book talk
Confronting Representations of Black People in Yiddish Culture - Live on Zoom
Scholars have long argued that the Yiddish press consistently condemned discrimination against African Americans and emphasized parallels between Jewish oppression in Eastern Europe and Black life in the United States. In Crude Creatures, Gil Ribak challenges this view, showing that it reflects only a narrow portion of Jewish representations of Black people during the immigration era.
Drawing on previously unexplored Yiddish newspapers, theater, and literature from Eastern Europe and the United States through 1929, Ribak exposes a gap in existing scholarship. Although Jewish writers frequently denounced lynching, racial violence, and segregation, they often portrayed Black Africans and African Americans using crude stereotypes. Many Eastern European Jews encountered Black people only after immigrating, yet brought with them preconceived images shaped by rabbinic exegesis, pious advice, travel narratives, folklore, scientific explorations, pulp literature, press reports, political rhetoric, and educational materials. These depictions cast Black people as cannibals, oversexed, prone to violence, childlike, or just happy-go-lucky people. Crude Creatures revises the overly optimistic narrative of Black-Jewish relations and reveals how immigrant cultures adapted to America’s racial hierarchy.
Join us for a discussion about this book with Ribak, led by Clinical Assistant Professor at University of South Carolina Devin Randolph.
About the Speakers
Gil Ribak is the Shirley D. Curson Associate Professor at The Arizona Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Arizona. Born and raised in Israel, Ribak came to the U.S. on a Fulbright Fellowship and completed a Ph.D. in history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He held several academic positions, such as the Director of the Institute on Israeli-American Jewish Relations at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles. His book, Gentile New York: The Images of Non-Jews among Jewish Immigrants, was published by Rutgers University Press in 2012. In 2021-2022, Ribak served as the European Union's Marie S. Curie Senior Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies at the Albert-Ludwig University in Freiburg, Germany.
Devin Randolph is Clinical Assistant Professor in the College of Education at the University of South Carolina. He studies the everyday experiences of targeted youth and systemic inequities. His research includes work with Jewish and African American-understanding the historical alliance, divergence and convergence and contours of racism and racial antisemitism. Randolph earned his Ph.D. in Foundations of Education from the University of South Carolina.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
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book talk
book talk
Pathways: Seven Short Stories by I. L. Peretz - In-person Program
The new graded reader Afn veg: Zibn dertseylungen fun Y.-L. Perets (Pathways: Seven Short Stories by I. L. Peretz), consists of seven classic short stories by the great author, I. L. Peretz, abridged and adapted for students by Moishele Alfonso.
Afn Veg features a side-by-side glossary, discussion questions, and audio recordings. This collection of adapted Peretz short stories gives the reader access to the very best that Yiddish literature has to offer, yet at such a level that even advanced beginners can comprehend it.
Every short story is divided into smaller chapters, with discussion questions at the end of each chapter. One feature that makes this reader so useful for students is the side-by-side glossary. The more difficult words and expressions appear in bold letters; right next to the Yiddish text is a glossary containing their translation, and in some cases, also the pronunciation. The book is a tremendous contribution to the learning materials available to today’s Yiddish students.
Join YIVO and League for Yiddish for a celebration of this new publication. Light refreshments will be served during the program.
This lecture will be held in Yiddish in person only.
About the Speaker
Moishele Alfonso received his B.A. in German, French and Italian from the University of Memphis. He attended the YIVO-Bard Uriel Weinreich Summer Program in 2018 and participated in the Yiddish Book Center’s Yiddish Pedagogy Fellowship (2018-19) and the Yiddish Pedagogy Practicum (2021-22). He has taught Yiddish at the Yiddish Book Center, the Workers Circle, and at Kadimah in Melbourne, Australia. In 2021-2022, Moishele transcribed Isaac Bashevis Singer’s book, Sonim: di geshikhte fun a libe (Enemies: a Love Story) into standardized Yiddish from the orthography used in its original serialized publication in the Forverts (1966). Moishele’s version was published in 2022 by Olniansky Farlag in Sweden and is the first time Sonim has ever appeared in book form in Yiddish.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
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book talk
book talk
Sounds of Survival: Polish Music and the Holocaust - In-person Program
Sounds of Survival explores the central role played by Jews in creating classical music in Poland. It examines an integrated Polish and Polish Jewish musical community as its members contended with antisemitism in the 1930s, attempted to survive the Nazi occupation, and established a renewed musical culture amid the ashes of World War II and the Holocaust. Reconstructing these musicians' lives from the 1920s into the 1950s, Mackenzie Pierce argues that despite nearly unimaginable violence, many Polish musicians treated the war as a time of reinvention and cultural preservation. Their faith that music was a source of cultural continuity, however, also marginalized experiences of wartime loss, especially those of Jewish victims and survivors of the Holocaust. Sounds of Survival not only reveals that the Holocaust was a central event within musical culture in Poland; it also shows why its musical aftermath has been difficult to hear.
About the Author
Mackenzie Pierce is assistant professor of musicology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and author of Sounds of Survival: Polish Music and the Holocaust (University of California Press, 2025). He is a scholar of twentieth-century musical culture in Eastern Europe, with a focus on Polish-Jewish relations and classical music. Active in both the US and Europe, his research has been supported through fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
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book talk
talk
Summer Program Information Session: Advanced Levels - Live on Zoom
Are you thinking of returning to the Summer Program to continue your advanced studies? Join Summer Program faculty and staff for a brief information session about YIVO’s advanced levels. Open to graduates of YIVO’s intermediate levels and those with comparable proficiency, this session will cover the structure of YIVO’s advanced levels, the admissions process, and more, with time for questions from prospective Summer Program students.
The session will be conducted in Yiddish and is entirely optional (prospective students are not required to attend).
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
Presented by:
talk
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.
Presented by:
talk
book club
LBI Book Club: It Will Yet Be Heard: A Polish Rabbi's witness of the Shoah and Survival - Live on Zoom
Dr. Joanna Sliwá will join the LBI Book Club in January to discuss the book It Will Yet Be Heard: A Polish Rabbi's Witness of the Shoah and Survival by Leon Thorne.
It Will Yet Be Heard: A Polish Rabbi's Witness of the Shoah and Survival
Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer once described Dr. Leon Thorne’s memoir as a work of “bitter truth” that he compared favorably to the works of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Proust. Out of print for over forty years, this lost classic of Holocaust literature now reappears in a revised, annotated edition, including both Thorne’s original 1961 memoir Out of the Ashes: The Story of a Survivor and his previously unpublished accounts of his arduous postwar experiences in Germany and Poland.
Rabbi Thorne composed his memoir under extraordinary conditions, confined to a small underground bunker below a Polish peasant’s pigsty. But, It Will Yet Be Heard is remarkable not only for the story of its composition, but also for its moral clarity and complexity. A deeply religious man, Rabbi Thorne bore witness to forced labor camps, human degradation, and the murders of entire communities. And once he emerged from hiding, he grappled not only with survivor’s guilt, but also with the lingering antisemitism and anti-Jewish violence in Poland even after the war ended. Harrowing, moving, and deeply insightful, Rabbi Thorne’s firsthand account offers a rediscovered perspective on the twentieth century’s greatest tragedy.
(Rutgers University Press)
Leon Thorne was a rabbi from Schodnica, near Drohobycz, in Austrian Galicia. He trained at the Breslau Seminary. Following the Holocaust, he served the post-war Jewish community of Frankfurt as a rabbi before immigrating to the United States, settling in Brooklyn, New York.
About Our Guest
Dr. Joanna Sliwá is a historian at the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) where she also administers academic programs. Joanna is a historian of the Holocaust and modern Polish Jewish history. She is the author of the award-winning book, Jewish Childhood in Kraków: A Microhistory of the Holocaust(Rutgers University Press, 2021) and, with Elizabeth (Barry) White, of The Counterfeit Countess: The Jewish Woman Who Rescued Thousands of Poles during the Holocaust (Simon and Schuster, 2024), which has been translated in several languages. A new volume that Joanna co-edited with Christine Schmidt and Elizabeth Anthony, Older Jews and the Holocaust:Persecution, Displacement, and Survival, will be published in 2026 (Wayne State University Press). She previously worked at the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, and at the Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. She has taught Holocaust and Jewish history at Kean University and at Rutgers University and has served as a historical consultant and researcher, including for the PBS film In the Name of Their Mothers: The Story of Irena Sendler
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book club
panel discussion
Holocaust Remembrance Today - a Living Responsibility: A Panel Discussion in Conjunction With the Exhibition "Between Life and Death: Stories of Rescue During the Holocaust" at the United Nations - In-person Program and Live on Zoom
Join us for a panel exploring how societies remember and reinterpret the Holocaust in the 21st century, and what meaning International Holocaust Remembrance Day holds today.
Inspired by the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity (ENRS) exhibition Between Life and Death: Stories of Rescue during the Holocaust, on view at the United Nations from January 15 to February 20 as part of remembrance and education outreach organized by the Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme, the discussion will focus on acts of rescue, individual moral choices, and the legacy of human solidarity during one of the darkest periods in history.
Moderated by Jayashri Wyatt, the panel comprising Elzbieta Ficowska, Mordecai Paldiel, Jay Winter (Charles J. Stille Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University), and Daniel Blatman (Max and Rita Haber Professor Emeritus of Contemporary Jewry and Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) will discuss how remembrance has evolved over the decades, how stories of rescuers and survivors can be communicated to younger generations, and how to respond to new challenges such as disinformation and the rapid development of AI, as well as the fading of living memory. The conversation will highlight why remembrance remains essential for shaping empathy, civic responsibility, and resilience in today’s world.
The panel discussion will take place at 7:00pm ET and will be preceded by a reception for the in-person audience at 6:00pm ET.
Co-presented by YIVO, Center for Jewish History, European Network Remembrance and Solidarity, the Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme, and the Sousa Mendes Foundation
About the Panelists
Jayashri Wyatt is the Chief of Education Outreach, in the UN Department of Global Communications. She is a seasoned communications professional with a wealth of experience in the United Nations System producing high-level events, advocacy campaigns, and films for the Department of Global Communications, UNICEF, and the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). She also has nearly a decade of experience as an educator championing women’s empowerment and gender equality.
Elzbieta Ficowska was born in the Warsaw ghetto in 1942 to Henia and Jossel Koppel. She survived because she was smuggled to the "Aryan side" and was hid from Germans by Stanislawa Bussold, a 56-year-old midwife and member of the underground who helped Jews. The only thing left from her Jewish parents is a little silver spoon bearing the girl's name and birth date. Her story is among those presented at the travelling exhibition Between Life and Death. For many years, she has been active in the Association of Children of the Holocaust, sharing her personal testimony of rescue and remembrance.
Dr. Mordecai Paldiel headed the Righteous Among the Nations Department at Yad Vashem from 1982-2007 and he serves on the Board of the Sousa Mendes Foundation. His books include Remembrance and Meaning: Dialogues and Thoughts on the Significance of Holocaust Rescuers; The Path of the Righteous: Gentile Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust; Sheltering the Jews: Stories of Holocaust Rescuers; Churches and the Holocaust: Unholy Teaching, Good Samaritans and Reconciliation; Whosoever Saves One Life: The Uniqueness of the Righteous Among the Nations; Saving the Jews: Amazing Stories of Men and Women Who Defied the Final Solution; Diplomat Heroes of the Holocaust; German Rescuers of Jews: Individuals versus the Nazi System; Polish Rescuers of Jews: Selected Stories of Amazing Acts of Goodness; Poland, the Jews and the Holocaust: Promised Beginnings and Troubled Past; Saving One’s Own: Jewish Rescuers During the Holocaust and Righteous or Not: The Honoring of Rescuers of Jews. He serves on the B’nai B’rith Commission to honor Jewish rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust. Thanks to his efforts, there is now a square named for Aristides de Sousa Mendes in Jerusalem. He provided the list of 60 diplomat-rescuers honored by the US Congress in 2024 in the Forgotten Heroes of the Holocaust Congressional Gold Medal Act.
Jay Winter is the Charles J. Stille Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University and a leading scholar of 20th-century European history. A specialist on the World War I, he has profoundly influenced the study of memory, mourning, and the cultural consequences of modern conflict. He is the author of numerous seminal works, including Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (1995), The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century (1996), René Cassin and Human Rights (2013), The Cultural History of War in the Twentieth Century and After (2022), and most recently The Day the Great War Ended, 24 July 1923: The Civilianization of War (2022). He holds honorary degrees from the universities of Graz, Leuven, and Paris.
Daniel Blatman is the Max and Rita Haber Professor Emeritus of Contemporary Jewry and Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He previously served as director of the University’s Institute of Contemporary Jewry and of the Center for the Study of the History and Culture of Polish Jewry. His research focuses on twentieth-century Polish Jewry, the Jewish labor movement in Eastern Europe, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto, Polish–Jewish relations during the Holocaust and its aftermath, and Nazi extermination policy. Among his major publications are For Our Freedom and Yours: The Jewish Labor Bund in Poland, 1939–1945; Reportage from the Ghetto: The Jewish Underground Press in the Warsaw Ghetto; The Death Marches: The Final Phase of Nazi Genocide; and Conflicting Histories and Coexistence: New Perspectives on the Jewish–Polish Encounters. He is the recipient of the Jacob Buchman Memorial Prize, the Yad Vashem International Prize in Holocaust Studies, and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
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panel discussion
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
book discussion
New Perspectives on the History of Antisemitism: A Roundtable Discussion With Mark Weitzman, Susannah Heschel, Maurice Samuels, and Samuel Freedman – In-Person Program
As concern over antisemitism has grown in recent years, so too have debates over how to understand and combat it. The Routledge History of Antisemitism, now in paperback, offers fresh perspectives into what has been called the oldest hatred. It explores antisemitism’s history and manifestations, ranging from its origins to the internet.
In the years following the Holocaust, many in North America and Europe viewed antisemitism as a historical issue with little current importance. However, recent events show that antisemitism is not just a matter of historical interest or of concern only to Jews. Antisemitism has become a major issue confronting and challenging our world. This volume starts with explorations of antisemitism in its many different shapes across time and then proceeds to a geographical perspective, covering a broad scope of experiences across different countries and regions. The final section discusses the manifestations of antisemitism in its varied cultural and social forms.
Join us for this critically important and illuminating discussion about the book’s insights into antisemitism featuring co-editor Mark Weitzman (World Jewish Restitution Organization) and contributors Susannah Heschel (Dartmouth) and Maurice Samuels (Yale). Samuel Freedman (Columbia) will moderate. A reception will follow the program. The book will be available for purchase and signing.
About the Speakers
Mark Weitzman is co-editor of The Routledge History of Antisemitism. He is Chief Operating Officer of the World Jewish Restitution Organization, the lead NGO working toward restitution of Jewish private and communal property seized during World War II. He is also the senior NGO member of the official U.S. delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Authority (IHRA), where he chaired the Committee on Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial and the Museums and Memorials Working Group. He was the architect of IHRA’s adoption of the Working Definition of Antisemitism and the lead author of IHRA’s Working Definition of Holocaust Denial and Distortion. He wrote the monograph Jews and Judaism in the Political Theology of Radical Catholic Traditionalists, and his chapter on “Holocaust Denial and Distortion” will be published in the forthcoming Cambridge University Press History of Antisemitism.
Susannah Heschel is Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor and chair of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College. Her books include Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus; The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany; Jüdischer Islam: Islam und jüdisch-deutsche Selbstbestimmung; Jewish Studies and the Woman Question, written with Sarah Imhoff, and several edited books. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, grants from the Carnegie Corporation and the Ford Foundation, and five honorary doctorates from universities in the United States, Canada, Germany, and Switzerland.
Maurice Samuels is the Betty Jane Anlyan Professor of French at Yale University, where he also directs the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Cullman Center Fellowship at the New York Public Library, he is the author of five books, including The Right to Difference: French Universalism and the Jews; The Betrayal of the Duchess; and Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair, published in Yale's Jewish Lives Series.
Samuel Freedman (above photo: credit Gabriela Bhaskar) has been an award-winning author, columnist, and professor. A former columnist for The New York Times and a professor emeritus at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, he is the author of the ten acclaimed books. The most recent of them, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights, won the 2024 Hillman Prize for Book Journalism. Freedman’s previous books include Upon This Rock: The Miracles of a Black Church; The Inheritance: How Three Families and America Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond; and Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry. Four of his books have been listed among The New York Times’ Notable Books of the Year. Jew vs. Jew won the National Jewish Book Award for Non-Fiction and made the Publishers Weekly Religion Best-Sellers list.
This program is part of the Anne Frank in History and Memory series, which is made possible by the New York State Education Department and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
Ticket Info: Pay what you wish; registration is required
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book discussion
conversation
At Lunch with Margalit Fox – Live on Zoom
Julie Salamon, New York Times best-selling author, sits down with author and journalist Margalit Fox. Considered one of the foremost explanatory writers and literary stylists in American journalism, Margalit (mar-gah-LEET) Fox retired in 2018 from a 24-year-career at the New York Times, where she was most recently a senior writer. As a member of the newspaper’s celebrated obituary news department, she has written the Page One sendoffs of some of the best-known cultural figures of our era, including the pioneering feminist Betty Friedan, the writers Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison, the poet Adrienne Rich, the children’s author Maurice Sendak and the advice columnists Dear Abby and Ann Landers. She has also written the obituaries of many of the unsung heroes who have managed, quietly, to touch history, among them the inventors of the crash-test dummy, the bar code and the pink plastic lawn flamingo. In 2016, the Poynter Institute named her one of the six best writers in the New York Times’s history. The recipient of the William Saroyan International Prize for Nonfiction, Margalit is the author of four previous narrative nonfiction books: Talking Hands, The Riddle of the Labyrinth, Conan Doyle for the Defense and The Confidence Men. Originally trained as a cellist, she holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in linguistics from Stony Brook University and a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She lives in Manhattan with her husband, the writer and critic George Robinson. margalitfox.com
Ticket Info: Free; register online for a Zoom link
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conversation
exhibit opening
And That's True Too: The Life and Work of Lore Segal - In-person Program and Live on YouTube
On January 22, LBI will open its first exhibition of 2026 And That's True Too: The Life and Work of Lore Segal. Aside from the unveiling of the exhibition, the opening event will feature renowned actor Toni Kalem (The Sopranos) reading from Lore Segal’s autobiographical novel Other People’s Houses.
About the Exhibition
And That’s True Too: The Life and Work of Lore Segal presents a richly documented exploration of the life and literary legacy of Lore Segal (1928–2024). Born in Vienna, Segal survived Nazi persecution as a child when she escaped on one of the earliest Kindertransports to England. Her subsequent life—marked by displacement, reinvention, and a lifelong engagement with language—shaped a body of work distinguished by moral clarity, wit, and intellectual rigor.
The exhibition features photographs, manuscripts, rare books, and archival materials that trace Segal’s journey from prewar Vienna to New York and examine how exile informed her novels, short stories, translations, and children’s books, as well as her influential career as a teacher.
The title And That’s True Too reflects Segal’s commitment to complexity and multiple perspectives—an ethos that runs through her writing and her reflections on memory, identity, and human connection.
About our guest
Toni Kalem has an extensive background as an actress in film, television, and theater. Although known for her portrayal of Italian characters in iconic films such as Philip Kaufman’s, THE WANDERERS, PRIVATE BENJAMIN, and Angie Bonpensiero on THE SOPRANOS, for which she also wrote, Ms. Kalem is of Jewish descent. When she read Lore Segal’s autobiographical novel, OTHER PEOPLE’S HOUSES, she discovered the deeply personal story she’d always wanted to tell. Like Lore, her mother was also on the Kindertransport, but unlike Lore, she barely spoke of her experience. Ms. Kalem, who now has her German citizenship, has adapted OPH as a screenplay and plans to shoot in Vienna and the UK.
Some other film credits include adapting and directing Anne Tyler’s, A SLIPPING-DOWN LIFE, which was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, and an adaptation of Lisa Zeidner’s novel, LAYOVER, which she will direct starring Guy Pearce.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
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exhibit opening
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.
Presented by:
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.
Presented by:
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
Presented by:
celebration
