screening.
About the Filmmaker
Jeanine Meerapfel is a filmmaker, screenwriter and producer. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, she attended the city's school of journalism before going on to work as an editor and freelance journalist. From 1964 to 1968, she studied at the Film Institute, Hochschule für Gestaltung, Ulm, Germany, where she was taught by Alexander Kluge and Edgar Reitz. Meerapfel shot her first motion picture, Malou, in 1980. This was followed by award-winning documentary and feature films such as In the Country of my Parents (1981), Amigomío (1995), and many others.
Meerapfel worked as a Professor at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, Film Department, from 1990 to 2008. In 2012, her feature film The German Friend, an Argentine-German co-production, was released in cinemas. Together with Floros Floridis, she produced the audiovisual essay Confusion / Diffusion in 2015. In 2019, she also produced together with Floros Floridis the audiovisual essay Moving Sand / Topos. In March 2020, Meerapfel was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit 1st Class for her success as a filmmaker and author as well as her commitment to human rights, freedom of speech and equality and diversity of cultures. In Autumn 2020, she initiated the European Alliance of Academies, an alliance of 60 art academies and institutions that stands up for the freedom of art. The German Federal Association of Film Directors (BVR) has appointed her as honorary president in February 2021. Meerapfel has been a member of the Film and Media Arts Section of the Akademie der Künste since 1998. She was the Deputy Director of this Section from 2012 to 2015. In May 2015 she was elected President of the Akademie der Künste, followed by the re-election in May 2018 and November 2021.
Prizes and awards (a selection): 1981: International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) Award in Cannes for Malou; 1985: German Film Critics' Award (Deutscher Kritikerpreis) for Melek Leaves; 1989: German Film Award and Argentine Oscar nomination for La Amiga; 2000: Female Artists' Award of the German Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia (Künstlerinnenpreis des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen); 2001: special award at the Argentine festival Mar del Plata for Anna's Summer; 2012: Prize of Honour at the International Film Festival Innsbruck.
More information about Meerapfel and her work can be found on her website.
Ticket Info: $10 general; $5 LBI/CJH/Partner Members, Students, Seniors; register at lbi.org/events/eine-frau/
Presented by:
film and discussion
lecture
Interpreting Your Jewish DNA Test Results – Live on Zoom
DNA has the potential to be an essential and revolutionary genealogical tool, especially for Jewish testers facing roadblocks in their paper trails, including those affected by the Holocaust. The Center for Jewish History has recently launched the DNA Reunion Project, which provides free commercial DNA testing to Holocaust survivors and their children. If you've just taken a DNA test or are considering it, project co-founders Dr. Adina Newman and Jennifer Mendelsohn will walk you through how to decipher your results without getting tripped up by common mistakes. (Why does it say I have so many matches? What do all the numbers mean? Which of these people should I reach out to?) You'll learn techniques that will help you work effectively with DNA to expand your family tree -- and connect with new relatives.
Ticket Info: Pay what you wish; register here for a Zoom link
Presented by:
lecture
film and discussion
The Hidden Jews of Ethiopia
Nafkot – Yearning, a new film by Dr. Malka Shabtay
The Hidden Jews of Ethiopia, a new book by Dr. Marla Brettschneider
Panelists
Dr. Malka Shabtay is an applied anthropologist who has worked for decades with the Ethiopian Jewish community in Israel and more recently in Ethiopia. Author of many books, she has taught in numerous academic institutes including the Ruppin Academic Center and the Institute for Immigration and Social Integration. Shabtay combines research, consultancy, and training for organizations applying cultural and cross-cultural perspectives in their work. Nafkot (Yearning 2022) is her second ethnographic film.
Mr. Belayneh Tazebku Worku is one of the leaders of the Ethiopian North Shewa Bete-Israel community and serves as the manager of the synagogue, Brit Olam, in Addis Ababa. Working in the community for twenty-five years, Tazebku Worku has focused on raising awareness and community organizing both locally and nationally toward full civil and human rights of the Bete Israel people and community. Tazebku Worku also works to meet concrete current needs of the community such as the creation of a Jewish cemetery and a Bete Israel community settlement in Debre Berhan, in the Amhara region.
Dr. Marla Brettschneider, Professor holds a joint appointment in Politics & Feminist Studies at the University of New Hampshire. She is a groundbreaking scholar of Jewish diversity politics and political theory, also using diversity as a frame to address antisemitism in the US and globally. Lecturing widely and author of numerous award-winning books, her works include: Jewish Feminism and Intersectionality; The Family Flamboyant: Race Politics, Queer Families, Jewish Lives; The Hidden Jews of Ethiopia; The Jewish Phenomenon in Sub-Saharan Africa, & The Narrow Bridge: Jewish Views on Multiculturalism with a forward by Cornel West.
Ticket Info: $15; register at eventbrite.com
Presented by:
film and discussion
book talk
Jewish Culture Between Canon and Heresy - Live on Zoom
A new career-spanning anthology from Jewish historian David Biale, Jewish Culture Between Canon and Heresy, brings over a dozen of his key essays together for the first time. These pieces, written between 1974 and 2016, are all representative of a method Biale calls "counter-history": "the discovery of vital forces precisely in what others considered marginal, disreputable and irrational." The themes that have preoccupied Biale throughout the course of his career—in particular power, sexuality, blood, and secular Jewish thought—span the periods of the Bible, late antiquity, and the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. Exemplary essays in this volume argue for the dialectical relationship between modernity and its precursors in the older tradition, working together to "brush history against the grain" in order to provide a sweeping look at the history of the Jewish people. Join YIVO for a discussion focusing on this new anthology featuring Biale in conversation with Sarah Abrevaya Stein.
About the Speakers
David Biale is Emanuel Ringelblum Distinguished Professor of Jewish History at the University of California, Davis. He was educated at UC Berkeley, the Hebrew University and UCLA. His most recent books are Hasidism: A New History (with seven co-authors), Gershom Scholem: Master of the Kabbalah and Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought. Earlier books are Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History, Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History, Eros and the Jews and Blood and Belief: The Circulation of a Symbol Between Jews and Christians. He is also the editor of Cultures of the Jews: A New History and the Norton Anthology of World Religions: Judaism. His books have been translated into eight languages and have won the National Jewish Book Award three times.
Professor Biale has served as chair of the Department of History at UC Davis and as Director of the Davis Humanities Institute. He also founded and directed the UC Davis Program in Jewish Studies. In 2011, he won the university’s highest award, the UC Davis Prize for Undergraduate Teaching and Scholarly Achievement. He also founded the Posen Society of Fellows, an international doctoral fellowship for students of modern Jewish history and culture.
Sarah Abrevaya Stein is author or editor of ten books. In The New York Times, Matti Friedman has written that "Stein, a UCLA historian, has ferocious research talents [...] and a writing voice that is admirably light and human." Stein's most recent book, Wartime North Africa, A Documentary History 1934-1950 (Stanford University Press, with the cooperation of the USHMM, 2022), is the first-ever collection of primary documents on North African history and the Holocaust. Stein's previous book, Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux: Macmillman, 2019), explores the intertwined histories of a single family, Sephardic Jewry, and the dramatic ruptures that transformed southeastern Europe and the Judeo-Spanish diaspora. Stein’s books, articles, and pedagogy have won numerous prizes, including two National Jewish Book Awards, the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award. Stein is also co-editor (with David Biale of UCD) of Stanford University Press Series in Jewish History and Culture.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/Canon-and-Heresy
Presented by:
book talk
book talk
This Was Not America - Live on Zoom
This Was Not America: A Wrangle Through Jewish-Polish-American History is a new book featuring a conversation, often contentious, between Michael Steinlauf, historian of Polish-Jewish culture and child of Holocaust survivors, and the anthropologist and artist Elzbieta Janicka. The conversation touches on critical moments in Jewish, Polish, and American history, including fleeing the Warsaw Ghetto, living underground fighting for social justice in 1960s’ Seattle, and helping dismantle the communist system in 1980s’ Poland. Beyond individual biography, the talk ranges from the apparition of a dybbuk in postwar Brooklyn to the consequences of a non-critical approach to Polish-Jewish studies. Join YIVO for a discussion of this unique new book with co-authors Steinlauf and Janicka led by YIVO’s own Eddy Portnoy.
About the Speakers
Michael Steinlauf is the author of Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust as well as numerous studies of Jewish culture in prewar Poland. He was one of the founders of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Currently he is completing studies of the Polish Jewish dramatist Mark Arnshteyn and the Yiddish culture hero Y. L. Peretz.
Elzbieta Janicka is a literary scholar and visual artist. She is the author of Sztuka czy Naród? [Art or Nation?] and Festung Warschau, exposing violence and exclusion embedded in Polish dominant culture, as well as numerous studies of Polish antisemitism. Most recently she co-authored Philosemitic Violence. Poland’s Jewish Past in New Polish Narratives (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021).
Eddy Portnoy, the Senior Academic Advisor & Director of Exhibitions at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, is the author of Bad Rabbi and Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/This-Was-Not-America
Presented by:
book talk
book talk
Knowledge Under Siege: The Guardians of Fate - Live on Zoom
This event is a part of YIVO's series Knowledge Under Siege, which presents recent scholarship from Poland about the Holocaust and antisemitism. Each event features scholars discussing a recent book they worked on.
Bozena Keff, Straznicy fatum [The guardians of fate] (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2020).
“Straznicy fatum” [The guardians of fate] by Bozena Keff is a collection of essays on Polish-language literature about the Holocaust. Keff asks whether those literary works contain a diagnosis of Polish culture that corresponds with its assessment by critical humanities and arts today. In the texts analyzed by Keff, Poles are presented as so-called “Polish witnesses to the Holocaust” who were allegedly “helpless” because of the Nazi terror. Today – on the basis on the same texts – they are recognized as co-perpetrators. Another topic discussed by Keff are the terms and conditions that Polish culture has imposed upon Jews who undertook to integrate into it. “Host and guest regulations” were and are intuitively known to all Jews in Poland as a set of unwritten, because obvious, rules of domination and submission. Keff examines their functioning notably in the biography and work of a Polish-language poet of the Holocaust Tadeusz Rózewicz.
About the Speaker
Bozena Keff – a philosopher by training, she is a writer, poet, feminist activist and theorist. Her books include: “Postac z cieniem. Postacie zydówek w polskiej literaturze konca XIX wieku i dwudziestolecia miedzywojennego” [Figure with shadow. Portraits of Jewish women in Polish literature at the turn of the twentieth century] (2001); “Barykady. Kroniki obsesyjne” [Barricades. Obsessive chronicles] (2005). Her monograph “Antysemityzm. Niezamknieta historia” [Anti-Semitism. Story unfinished] (2013) addresses antisemitism as a durable element in European and Polish history and culture. Translated into Hebrew, French, Italian, Spanish and German, her transgressive poetry suite “Utwór o Matce i ojczyznie” (2008) was published in the US as “On Mother and Fatherland” in the translation of Alissa Valles and Benjamin Paloff in 2017.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/KnowledgeUnderSiege3
Presented by:
book talk
lecture
German Refugee Classicists: Eva Lehmann Fiesel and Ruth Fiesel – Live on Zoom
This presentation illuminates the extraordinary lives and legacies of two German-born classicists, Eva Lehmann Fiesel and her daughter Ruth Erika Fiesel, warmly welcomed here in the United States as refugees from the Nazis and their "race laws" in 1934. A gifted specialist in Etruscan studies born in 1891, Eva Fiesel died in 1937, seven months after assuming a post as Visiting Associate Professor of Classics at the all-female Bryn Mawr College outside of Philadelphia, unable to fulfill her immense scholarly promise. Ruth, who was born in 1921 and died in 1994, earned her own BA in classics from Bryn Mawr in 1942, subsequently availing herself of opportunities to undertake graduate work in classics in both the United States and abroad. Yet she ultimately opted to teach Latin at the pre-collegiate level and work as in secondary school administration rather than pursue a PhD. and university career in classics.
How and why do the achievements of this mother-daughter dyad matter not only to the profession of classics worldwide, but also to women’s history, and that of our country? Scholar Judith Peller Hallett will focus on the role of gender in the emigration of German refugee classicists to the United States, explore both similarities and differences between the study of classics in German and American educational institutions, and reflect on how generational as well as socio-cultural change shaped the shared commitment to classical studies – and its glorious interdisciplinarity – by members of the same family.
About the Speaker
Judith Peller Hallett is Professor of Classics and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Emerita at the University of Maryland, College Park. She holds a BA in Latin from Wellesley College and an AM and PhD in Classical Philology from Harvard University. She has published widely in the areas of Latin language and literature; women, the family and sexuality in Greco-Roman antiquity; and the study and reception of classics in the Anglophone world. A former Blegen Visiting Scholar in the Department of Classics at Vassar College and Suzanne Deal Booth Resident Scholar at the Center for Intercollegiate Studies in Rome, she has also held fellowships from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. A 2013 collection of essays from Routledge— Domina Illustris: Latin Literature, Gender and Reception, edited by Donald Lateiner, Barbara Gold and Judith Perkins—celebrates her academic career.
Ticket Info: Free; register at lbi.org/events/german-refugee-classicists/
Presented by:
lecture
yiddish club
YIVO Yiddish Club: Yiddish Hip Hop with Josh "Socalled" Dolgin – Live on Zoom
Nu, vilst redn a bisele yidish? An event for Yiddish enthusiasts the world over, the YIVO Yiddish club is an informal monthly gathering to celebrate Mame-loshn. Hosted by Shane Baker, sessions take place in English, and are liberally peppered with Yiddish. Each month Baker is joined by a different guest who discusses their work and a related Yiddish cultural theme. In the spirit of a club, sessions are held as interactive zoom meetings in which participants can see and hear one another. Each session includes ample time for audience questions, group discussion, and, time permitting, knock-down, drag-out arguments. Attendees need not know any Yiddish to attend, though some familiarity with the language is highly recommended.
This session features Josh "Socalled" Dolgin, a pianist, accordionist, producer, journalist, photographer, filmmaker, magician, cartoonist and puppet maker based in Montreal, Quebec. Dolgin has lectured and has led master classes in music festivals around the world, from Moscow to Paris, from London to LA, and from Krakow to San Francisco, and has performed on every continent. He has released over 6 albums which include musical collaborations with artists across a variety of genres ranging from Classical, Jazz, and Hip Hop to Klezmer. In December 2015, Socalled was presented with the “Adrienne Cooper Memorial Dreaming in Yiddish” award for his work disseminating and exploring Yiddish culture.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/YiddishClub18 for a Zoom link
Presented by:
yiddish club
book talk
Elie Wiesel: Confronting the Silence - In-person and Live on Zoom
As an orphaned survivor and witness to Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) became a torchbearer for victims and survivors of the Holocaust at a time when the world preferred to forget. How did this frail, soft-spoken man from a small village in the Carpathians become such an influential presence on the world stage? Drawing from Wiesel’s writings and interviews with his family, close friends, scholars, and critics, Joseph Berger’s new book, Elie Wiesel: Confronting the Silence, presents Wiesel as both a revered Nobel laureate and a man of complex psychological texture and contradictions. Join YIVO for a discussion of this new book featuring Berger in conversation with Samuel Norich.
About the Speakers
Joseph Berger was a New York Times reporter, columnist, and editor for thirty years, and he continues to contribute periodically. He has taught urban affairs at the City University of New York’s Macaulay Honors College. He is the author of Displaced Persons: Growing Up American After the Holocaust and lives in New York City.
Samuel Norich served as executive director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research from 1980-1992, and as vice president of the World Jewish Congress from 1975 to 1981. Norich is the author of What Will Bind Us Now?: A Report on the Institutional Ties Between Israel and American Jewry. Norich currently serves as the president of the Forward Association. He was the publisher and chief executive of the English and Yiddish Forward for two decades, until he retired in 2017.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/Elie-Wiesel
Presented by:
book talk
panel discussion
Conversation with Stefan Schirmer and FC Ente Bagdad
Join us as we chat with winners of the 2023 Obermayer Awards. Learn more about the work, perspectives, and personal motivations of these inspiring people. We'll show a brief film, have an in-depth conversation facilitated by Widen the Circle Executive Director Joel Obermayer, and invite questions from the audience.
Stefan Schirmer has been the guiding force behind making Mainz-based German football club FC Ente Bagdad into a beacon for diversity, acceptance, and equality, as well is in helping people recognize and understand Jewish history and culture. The club organizes many popular remembrance events, particularly during Mainz Remembrance Weeks, and reaches out to “new Germans” from war-torn countries including Syria, Afghanistan, and Ukraine who have found refuge in Mainz. For one match, the entire team wore kippahs in solidarity with a person who had recently been attacked.
Ticket Info: Free; register at lbi.org/events/obermayer-fc-ente-bagdad/
Presented by:
panel discussion
memorial event
Commemoration of the 80th Anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising at Der Shteyn
Please Note: This event does NOT take place at the Center for Jewish History.
Please join us to commemorate the 80th Anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Speaking in the program are Irena Klepfisz, Jeffrey Shandler, and Mindy Spiegel. The artistic program will include Joanne Borts, Menachem Fox, Shifee Losacco, Elliott Palevsky, and Daniella Rabbani, as well as children from the Workers Circle Midtown Shule.
This event will take place at der shteyn, the memorial stone in Riverside Park between 83rd and 84th Street. The program will be recorded and made available on YouTube.
Ticket Info: Free; no registration required.
Presented by:
memorial event
conversation
At Lunch with Hannah Goldfield – Live on Zoom
Julie Salamon (Wall Street Journal & NY Times) sits down with The New Yorker’s food critic and writer for the weekly Tables for Two restaurant column Hannah Goldfield. Previously, she was a fact checker at The New Yorker and an editor at T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Her writing has appeared in New York magazine and the Times among other publications.
Ticket Info: Free; register at ajhs.org/events/at-lunch-with-hannah-goldfield/ for a Zoom link
Presented by:
conversation
book talk
The Population History of German Jewry: 1815–1939 - In-person Event
The late Steven Mark Lowenstein was a brilliant social historian who, after retiring from his academic position at the University of Judaism, labored until his final days to complete a monumental demographic history of German Jewry. Lowenstein took the research of Hebrew University demographer Professor Usiel Oscar Schmelz and brought it to life with insights into the daily experiences of German-speaking Jews. David N. Myers (UCLA), who co-edited the book for its posthumous publication, will join Marsha Rozenblit (Maryland), David Ellenson (HUC), and Lowenstein’s daughter, Ruth Glasser (UCONN), for a celebration of Lowenstein’s legacy and his final opus.
If you would like to attend this program virtually, please select the "Virtual Admission" option when reserving tickets on Eventbrite.
Reviews
“The pioneering research of Usiel Schmelz and Steven Lowenstein provides a new dimension for German-Jewish History. Instead of relying on a few personal accounts and anecdotal evidence, this book constitutes a tool to decipher the complete picture of the German-Jewish community. It is an indispensable source for everyone interested in the modern Jewish experience.”
— Michael Brenner, President of the International Leo Baeck Institute for the Research of German-Jewish History and Culture
“Steven Lowenstein’s landmark volume presents the history of German Jewry from the early 19th century into the Nazi era through the prism of shifting population patterns. Replete with an incomparable array of data, the book’s meticulous narrative also serves as a memorial to a diverse Jewish community whose history reflected the triumphs and tragedies of the modern Jewish experience.”
— Jack Wertheimer, The Jewish Theological Seminary
“Steven Lowenstein’s demographic history of Jews in Germany is a state-of-the-art study that will certainly become a classic. He has absorbed and presented in highly readable prose the chronological, regional, and topical demographic interpretations of the years 1815-1939 while also engaging in historiographical debates. This new and all-embracing picture of German Jewry offers readers careful analyses of such topics as urbanization, marriage and intermarriage, births and deaths, in and out migration and internal migration, and addresses age, region, and gender while also comparing to non-Jewish populations in Germany. The book is breathtaking in its research and scope and a must for every scholar of German-Jewish history.”
— Marion Kaplan, Skirball Professor Emerita of Modern Jewish History
“Stephen Lowenstein has published the definitive demographic history of German Jewry. This is a monumental curated archive, actually a twice posthumous book. Lowenstein's initial statistics were compiled by the Israeli demographer Oscar Schmelz, and Lowenstein himself died before finishing this tome. The massive detail will help us explain a burning question in German history. Does the trend toward ‘racial suicide’ documented in this book help explain the cultural achievements of Jews in modern Germany? Family historians, genealogy buffs and population historians will rely on Lowenstein's volume and appreciate its comparative reach and meticulous detail.”
— Deborah Hertz, Wouk Chair in Modern Jewish Studies, Department of History, University of California at San Diego
Ticket Info: General: $10; LBI/CJH/Partner Members, Students, Seniors: $5; register at lbi.org/events/steve-lowenstein/
Presented by:
book talk
book talk
Speaking Yiddish to Chickens - Live on Zoom
Author Seth Stern joins us to discuss his new book Speaking Yiddish to Chickens, moderated by the Chair of Jewish Studies at the University of Connecticut, Avinoam Patt.
Most of the roughly 140,000 Holocaust survivors who came to the United States in the first decade after World War II settled in big cities such as New York. But a few thousand chose an alternative way of life on American farms. More of these accidental farmers wound up raising chickens in southern New Jersey than anywhere else. Speaking Yiddish to Chickens is the first book to chronicle this little-known chapter in American Jewish history when these mostly Eastern European refugees – including the author’s grandparents – found an unlikely refuge and gateway to new lives in the US on poultry farms. They gravitated to a section of south Jersey anchored by Vineland, a small rural city where previous waves of Jewish immigrants had built a rich network of cultural and religious institutions.
Ticket Info: Free; register at ajhs.org/events/book-talk-speaking-yiddish-to-chickens/ for a Zoom link
Presented by:
book talk
panel discussion
Curriculum Wars and the Struggle for the Future of Judaism – In-person Event
News reports about curricular standards in Hasidic schools have set off a polarizing public debate. With the rapid growth of Hasidic Judaism, many observers recognize that the future of American Judaism is being contested. Arguments over the Jewish curriculum are not new. In his new book, The Jewish Reformation, Michah Gottlieb (NYU) explores how in the 18th and 19th centuries these disputes reflected competing spiritual visions of Judaism. Join us for an illuminating program about the contemporary relevance of these centuries-old debates. David Ellenson (Hebrew Union College) will moderate a conversation between Gottlieb, Yitzhak Melamed, (Johns Hopkins University) and Naomi Seidman (University of Toronto).
If you would like to attend this program virtually, please select the "Virtual Admission" option when reserving tickets on Eventbrite.
Ticket Info: General: $10; LBI/CJH/Partner Members, Students, Seniors: $5; register atregister at lbi.org/events/curriculum-wars/
Presented by:
panel discussion
lecture
Between the Living and the Dead: Considering Tradition in the Jewish Cemeteries of Poland, 1918-1945 – Live on Zoom
The Jewish cemetery has long been a site guided by Jewish law and traditional ritual practice. However, in the early twentieth century, pressures of modernity and urbanization in Poland strained traditional practices at the Jewish cemetery. In this talk, Alison B. Curry will examine how politics, modernity, and tragedy altered traditional uses of Jewish cemeteries in Poland.
While during the interwar period specific aspects of funerals, burials, and cemetery usage relied less and less on Jewish tradition and law, with the start of the Second World War, caring for bodies after death became both a priority and a triviality. Handling the ever-increasing numbers of the deceased in the ghetto meant that, in many cases, various death traditions were abandoned altogether. On the other hand, the sanctity of Jewish tradition and ethics emboldened many activists to call for returns to traditional practices of funeral and burial during the Holocaust.
In this talk, Curry argues that the Jewish cemetery became a central space for negotiation of identity – a place where the living considered their own Jewishness, reflected in that of the dead.
About the Speaker
Alison B. Curry is a doctoral candidate in History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Previously, she received her M.A. in Holocaust and Genocide Studies from Gratz College and a Graduate Certificate in Digital Public Humanities from George Mason University. Curry’s dissertation research focuses on the ritual, spatial, and functional uses of Jewish cemeteries in Poland between 1918 and 1945. Currently, Curry is a Saul Kagan Fellow in Advanced Shoah Studies as well as the 2022-2023 Max Weinreich Center Fellow in Polish Jewish Studies. Her research has also been supported by the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies, the Association for Slavic, East European & Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/Cemeteries-of-Poland for a Zoom link
Presented by:
lecture
book talk
Unearthed - In-person and Live on Zoom
As a child, Meryl Frank was the chosen inheritor of family remembrance. Her aunt Mollie told her about Vilna, the Yiddish theater, and, above all else, Meryl’s cousin, the radiant Franya Winter. Franya was a leading light of Vilna’s Yiddish theater, a remarkable and precocious woman who cast off the restrictions of her Hasidic family and community to play roles as prostitutes and bellhops, lovers and nuns. Yet there was one thing her aunt Mollie would never tell Meryl: how Franya died. Before Mollie passed away, she gave Meryl a Yiddish book containing the terrible answer but forbade her to read it. And for years, Meryl obeyed.
Drawing on archives across four continents, including extensively from YIVO, and guided by the shocking truth recorded in the pages of the forbidden book, Meryl Frank's Unearthed traces her search for her cousin Franya. Meryl’s discoveries reveal a lost world destroyed by hatred, illuminating the cultural haven of Vilna and its resistance during World War II. Join YIVO for a discussion with Meryl Frank about this new book led by Opinion Editor of the Forward, Laura E. Adkins.
About the Speakers
Meryl Frank is president of Makeda Global Network, an international consulting firm that works with thousands of women worldwide. Over a long and varied career, she has been an activist, a mayor, an ambassador, and a champion for women’s leadership and political participation around the world. In 2009, President Obama appointed her United States Representative and, subsequently, Ambassador to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. In May of 2022, President Biden appointed Frank to a seat on the US Holocaust Memorial Council. She is also a member the Board of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
Laura E. Adkins is an award-winning writer, editor, and speaker based in New York. She is the Opinion Editor of the Forward. Laura’s writing on antisemitism, Orthodox Judaism, data, and gender has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Glamour, and other outlets. She was previously the Opinion Editor of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the editor of Jewish Insider, and an assistant blogs editor at The Times of Israel.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/Unearthed
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book talk
symposium
“Zionism and American Jews: Bringing Us Together and Pulling Us Apart – In Person and Livestreamed on Zoom
“Zionism and American Jews marks the State of Israel’s 75th birthday by gathering twenty internationally recognized scholars at the Center for Jewish History to discuss the long relationship between the American Jewish community and the Zionist movement.
Since the Jewish state’s founding in 1948, American Jews have been stalwart supporters of Israel. But growing domestic political instability in Israel, spiking tensions between Israelis and Palestinians, and surging antisemitism in the U. S., have caused new splits to emerge among American Jews about the Zionist movement. Generationally as well as politically, American Jews appear to be more divided about Zionism than ever. Yet these divisions are hardly new. In fact, for nearly a century and a half, Zionism has been a source of contention, not just consensus, among Jews in the United States and around the world. The question of whether the Jewish people should be viewed as an ethnically defined nation or merely a religious community has been hotly contested within Jewish communities from the late 19th century to the present. “Zionism and American Jews chronicles this long history in the effort to explain present-day tensions and opportunities in the relationship between the American Jewish community and the State of Israel.
The symposium, which is organized in partnership with the National Library of Israel, is the first installment in a larger series of public symposia sponsored by the Center for Jewish History’s brand new Jewish Public History Forum. Future symposia at The Forum will include “Jewish Responses to Fascism, 1933-2023” (fall 2023), “Jews and Immigration: 1924-2024 (spring 2024), and “Jews and Democracy: Antiquity to the Present” (fall 2024).
This program is presented with the generous support of David Berg Foundation.
Click here for a schedule, list of speakers, and tickets.
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symposium
lecture
Gaping Mouths and Leaning Towers: The Queer Geometries of Peretz Markish's Long Form Poems, "Di kupe" and "Radyo" - Live on Zoom
Following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Yiddish—that stateless tongue par excellence—found official status within the new “international state” of the Soviet Union. In her seminal study of modernisms, Chana Kronfeld identifies the poetics of Hebrew and Yiddish literatures as processes of de-territorialization (1996). This talk takes Kronfeld’s study of marginal modernisms as a point of departure and aims to interrogate the relationship between space, revolution, and language at the beginning of the Soviet experience. Specifically, this paper places Peretz Markish’s Yiddish long-form poems, Di kupe (The Mound) and Radyo (Radio), in conversation with the architectural aspirations of the Soviet avant-garde. The poems’ irregular—indeed, impossible—representation of bodies in space resists established traditional definitions of being and belonging and, in turn, undercuts the authority of any traditional establishment itself. To enact his takedown of tradition, Markish disrupts linguistic and spatial conventions to (de)construct fictional edifices: the mound (Di kupe) is at once divine and profane, everywhere and nowhere, concave and erect; the tower of his poem Radyo, too, reaches up, outwards, and down to broadcast a message of cautious hope in the face of violence. Given these mechanisms, Markish’s poetry does not simply wrangle with the paradoxical project of “building communism,” especially as it relates to the new Soviet Jew, but rather performs its contradictions. As they turn the inside out and the upside down, Di kupe and Radyo illustrate the power of revolution as a destabilizing force that both made and unmade one's sense of self.
About the Speaker
Elaine Wilson is a writer, literary translator, language instructor, and PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic Languages at Columbia University. She studies Russian and Yiddish literature of the early Soviet period and is currently at work on her dissertation, entitled: “The Soviet Exodic: Resistance and Revolution in Soviet Russian and Yiddish Literature,1917 – 1935.” She is the recipient of the Vladimir and Pearl Heifetz Memorial Fellowship and the Vivian Lefsky Hort Memorial Fellowship in Jewish Literature at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research for 2022-2023.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/Markish-Poems
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lecture
book talk
The Object of Jewish Literature: A Material History - Live on Zoom
With the rise of digital media, the "death of the book” has been widely discussed. But the physical object of the book persists. In her new book, The Object of Jewish Literature: A Material History, through the lens of materiality and objects, Barbara E. Mann tells a history of modern Jewish literature, from novels and poetry to graphic novels and artists’ books. Bringing contemporary work on secularism and design in conversation with literary history, she offers a new and distinctive frame for understanding how literary genres emerge. Join YIVO for a discussion exploring this new publication with Mann in conversation with literary and cultural historian Justin Cammy.
About the Speakers
Barbara E. Mann is the inaugural holder of the Stephen H. Hoffman Professorship in Modern Hebrew Language and Literature at Case Western Reserve University. She is the author of A Place in History: Modernism, Tel Aviv and the Creation of Jewish Urban Space (Stanford, 2006) and Space and Place in Jewish Studies (Rutgers, 2012).
Justin Cammy is professor of Jewish Studies and World Literatures at Smith College. Cammy is the translator from the Yiddish of Sholem Aleichem's Judgment of Shomer, Hinde Bergner's On Long Winter Nights: Memoirs of a Jewish Family in a Galician Township, and most recently Abraham Sutzkever's From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2021).
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/The-Object-of-Jewish-Literature
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book talk
yiddish club
YIVO Yiddish Club: Yiddish Club Mixer – Live on Zoom
The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the International Association of Yiddish Clubs (IAYC) join forces to present a Yiddish club mixer. This event, held as a Zoom meeting, will allow Yiddish clubs around the world the opportunity to share a bit about themselves, and to meet fellow Yiddish enthusiasts. Clubs will each share in English or Yiddish* 3-5 minutes about their origins, activities, a fun story about their Yiddish club, and information about how to get involved in their offerings. All are invited to join to watch!
Interested in presenting about your Yiddish club? Please send an email to info@yivo.org with the subject heading “Yiddish Club Mixer.” A limited number of presentation slots are available and will be assigned on a first-come, first-served basis.
*If a club that is held in another language would like to present in their language this is possible, but we ask for screen-share translation in English or Yiddish if so.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/YiddishClub19 for a Zoom link
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yiddish club
lecture
Baruch Vladeck and the Movement for Public Housing - Live on Zoom
Baruch Vladeck (1886-1938) was an important figure in American Yiddish culture, serving as the longtime managing editor of the Forverts, a New York City Councilman, president of the American ORT and chairman of the Jewish Labor Committee. Yet one of Vladeck's most significant, but still underappreciated, roles was his place on the first board of the New York City Housing Authority and as a supporter of public housing. The public housing movement in New York in part grew out of earlier Jewish tenant activism, especially on the Lower East Side. In the 1930s, New York City was a pioneer in the field of public housing, creating a system that today is the largest in the nation and houses around 340,000 people in its developments. In this talk, Michael Casper will explore Vladeck's unique place as a pioneer in the public housing movement.
About the Speaker
Michael Casper is the Postdoctoral Associate in Modern Jewish History at Yale University. He is the coauthor, with Nathaniel Deutsch, of A Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate, and the Making of Hasidic Williamsburg, which won a National Jewish Book Award. He is the recipient of the 2022-2034 Fellowship in American Jewish Studies, funded by the Rose and Isidore Drench Memorial Fellowship and the Dora and Mayer Tendler Endowed Fellowship in Jewish Studies.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/Baruch-Vladeck
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lecture
book talk
Isaac Bashevis Singer's "Simple Gimpl" - Live on Zoom
Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Gimpl tam” was published on March 30, 1945, in the obscure Yiddish-language journal Idisher kempfer, about a month before the Nazi surrender. A story of bullying and the potential for revenge, it tells the deathbed confession of an orphaned baker who is targeted by his own community for ridicule and practical jokes. Gimpl has come to be seen as a symbol of the Jewish people in the diaspora, and, by synecdoche, minorities in general. Should they be passive in the face of aggression? Or should they defend themselves?
A new bilingual edition features Singer's original Yiddish alongside his own partial translation, now completed and edited by writer and scholar David Stromberg. The book also features the 1953 Saul Bellow translation which first brought the story to fame, new illustrations by Liana Finck, and an afterword by David Stromberg. Join YIVO for a discussion with Stromberg featured in conversation with David Roskies.
About the Speakers
David Stromberg is a writer, translator, and scholar whose work has appeared in The American Scholar, The Massachusetts Review, and Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. His recent books include Old Truths and New Clichés, an edited collection of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s essays, and a speculative nonfiction novella, A Short Inquiry into the End of the World. His follow-up essay, “The Eternal Hope of the Wandering Jew,” appears in The Hedgehog Review.
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.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/Simple-Gimpl
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book talk
book talk
Knowledge Under Siege: Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in German Occupied Poland - Live on Zoom
This event is a part of YIVO's series Knowledge Under Siege, which presents recent scholarship from Poland about the Holocaust and antisemitism. Each event features scholars discussing a recent book they worked on.
Night Without End. The Fate of Jews in German Occupied Poland, edited by Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2022).
Jan Grabowski discusses Night Without End, a study focused on the so-called third phase of the Holocaust in Poland. The phase began after the liquidation of the ghettos and continued until the very end of the occupation. The authors of the book look at eight rural counties which, in the summer of 1942, contained a population of more than 110,000 Jews. Less than 2% of them survived the war and close to 70% of those who went into hiding, either perished at the hands of their gentile neighbors, or were turned in by them to the Germans. On the basis of Israeli, Polish, German, US and Russian/Ukrainian archives, the authors study the Jewish struggle for survival, the agency of the local populations, and the German genocidal strategies. The book, which provoked a furious reaction of the Polish nationalist authorities, has now been made available to the English-reading audience through the combined efforts of Yad Vashem and Indiana University Press.
About the Speaker
Jan Grabowski is a Professor of History at the University of Ottawa and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He has authored/co-authored or edited twenty books and published more than eighty articles. His book “Hunt for the Jews. Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland” (2013) has been awarded the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for 2014. In 2018 he co-edited and co-authored “Dalej jest noc” [Night Without End], a two-volume study of the wartime fate of Jews in selected counties of occupied Poland. Grabowski’s most recent book is “Na posterunku. Udzial polskiej policji granatowej i kryminalnej w Zagladzie Zydów” [On duty. The role of the Polish “blue” police in the Holocaust] (2020). He was appointed the 2021-2022 Cleveringa Chair at Leiden University in Netherlands and in December 2022 he has been awarded the Canadian SSHRC Impact Award for research.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/KnowledgeUnderSiege4
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book talk
conversation
At Lunch with Joseph Berger – Live on Zoom
Julie Salamon (Wall Street Journal & NY Times) sits down with New York Times reporter and author Joseph Berger. Joseph was a New York Times reporter, columnist, and editor for thirty years. He is the author of four books: Displaced Persons: Growing Up American After the Holocaust, which was a New York Times Notable Book; The World in a City: Traveling the Globe Through the Neighborhoods of the New, New York; and The Young Scientists: America’s Future and the Winning of the Westinghouse. His biography of Elie Wiesel is scheduled for publication in February 2023.
Ticket Info: Free; register at ajhs.org/events/at-lunch-with-joseph-berger/ for a Zoom link
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conversation
book talk
Franz Kafka: The Diaries - Live on Zoom
Dating from 1909 to 1923, Franz Kafka's handwritten diaries contain various kinds of writing: accounts of daily events, reflections, observations, literary sketches, drafts of letters, accounts of dreams, as well as finished stories. A new translation by Ross Benjamin titled Franz Kafka: The Diaries makes available for the first time in English a comprehensive reconstruction of the diary entries and provides substantial new content, including details, names, literary works, and passages of a sexual nature that were omitted from previous publications. Join YIVO for a conversation discussing this new publication with translator Benjamin in conversation with YIVO's Executive Director Jonathan Brent.
About the Speakers
Ross Benjamin’s translations include Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion, Joseph Roth’s Job, and Daniel Kehlmann’s You Should Have Left and Tyll. He was awarded the 2010 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for his rendering of Michael Maar’s Speak, Nabokov, and he received a Guggenheim fellowship for his work on Franz Kafka’s diaries.
Jonathan Brent is the Executive Director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City. From 1991 to 2009 he was Editorial Director and Associate Director of Yale Press. He is the founder of the world acclaimed Annals of Communism series, which he established at Yale Press in 1991. Brent is the co-author of Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953(Harper-Collins, 2003) and Inside the Stalin Archives(Atlas Books, 2008). He is now working on a biography of the Soviet-Jewish writer Isaac Babel. Brent teaches history and literature at Bard College.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/Franz-Kafka
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book talk
panel discussion
Max Weinreich and the Meaning of Yiddish - Live on Zoom
Max Weinreich spent the entirety of his adult life building YIVO and the field of Yiddish Studies. A 'convert' to the cause of Yiddishism in his adolescence, he pursued a doctorate in German philology in Weimar Germany with the explicit goal of returning to Eastern Europe to contribute to the project of building a modern, secular Yiddish culture. His study visits to Yale University and Vienna in the early 1930s proved transformational in broadening and revising his understanding of the role of the social sciences in Jewish life as a tool for strengthening Jews' psychological and material resources. The destruction of the traditional Yiddish heartland in Eastern Europe and his experiences leading YIVO in post-WWII New York City added yet another dimension to Weinreich's conception of the importance of both Yiddish and Jewish Studies for the future of American and world Jewry. Would Max Weinreich recognize Yiddish studies today?
Moderated by Kalman Weiser and featuring Naomi Seidman, Kenneth Moss, and Jeffrey Shandler, this panel will examine Weinreich's evolving understanding of the meaning of Yidishe visnshaft (Yiddish studies) and the role of Yiddish in Jewish life throughout his career.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/Max-Weinreich
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panel discussion
book talk
Knowledge Under Siege: Philo-Semitic Violence: Poland’s Jewish Past in New Polish Narratives - Live on Zoom
This event is a part of YIVO's series Knowledge Under Siege, which presents recent scholarship from Poland about the Holocaust and antisemitism. Each event features scholars discussing a recent book they worked on.
Elzbieta Janicka and Tomasz Zukowski, Philo-Semitic Violence. Poland’s Jewish past in new Polish narratives (Landham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021).
“Philo-Semitic Violence” examines phenomena termed a “new opening in Polish-Jewish relations,” thought to stem from sociocultural change and the posthumous inclusion of those subjected to antisemitic violence. Elzbieta Janicka and Tomasz Zukowski investigate the terms and conditions of this inclusion whose object is an imagined collective Jewish figure. Different creators and media, same friendly intentions, same warm reception beyond class and political cleavages, regardless of gender and age. The made-to-measure Jewish figure confirms and legitimizes the majority narrative—especially about Polish stances and behaviors during the Holocaust. The consequence: aggression toward anyone who dares to interrupt the narcissistic self-staging of Polish virtue. “Philo-Semitic Violence” exposes the Polish ethnoreligious identity regime that privileges the concern for the collective image over reality. Janicka and Zukowski’s inquiry shows how patterns of exclusion and violence are reproduced when antisemitism—with its Christian sources and community-building function—is not openly problematized, reassessed, and rejected in light of its consequences and the basic principle of equal rights.
About the Speakers
Elzbieta Janicka is a historian of literature interested in the identity and community building function of Polish antisemitism. She is the author of the books: “Szluka czy Naród?” [Art or the Nation?] (2006) on a Polish poet Andrzej Trzebinski, member of a Polish fascist organization during WWII and “Festung Warschau” [Fortress Warsaw] (2011) on present-day symbolic topography of the former Warsaw ghetto area. She recently authored “Herbarium Polonorum (Heimatphotographie)” (2020) and co-authored “This Was Not America. A wrangle through Jewish-Polish-American history” (Academic Studies Press, 2022; with Michael Steinlauf). She works at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
Tomasz Zukowski is a historian of literature interested in the identity issues at the point of convergence of minorities and the dominant group, and the related discursive mechanisms in the context of the Holocaust. He recently published: “Wielki retusz. Jak zapomnielismy, ze Polacy zabijali Zydów” [The Great whitewash. How we forgot that the Poles were killing Jews] (2018) and “Pod presja. Co mówia o Zagladzie ci, którym odbieramy glos” [Under the pressure. What do those we silence say about the Holocaust?] (2021). Co-author and co-editor of “The Holocaust Bystander in Polish Culture, 1942-2015. The Story of Innocence” (Palgrave, 2021). He works at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/KnowledgeUnderSiege5
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book talk
book talk
Heidegger in Ruins - Live on Zoom
Martin Heidegger’s sympathies for the conservative revolution and National Socialism have long been well known. As the rector of the University of Freiburg in the early 1930s, he worked hard to reshape the university in accordance with National Socialist policies. He also engaged in an all-out struggle to become the movement’s philosophical preceptor, “to lead the leader.” Yet for years, Heidegger’s defenders have tried to separate his political beliefs from his philosophical doctrines. They argued, in effect, that he was good at philosophy but bad at politics. But with the 2014 publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, it has become clear that he embraced a far more radical vision of the conservative revolution than previously suspected. His dissatisfaction with National Socialism, it turns out, was mainly that it did not go far enough. The notebooks show that far from being separated from Nazism, Heidegger’s philosophy was suffused with it.
In Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology, Richard Wolin explores what the notebooks mean for our understanding of arguably the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, and of his ideas—and why his legacy remains radically compromised. Join YIVO for a discussion with Wolin about this book led by YIVO's Executive Director Jonathan Brent.
About the Speakers
Richard Wolin is distinguished professor of history, political science, and comparative literature at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuseand The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism.
Jonathan Brent is the Executive Director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City. From 1991 to 2009 he was Editorial Director and Associate Director of Yale Press. He is the founder of the world acclaimed Annals of Communism series, which he established at Yale Press in 1991. Brent is the co-author of Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953(Harper-Collins, 2003) and Inside the Stalin Archives(Atlas Books, 2008). He is now working on a biography of the Soviet-Jewish writer Isaac Babel. Brent teaches history and literature at Bard College.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/Heidegger
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book talk
