Yiddish: A Global Culture
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Book Talk
Co-sponsored by the Yiddish Book Center Admission: Free Registration is required. |
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.