News & Features

The new YIVO Digital Archive on Jewish Life in Poland is now linked to from many other websites and has received coverage in The New York Times: "New Web Portal Provides Access to Historic Materials on Jewish Life in Poland," Jewish Heritage Europe, and Arts Journal. Mosaic Magazine reprinted the Times article.

The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe was designated as "the single best resource on Jewish life in interwar Central and Eastern Europe" by the Centropa Summer Academy in its May e-newsletter.

Klezmer-rock band Golem has been reinterpreting Yiddish and East European Jewish music for the 21st century since 2000. YIVO Public Program Director Helena Gindi spoke with founder and lead singer of the band, Annette Ezekiel Kogan, about Golem’s latest album, Tanz, which was released on May 13 on the Mexican label Discos Corason.

Golem’s CD release party for Tanz will be held at Joe’s Pub on May 29, 2014.

Listen to clips from Tanz on Golem’s website.

Gary Bart, great-nephew of the circus strongman Zishe Breitbart, has just published an online photobookshowcasing artifacts related to his famous forebear that he has been roaming the world collecting for decades. Breitbart, known to Jewish audiences as Shimshn-hagibr (Samson the Mighty), was born into a family of blacksmiths in Lodz. ...

Visit yivo.org/Video-Audio-Archive to view or listen to many of YIVO’s programs from 2005 to the present. Some of our most recent additions include:

Sunday, April 6, 2014: Passing the Torch: Jewish Music Archives and the Future of Yiddish Song, a symposium that brought together archivists, scholars and performers to discuss the history and creation of Yiddish folk music archives, and the future of the study and performance of Yiddish song today. The event was dedicated to the memory of Chana Mlotek, YIVO’s Music Archivist from 1978 until her recent passing at age 91 in 2013. Watch the video.

by ROBERTA NEWMAN The 1960s marked a new era for public interest in the Holocaust. The trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 was the first trial to be televised internationally and drew large audiences in the United States. In 1964, I Never Saw Another Butterfly,an anthology of poems and drawings by children ...

How to re-examine Vladimir Jabotinsky, a man whose political life kept him almost constantly in the public eye?

On March 12, 2014, YIVO purchased a collection of more than 300 letters, poems, drawings, telegrams, and other miscellaneous papers at a Judaica auction by Kestenbaum & Company. The documents include both prewar and postwar letters to and from Abraham Sutzkever (1913-2010), one of the leading Yiddish poets of the twentieth ...

In this episode of YIVO’s radio program on WEVD, originally heard on January 10, 1965, Dr. Nosn Reich talks about the 39th Annual YIVO Conference, which would convene later that month in New York. Many of the upcoming episodes of the series focus on the conference and present excerpts from ...

Author Cecile E. Kuznitz talks about her book, the first full-length history of YIVO.

by J.D. ARDEN,Reference and Genealogy Assistant, Center for Jewish History Last week, April 27 – May 3, library and archival institutions observed Preservation Week. Among them, the organization Heritage Health has been working for the past decade on raising awareness of the state of cultural heritage collections in the U.S. In ...