members only event
Meet the Fellows: Maytal Mark and Jonathan Green - In-person Program and Live on Zoom
Join us for a meet-and-greet with our fellows, Maytal Mark and Jonathan Green, who will share insights from their research on Middle Eastern intellectual history and the evolution of luxury and consumer culture. Light refreshments will be served.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required - registration is limited to CJH members.
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members only event
lecture
Dancing Modernity: Popular Yiddish Music in Interwar Poland and Lithuania - Live on Zoom
The early twentieth century brought a profound redefinition of everyday life. Accelerating modernization and political stratification increasingly divided society. Surprisingly, one modern phenomenon seduced nearly everyone: popular music. Regardless of political views or language (Yiddish, Polish, Lithuanian, or Hebrew), people of all kinds were lured by dance parties, musical theater, and the latest records. All of this was broadcast daily on the radio, captivating millions of listeners.
This presentation by Tomasz M. Jankowski invites you to explore the shared Jewish, Polish, and Lithuanian musical heritage and to listen to original recordings from the 1930s. Jews were involved in almost every step of the production process. Not only were many of the best interwar performers of Jewish origin, but composers, lyricists, and record label owners were as well. Artists succeeded in creating a trans-ethnic culture in which personal background lost its limiting significance. Popular genres, like Tango, Foxtrot and Boston, transcended national boundaries, traveling to and from Buenos Aires, New York, Paris, Warsaw and Kaunas. Popular dance music promised social emancipation and a temporary escape from everyday worries. It offered the hope that the future could be shared like a dance floor.
About the Speaker
Tomasz M. Jankowski is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Eastern European Jewish History at Vilnius University in Lithuania. He is interested in Jewish social entanglements in east-central Europe from the late 18th to the early 20th centuruies. His research ranges from family history and demography to popular music. Jankowski has published two books: Hebrew Polish Tango (Polin Museum, 2019) and Demography of a Shtetl (Brill, 2022). He has also been involved in documenting Jewish heritage for several institutions, including UNESCO.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
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lecture
lecture
Unwelcome Returns? (Re-)Naturalization Rights of German Jews and their Descendants in the Federal Republic of Germany - In-person Program
Article 116 Paragraph Two of the Basic Law (the German constitution of 1949) grants former German citizens whose citizenship was removed by the Nazi regime on the grounds of their Jewish ‘race’ the right to German citizenship upon application. This right is not restricted to the denaturalised individuals themselves, but also extends to their descendants. Yet during the over seventy-five years of the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany, there have been significant changes regarding which German Jews – and which groups of descendants – enjoyed that right to German citizenship. Drawing on previously unexamined material from archives throughout Germany, this talk reconstructs those developments, showing how antisemitic and former Nazi civil servants acted to restrict rights of German Jews in the 1950s and 1960s, establishing arbitrary exclusions that remained in force until the reform of the German Nationality Act in 2021.
About the Speaker
Nicholas Courtman is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of History and the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at King’s College London. He is currently completing a five-year research project funded by the Alfred Landecker Foundation as part of the Alfred Landecker Lecturer Programme entitled “Citizenship after Hitler: Continuity and Change in the Citizenship Law and Naturalisation Practice of the Federal Republic of Germany”.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
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lecture
family history today
Family History Today: Jews in the American South - Live on Zoom
Shari Rabin’s The Jewish South: An American History (Princeton University Press, 2025), is the first narrative survey of southern Jewish history. Exploring dynamics of race and religion, it features a wide range of Jewish southerners whose stories complicate popular understandings of their region. In this presentation, Rabin will offer an overview of the book, with a focus on the primary sources, including archival materials, newspaper articles, governmental documents, and more, which helped her understand the lives of southern Jews from the 17th to the 20th centuries.
About the Speaker
Shari Rabin is an associate professor of Jewish studies, religion, and history and chair of Jewish studies at Oberlin College. She is the author of Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-century America (NYU Press, 2017), which won the National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies, and The Jewish South: An American History, published this year by Princeton University Press. She serves as vice president of the Southern Jewish Historical Society.
Sponsored by the Ackman & Ziff Family Genealogy Institute
Ticket Info: Pay what you wish
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family history today
book talk
Yiddish: A Global Culture - Live on Zoom
Yiddish: A Global Culture at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, MA showcases the extraordinary vibrancy and breadth of modern Yiddish culture—its literature, theater, art, music, journalism, politics—from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. This exhibition catalog offers a panoramic view of Yiddish: A Global Culture to the general reader, placing the transnational story of Yiddish within broader world history. The 344 full-color pages include an eight-page gatefold of “Yiddishland,” the exhibition’s 60-foot mural, along with hundreds of stunning reproductions of artworks, rare artifacts, and other key exhibits. With illuminating introductory essays and a timeline highlighting the iconic figures, breakout creative masterpieces, and controversies of the Yiddish world, this volume brings to dramatic life the significance of one remarkable civilization and its ongoing legacy.
Join us for a discussion about this exhibition catalog with curator David Mazower, led by YIVO Senior Academic Advisor & Director of Exhibitions Eddy Portnoy.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
About the Speakers
David Mazower is research bibliographer and editorial director at the Yiddish Book Center. He is also the chief curator and writer of the Center’s landmark permanent exhibition, Yiddish: A Global Culture. Prior to joining the Center, he was a senior staff journalist with BBC World News in London and deputy curator of the Jewish Museum London. He writes for the Digital Yiddish Theatre Project and is the author of Yiddish Theatre in London. His dozens of published articles include several on his great-grandfather, Yiddish writer Sholem Asch, as well as explorations of Yiddish theater and popular culture, British Jewish history, Jewish art, and the Yiddish salon of Bronx poet Bertha Kling. He graduated with a degree in history from Cambridge University and has a postgraduate diploma in Russian.
Eddy Portnoy received his Ph.D. in Modern Jewish History from the Jewish Theological Seminary and holds an M.A in Yiddish Studies from Columbia. His articles on Jewish popular culture phenomena have appeared in The Drama Review, Polin, and Studies in Contemporary Jewry, among others. In addition to speaking on Jewish popular culture throughout Europe and North America, he has consulted on museum exhibits at the Museum of the City of New York, Musée d'art et d'histoire du judaïsme in Paris, and the Joods Historisch Museum in Amsterdam. He is the author of Bad Rabbi and Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press, published by Stanford University Press, 2017.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
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book talk
lecture
The Fall of the Weimar Republic - Live on Zoom
The fall of the Weimar Republic in 1933 has long been regarded as the paradigm of democracy’s collapse in the face of a populist, dictatorial challenge from Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, who built the “Third Reich” on its ruins. Can we learn any lessons from it for the present day? Many factors have been blamed for the failure of Germany’s first democracy, including the electoral system, based on proportional representation, the impact of hyperinflation in 1922-23, the power of the President, the impact of the world Depression in 1932-33, the legacy of the punitive Paris Peace Settlement that followed Germany’s defeat in World War I, and the charismatic appeal of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
This lecture by Sir Richard J. Evans explores the strengths and weaknesses of these various explanations and comes to the conclusion that the shallow and weak roots of democratic political culture in Germany were the most important factor in the inability of the Republic and its institutions to withstand the economic challenge of the Depression and the political onslaught of Hitler and the Nazis.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
About the Speaker
Sir Richard J. Evans is a renowned British historian specializing in 19th and 20th century European history, with a particular focus on Germany. Evans has authored numerous influential books, including the acclaimed three-volume "The Third Reich Trilogy." He served as Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge from 2008 to 2014 and was President of Wolfson College from 2010 to 2017. He is known for his work on German social history, his role as an expert witness in the David Irving libel trial, and his defense of historical methodology against postmodernist skepticism. Evans has been recognized for his contributions to scholarship, receiving a knighthood in 2012. He served as Provost of Gresham College in London from 2014 to 2020. Evans currently serves as Deputy Chair of the UK Spoliation Advisory Panel, advising the Government on claims for the restitution of Nazi-era looted art.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
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lecture
talk
Summer Program Information Session - Live on Zoom
Have you always wanted to study Yiddish at the YIVO-Bard Summer Program? Are you wondering what it would be like to spend six weeks studying at YIVO in New York City? Join faculty and staff of the Summer Program for one of our brief information sessions. These 45-minute sessions will cover the program’s structure, admissions process, and more, with time for questions from prospective Summer Program students. The sessions will be conducted in English and are entirely optional (prospective students are not required to attend).
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
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talk
celebration
Salud i Beraha: The 9th Annual NY Ladino Day! - In-person Program
Curated by Jane Mushabac and Bryan Kirschen
Musical Performance featuring Brazilian Ladino singer Fortuna, accompanied by her quartet
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Joe Halio
Since 2013, Ladino Day programs have been held around the world to honor Ladino, also known as Judeo-Spanish. January 11th marks New York’s 9th Annual Ladino Day hosted by the American Sephardi Federation.
Ladino is a bridge to many cultures. A variety of Spanish, it has absorbed words from Hebrew, Turkish, Arabic, French, Greek, and Portuguese. The mother tongue of Jews in the Ottoman Empire for 500 years, Ladino became the home language of Sephardim worldwide. While the number of Ladino speakers has sharply declined, distinguished Ladino Day programs like ours celebrate and preserve a vibrant language and heritage. These programs are, as Aviya Kushner has written in the Forward, “Why Ladino Will Rise Again.”
Ticket Info:
$20 Early Bird General Admission
(Admission to Ladino Day)
$30 Friend of NY Ladino Day (Includes a copy of the book: The Historic Synagogues of Turkey, and admission to Ladino Day)
$50 VIP Friend of NY Ladino Day
(Includes VIP reception prior to the program, a copy of the book: The Historic Synagogues of Turkey, and VIP seating at Ladino Day)
* Early Bird prices end on December 1, 2025
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celebration
