book talk
LBI Book Club, Vol II, Part 1: The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig, featuring George Prochnik – Live on Zoom
Join us for a discussion of Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday, featuring George Prochnik, author of The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World.
Please note that the discussion for The World of Yesterday will be broken into 2 parts, Chapters 1-8 and Chapters 9-16. The first 8 chapters will be discussed in the June 2nd meeting. The second 8 chapters will be discussed in the June 9th meeting. IF YOU WISH TO ATTEND BOTH SECTIONS, PLEASE REGISTER FOR BOTH. This is the webpage for the first session. The page for the second session is here. Thank you!
Written as both a recollection of the past and a warning for future generations, The World of Yesterday recalls the golden age of literary Vienna—its seeming permanence, its promise, and its devastating fall. Surrounded by the leading literary lights of the epoch, Stefan Zweig draws a vivid and intimate account of his life and travels through Vienna, Paris, Berlin, and London, touching on the very heart of European culture. His passionate, evocative prose paints a portrait of an era that danced brilliantly on the edge of extinction. The World of Yesterday is often described as Zweig’s memoir to a lost world.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required at eventbrite.com/e/lbi-book-club-vol-ii-the-world-of-yesterday-by-stefan-zweig-tickets-105434443258 to receive a link to the Zoom event
Presented by:
book talk
lecture
Dybbuks, Golems, S. An-ski, and Jewish Legends in Times of Fear – Live on Zoom
S. An-ski’s play The Dybbuk, a story of possession set in a shtetl (think The Exorcist meets Fiddler on the Roof), is the foundation of modern Jewish drama. This talk by scholar Gabriella Safran explores its roots: in Jewish folklore, the scandalous blood libel trial in Kiev in 1913, and the political passions of Russian-Jewish revolutionaries. In composing the play, An-ski was torn between two Jewish myths, each still modern: the tragic ambivalence of the dybbuk, a lost, wandering soul, and the technological triumphalism of the golem, a robot set in motion by practical kabbalah and capable of defending the Jews from every harm.
Ticket Info: Free; reservations required at yivo.org/Dybbuks to receive a link to the Zoom event
About the Speaker:
Gabriella Safran, the Eva Chernov Lokey Professor in Jewish Studies at Stanford University, teaches in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. She is the author and editor of prize-winning books on how Russian novels describe Jewish assimilation and on the relation between Jewish literature and anthropology; her biography of a pioneering Russian-Jewish writer, ethnographer, and revolutionary, Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk’s Creator, S. An-sky, came out with Harvard University Press in 2010. Safran is now finishing a book on listening, transcription, and verbal imitation across class lines in the mid-19th-century Russian Empire, and beginning another book about the international pre-history of the Jewish joke.
Presented by:
lecture
book talk
The Art of the Jewish Family – Live on Zoom
A virtual program exploring the history of women in early New York through five objects.
In The Art of the Jewish Family, Laura Arnold Leibman examines five objects owned by a diverse group of Jewish women who all lived in New York in the years between 1750 and 1850. These objects, many of which are drawn from the AJHS Archives, offer intimate and tangible views into the lives of Jewish American women from a range of statuses, beliefs, and lifestyles—both rich and poor, Sephardi and Ashkenazi, slaves and slaveowners. Join us for a conversation with Laura Arnold Leibman about her new book, and the important role objects and material culture play in preserving the stories of women.
Ticket Info: Free; register at ajhs.org/register-art-jewish-family to receive a link to the Zoom program
Presented by:
book talk
family program
Virtual Class: Soapbox Yoga
A key part of activism – is to take action and be active. This virtual series uniquely blends storytelling and physical movement and connects families in real time through Zoom! These 45-minute classes invite families to get up and participate in connecting past and present through poses inspired by the stories of Emma Lazarus and the soapbox speakers of Union Square.
This program is geared towards families with children age 4 to 7 years old.
Ticket Info: Free! RSVP required
Made possible by:
The Prose & Pose family program series has been made possible in part by PJ Libray.
Presented by:
family program
lecture and musical program
Yemenite Men and Women and their Music – Live on Zoom
The Yemenites were a fixed community in the southern Arabian peninsula for 3,000 years. Barak Oded is a musicologist who specializes in Yemenite songs of all types, as well as the language and tunes involved in the context of other Jewish communities. In these sessions, Barak will show the uniqueness of Yemenite song and prayers as they were distinct from other communities. Prayers were chanted, there wasn't and still isn't music and song in liturgical services. Men would sing songs based on Jewish texts, and in Hebrew, while women would sing in Arabic about daily life.
Samples of each of these categories will be presented throughout these presentations.
Ticket Info: $5 at us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/8715883374731/WN_ViWb9-_rRYKtM--LZTGymA
Presented by:
lecture and musical program
book talk
LBI Book Club, Vol II, Part 2: The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig, featuring George Prochnik – Live on Zoom
Join us for a discussion of Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday, featuring George Prochnik, author of The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World.
Please note that the discussion for The World of Yesterday will be broken into 2 parts, Chapters 1-8 and Chapters 9-16. The first 8 chapters will be discussed in the June 2nd meeting. The second 8 chapters will be discussed in the June 9th meeting. IF YOU WISH TO ATTEND BOTH SECTIONS, PLEASE REGISTER FOR BOTH. This is the webpage for the second session. The page for the first session is here. Thank you!
Written as both a recollection of the past and a warning for future generations, The World of Yesterday recalls the golden age of literary Vienna—its seeming permanence, its promise, and its devastating fall. Surrounded by the leading literary lights of the epoch, Stefan Zweig draws a vivid and intimate account of his life and travels through Vienna, Paris, Berlin, and London, touching on the very heart of European culture. His passionate, evocative prose paints a portrait of an era that danced brilliantly on the edge of extinction. The World of Yesterday is often described as Zweig’s memoir to a lost world.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required at eventbrite.com/e/lbi-book-club-vol-ii-the-world-of-yesterday-by-stefan-zweig-tickets-105434443258 to receive a link to the Zoom event
Presented by:
book talk
family program
Virtual Visit: Meet Emma Lazarus
Step back in time and into the sitting room of Emma Lazarus, a fifth-generation American Jew caught in an important turning point in American history. In this live interactive program, children have the opportunity to engage with the famous poetess about her life and the issues of her time. Emma will encourage families to identify a cause that they care about and discover their own creative voice. Recommended for children age 7 – 12, but family of all ages are welcome to follow along.
Ticket Info: Free! RSVP required
Presented by:
family program
book talk
People of the Book Club: Inheritance - Live on Zoom
Go behind the stories at our bi-monthly book discussion, led by Lauren Gilbert, Senior Manager for Public Services at the Center for Jewish History. This session will feature a discussion of Inheritance, a memoir by Dani Shapiro, in which she recounts her experience of discovering (via DNA testing) the stunning news that her father was not her biological father. The book discussion will be followed by a Q&A with the author.
Participants will need to obtain their own copy to read before the discussion.
Ticket Info: Free, registration required at inheritance.bpt.me or 800-838-3006
Presented by:
book talk
family program
Virtual Class: Soapbox Yoga
A key part of activism – is to take action and be active. This virtual series uniquely blends storytelling and physical movement and connects families in real time through Zoom! These 45-minute classes invite families to get up and participate in connecting past and present through poses inspired by the stories of Emma Lazarus and the soapbox speakers of Union Square.
This program is geared towards families with children age 4 to 7 years old.
Ticket Info: Free! RSVP required
Made possible by:
The Prose & Pose family program series has been made possible in part by PJ Libray.
Presented by:
family program
book talk
The Lost Family with Libby Copeland – Live on Zoom
In her acclaimed new book, The Lost Family: How DNA Testing Is Upending Who We Are (Abrams, 2020), award-winning journalist Libby Copeland investigates the rapidly evolving phenomenon of home DNA testing, uncovering the story of Alice Collins Plebuch, whose supposed Irish ancestry is overturned by a DNA test that indicates Ashkenazi Jewish heritage. On the 20th anniversary of home DNA testing for ancestry purposes, and with over 30 million Americans tested, the author will explore how this technology illuminates how we think about family, heritage, and ourselves. She will also discuss the implications of home DNA testing for Jewish genealogy, as well as the unique challenges of genetic genealogy for Ashkenazim.
Ticket Info: Free; register at lostfamily.bpt.me or 800-838-3006 to receive a link to the Zoom event
Presented by:
book talk
family program
Virtual Visit: Meet Emma Lazarus
Step back in time and into the sitting room of Emma Lazarus, a fifth-generation American Jew caught in an important turning point in American history. In this live interactive program, children have the opportunity to engage with the famous poetess about her life and the issues of her time. Emma will encourage families to identify a cause that they care about and discover their own creative voice. Recommended for children age 7 – 12, but family of all ages are welcome to follow along.
Ticket Info: Free! RSVP required
Presented by:
family program
lecture
Eating Right and Left: Food and Political Alignment in the Yiddish Press
Eve Jochnowitz | Delivered in Yiddish
An editorial published in Der Tog May 17, 1916 titled “Vegetarians have to be liberal too” spelled out the intense and contentious connection drawn by many Yiddish writers between Jewish eating and Jewish politics in the early years of the 20th century. All parties, those arguing for and against vegetarianism, claimed for themselves the moral high ground associated with liberalism, with greatness of soul and generosity of spirit, and attributed conservatism to the other side.
This lecture will use intriguing texts and images to examine what values Yiddish writers in Europe, the Americas, and Palestine considered “liberal,” and how they saw food practices including both embracing or rejecting vegetarianism, as advancing those values. The question of whether any kind of prescriptivism could be put to use for a progressive agenda was complicated (in the United States) by the arguments for and against prohibition. Editors of Yiddish papers differed as well on whether women’s emancipation was relevant to a radical agenda and what role cooking and eating might play in advancing women’s rights. Women wrote or contributed to all three known Yiddish vegetarian cookbooks in the first half of the 20th century, indicating that women were among the most energetic, productive advocates for vegetarianism. Yiddish journalists, nevertheless, saw women not as pioneers and agitators for vegetarianism, but as passive companions, active resistors, or simply indifferent, hapless victims in need of defense. This position was partly justified by the tone-deaf sexism of many vegetarian writers.
The discomfort with and nostalgia for Jewish religious practice and custom regarding vegetarianism as an admirable khumre or a dangerous heresy informed the discourse as well. The original Jewish Encyclopedia, completed in 1906, has a brief article on vegetarianism which is entirely positive (citing rabbinic sources uncomfortable with meat, mostly because it is an extravagance, and touching on modern Jewish vegetarian thinkers, but making no mention of any anti-vegetarian sentiment.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/YCLS2020-Jochnowitz to receive a link to the Zoom program
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
Yiddish Children's Literature and Jewish Modernity
Miriam Udel | Delivered in English
Scholars are only beginning to consider the corpus of nearly one thousand extant books, as well as several periodicals, that constitute the Yiddish children’s literature of the 20th century. However, this body of work was important in both shaping and respecting key aspects of the modern Jewish experience. We will explore what it means to limn the contours of a canon of Yiddish kidlit and discuss the unique vantage point that studying children’s literature and culture affords with respect to the rest of modern Jewish civilization.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/YCLS2020-Udel to receive a link to the Zoom program
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
Where Is the Capital of Yiddishland?
Kalman Weiser | Delivered in Yiddish
Yiddishists understood Yiddish as a global language and its secular culture as a global culture whose centre lay in eastern Europe. But where was the capital the "Yiddishland"? Following the First World War, litvish Vilna—home of YIVO—and poylish Warsaw—the metropolis of the modern Yiddish press, literature, and theatre—emerged as the leading candidates in the competition. Each city had its admirers and detractors who praised its virtues or condemned its vices in dozens of articles in the international Yiddish press. Their evaluations reflect local patriotism, personal frictions and ideological conflicts. But what does the competition teach us about the state of Yiddish in general and about Yiddishist hopes and fears for the future of the language?
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/YCLS2020-Weiser to receive a link to the Zoom program
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
The Barton Brothers, Mickey Katz, and Others: Yiddish-English Bilingual Parody Songs
Ronald Robboy | Delivered in English
In the years immediately following the Second World War, the Barton Brothers, an anarchic Catskill comedy duo, began recording humorous macaronic (that is, bilingual) parody songs that relied in no small part on Yiddish theater and radio for raw material. The Bartons’ unexpected success—their send-up of Yiddish radio, “Joe & Paul,” was a bona fide hit, however improbable—inspired clarinetist Mickey Katz, based in Los Angeles and working with first-rate studio players, to begin recording his own exceedingly funny Yiddish-mixed-with-English lyrics set to the melodies of current Hit Parade songs. Capitol Records issued (possibly to their own amazement) a steady stream of these Yinglish albums by Katz all through the 1950s and into the ‘60s. These in turn inspired Allan Sherman, a TV gameshow writer/producer, to begin recording his own parodies of standards and folk songs. Though hardly any of Sherman’s lyrics had actual Yiddish content, many still had a clearly Jewish inflection that often alluded—phonetically, grammatically, or syntactically—to Yiddish beginnings.
Close readings of selected tracks by the Bartons, by Katz, and by Sherman will focus on their language, their music, their delivery, and what made them so influential and so very funny.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/YCLS2020-Robboy to receive a link to the Zoom program
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
Ab. Cahan's Early Experiments in Yiddish Journalism: di "Sedre" and the Novella "How Rafol Naaritsokh Became a Socialist"
Ellie Kellman | Delivered in Yiddish
Abraham Cahan is known for writing what he called pleyne (plain) Yiddish. As editor of the socialist daily Forverts during the first half of the twentieth century, he famously expunged from the newspaper vocabulary he considered esoteric or unfamiliar to immigrant readers. During the 1890s, Cahan experimented with writing in a variety of genres for an audience of newly literate immigrants. As a co-founder of the socialist weekly Arbeter tsaytung, he tested his supposition that immigrants would buy a socialist paper if it were to supply sophisticated content in a simplified, partly entertaining form. In connection with this effort, Cahan created several popular genres for the paper. Among them was the well-known "Sedre." Each week, Cahan chose a theme from the weekly Torah portion and interpreted it along the lines of his socialist world view.
Among Cahan's less well known experiments with popularizing socialist ideas was his novella "How Rafol Naaritsokh Became a Socialist," which appeared in installments in Arbeter tsaytung in 1894. The protagonist, Rafol, a talented cabinet maker from Lithuania, immigrates to America and finds work in a furniture factory in New York. Suffering under the routinized and alienating labor that is required of him, he becomes active in a socialist circle, where he comes to understand that capitalism both exploits his body and dulls his spirit. Gradually, he embraces socialism in order to revive his sense of pride in productive work.
The novella was reprinted in pamphlet form in 1896. In 1907, Cahan revised and expanded the work into a full-length novel entitled Rafol Naaritsokh – the Story of a Carpenter Who Saw the Light.
The speaker will analyze the language and content of "Di Sedre" and the original version of Rafol Naaritsokh for the purpose of broadening the scope of scholarly evaluation of Cahan's early contribution to the Yiddish press.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/YCLS2020-Kellman to receive a link to the Zoom program
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
Chaim Zhitlovsky and His Philosophy of Yiddishism
Tony Michels | Delivered in English
Although barely remembered today, Dr. Chaim Zhitlovsky (1865-1943) was a towering figure in modern Jewish politics and culture during his own lifetime. He was highly influential yet often controversial. A revolutionary socialist and Jewish nationalist, Zhitlovsky promoted the idea of a Yiddish cultural renaissance in the United States, eastern Europe, and wherever Yiddish-speaking Jews lived. At various times, he supported Zionism and Communism; at other times he was a fierce critic of both. Who was Chaim Zhitlovsky and what was his philosophy of Yiddishism? This lecture explores the life and thought of one of the most intriguing Jewish thinkers of the modern era.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/YCLS2020-Michels to receive a link to the Zoom program
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
Stutchkoff and Yiddish Radio
Amanda (Miryem-Khaye) Seigel | Delivered in Yiddish
Nahum Stutchkoff was a prominent Yiddish lexicographer (Der oyster fun der yidisher shprakh; Der yidisher gramen-leksikon), but did you know that he was also a prolific playwright, actor, director, lyricist, translator and producer of Yiddish radio programs? Stutchkoff spent years at WEVD radio in New York, creating Yiddish radio dramas that enthralled listeners with family sagas, melodramatic sob stories and comic scenes of intergenerational conflict, all produced on a shoestring budget and seasoned with homemade special effects – not to mention his delightful commercials for food products. This lecture will explore Stutchkoff’s legacy within the “golden age” of Yiddish radio, drawing on his rich archive in the Dorot Jewish Division, New York Public Library.
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/YCLS2020-Seigel to receive a link to the Zoom program
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
The Accidental Rise of the Modern Yiddish Theater
Alyssa Quint | Delivered in English
The Accidental Rise of the Modern Yiddish Theater explores the particular social, commercial, cultural, linguistic, and historical circumstances that gave rise to the first public performances of Yiddish operetta in Romania and Russia from 1876 to 1883, a period considered the first chapter of the modern Yiddish theater. These performances kickstarted the global cultural phenomenon that became the modern Yiddish theater. Under what circumstances was this complex institution allowed to grow? And what accident of history—without which there may have been no Yiddish theater—lies at the intersection of all of these circumstances?
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/YCLS2020-Quint to receive a link to the Zoom program
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
Brider un shvester fun arbet un noyt. A geshikhte fun 'bund.'
Jack Jacobs | Delivered in Yiddish
The Jewish Workers’ Bund, founded in Vilna in 1897, was the most important Jewish socialist party in Europe, and the most powerful Jewish political party in a number of Poland’s major cities in the years immediately preceding the Second World War. This talk will explore the history of the Bund, and its ideological development, and will attempt to explain both the reasons for the Bund’s success, and the party’s limitations. Why was a party rooted in Marxism, led by secularists, and advocating anti-Zionist ideas, so attractive to a significant proportion of Polish Jewry in the 1930s?
Ticket Info: Free; register at yivo.org/YCLS2020-Jacobs to receive a link to the Zoom program
Presented by:
lecture
