News & Features

YIVO’s Letters to Afar video art installation at the Museum of the City of New York featured home movies from the YIVO Archives made by American Jews who traveled back to their hometowns in Poland during the 1920s and 1930s. What can we learn from and what are we looking for in these films when we look at them so many years later?

On March 10, 2015 writers Dani Shapiro and Glenn Kurtz appeared at YIVO in a program in conjunction with the Letters to Afar exhibition to discuss their own family films from prewar Poland, their search to identify individuals in the films, and how they used the home movies to deepen their understanding of a vanished world. The Shapiro footage of Horodok, Poland, became the basis for YIVO’s 1981 documentary, Image Before My Eyes, and the Kurtz family film of a visit to Nasielsk, Poland inspired Glenn Kurtz’s book Three Minutes in Poland, which was voted “Best of 2014” by The New Yorker and National Public Radio.

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 ...

YIVO has just learned of the passing of Benjamin Harshav yesterday, on April 23, 2015. Benjamin Harshav was Professor Emeritus of Hebrew Language & Literature at Yale University and the author of acclaimed works on Jewish culture, including Language in the Time of Revolution (1999), The Meaning of Yiddish (1990), American ...

The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research mounts new exhibit, Yiddish Fight Club, based on a linguistic study of Yiddish fighting terms that appeared in YIVO's first publication in 1926. It combines the now-forgotten slang of a violent Yiddish underworld with images of Jewish brawlers from the past. This  exhibit reveals the little-known history of the unique Yiddish fighting slang used by Jewish gangsters, boxers and professional wrestlers, among other tough Jews.

by ROBERTA NEWMAN Malka Lee, ca. 1930s. (YIVO Archives) When Yvette Marrin received the poem by her mother from translator Ri Turner (an alumnus of YIVO's Uriel Weinreich Summer Program in Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture), she was stunned. It wasn't the first time she'd been contacted by scholars about her mother, ...

On February 23, 2015, Bard College professor Cecile Kuznitz broke new ground in the study of Jewish material culture with a lecture entitled “Towards a Yiddish Architecture.”

While Jews once comprised a sizable element of most East European cities, they were never the dominant culture. How did they assert their presence in the urban landscape despite their lack of political power? Professor Kuznitz’s work-in-progress looks beyond synagogues and examines institutional and residential architecture created by Yiddish-speaking Jews in Poland and their émigré communities in the United States, and explores the role of the built environment in constructing a modern Jewish culture in the Diaspora.

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 of YIVO’s radio program on WEVD, YIVO Chief Archivist Ezekiel Lifshutz joins host Sheftl Zak to talk about YIVO’s collection of American Jewish autobiographies,collected during the course of a 1942essay contest on the theme “Why I left Europe and what I have accomplished in America.” Lifschutz had ...

Letters to Afar

YIVO’s and Polin’s video installation at the Museum of the City of New York, Letters to Afar, closed on March 31 but now West Coast residents have a chance to see the exhibition: it opened on February 26 at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, where it will run through May 24.

Thoughtful reviews of Letters to Afar on the West Coast include Tom Teichholz’s article, “From Here to ‘Afar’: The Art of Peter Forgacs” in The Huffington Post (also appearing in Jewish Journal), Sura Wood’s review for The Bay Area Reporter, reviews in Examiner.com, the San Francisco Examiner, and SF Weekly, and a paeon to Peter Forgacs by film scholar Bill Nichols on his blog.