News & Features

In this episode, originally broadcast on February 13, 1966, Dr. Mordkhe Schaechter talks about a course in standardized Yiddish orthography recently offered by YIVO. Host Sheftl Zak talks about a class for public school teachers entitled “One Hundred Years of Yiddish Literature” that is about to begin and about the ...

The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research receives a generous anonymous challenge grant of $1,160,000. The challenge grant, the single largest gift in YIVO’s 90 year history, will provide funds over the next 5 years to support the creation of The YIVO Vilna Collections project. The anonymous donor will match all contributions, 1:2, up to $1,160,000.

Last week, YIVO hosted two audience-packed events: the opening of the exhibition, Yiddish Fight Club and “YIVO at 90,” an all-day conference in honor of YIVO’s 90th anniversary.

Yiddish Fight Club is based on a 1926 linguistic study of Yiddish fighting terms and combines the now-forgotten slang of a violent Yiddish underworld with images of Jewish brawlers from the past. The exhibition was curated by YIVO Academic Advisor Edward Portnoy and designed by YIVO Web and Graphics Designer Alix Brandwein. It runs through September 1, 2015.

“Building a Future in America,” which took place on May 3, focused on YIVO’s work and activities in the 75 years since its relocation to New York and featured a keynote address by Kalman Weiser, as well as three panels with presentations by leading scholars. Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs of Lithuania Mantvydas Bekešius was an honored guest.

“In 1921 the GOSET troupe moved into a theater less than a mile from the Kremlin. For 28 years, through purge, terror, and paranoia, they presented world-class theater in Yiddish to audiences that only spoke Russian. And then they went too far.”

On May 17 and May 18, New Yiddish Rep will present a multi-lingual workshop production of David Schneider’s “Making Stalin Laugh" at Theater 80 in New York. The play features Israeli television star Gera Sandler and Yelena Shmulenson (“A Serious Man”)  and is directed by Allen Lewis Rickman (“The Big Bupkis”; the Yiddish “Pirates of Penzance”).

Originally presented in London, New Yiddish Rep’s production will be the play’s American premiere. In this revised version of the play, which first appeared in English, the characters will sometimes speak Russian, sometimes Yiddish, sometimes English, sometimes German, etc., just like their real-life counterparts did — but all dialogue will be simultaneously translated via English supertitles projected directly over the actors’ heads.

Two weeks ago, we reported on the death of Benjamin Harshav, translator, poet and eminent scholar of Hebrew and Yiddish literature. He died at age 86 in New Haven, Connecticut.

Since then, several full-length obituaries have appeared online, mourning his passing and celebrating his work and accomplishments. Forward notes that he was a mentor to “generations of students” and discusses his career in Israel as a poet and as a scholar at Tel Aviv University, where he founded the Department of Poetics and Comparative Literature.

Assemble the letterheads of Jewish organizations, institutions, and individuals in Europe, North and South America, and Palestine from the 1890s to the eve of World War II in 1939 and you have a portrait of the Jewish world: transnational; diverse in language, political, and religious orientation; and flourishing. Di gantse velt ...

In this episode, originally broadcast on November 28, 1965, Dr. Marvin (Mikhl) Herzog interviews Dr. Florence Guggenheim-Grünberg on Western Yiddish. Recorded examples of native speakers of Western Yiddish are featured, with the discussion in English. Among Guggenheim-Grunberg’s publications are "Horse Dealers' Language of the Swiss Jews in Endingen and Lengnau" ...

In addition to extensive coverage of the Yiddish Fight Club exhibition, there has been media interest in three other major YIVO projects:

• The YIVO Vilna Collections project, YIVO’s international initiative to digitally reunite its prewar collections in New York and Vilnius, is the subject of an article in Le Monde. and an article about the project that originally appeared in Ami Magazine was reprinted in Long Island Jewish World.
• The Letters to Afar video installation, now on view at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, was reviewed in The Huffington Post and in Jewish Journal.
• The Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook, an English translation of a prewar Yiddish cookbook, slated for publication by Schocken Books and YIVO on May 26, was mentioned in Forward’s “The Jew and the Carrot” blog.

The Lithuanian Government-designated joint commission, bringing together various governmental officials and Jewish representatives from the Lithuanian Jewish Community and international Jewish organizations, held its first meeting in Vilnius. Topics addressed were the protection and preservation of Jewish cemeteries and mass graves of Holocaust victims, the restoration of synagogues and other Jewish heritage sites, the education of Lithuanian children about the history of Lithuanian Jewry, and the gaps in Lithuanian law on private property restitution and its subsequent implementation.

Jack Jacobs talks about his book.