News & Features

On March 25, YIVO Executive Director Jonathan Brent delivered a lecture at the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Washington, DC, “The Last Books: Recovering the East European Jewish Past,” on the dramatic story of YIVO’s collections in Vilna: looted by the Nazis, destroyed, hidden, and, in part, rescued.

YIVO Kronhill Scholar in Residence Steven J. Zipperstein will deliver a lecture entitled “Hayyim Nahman Bialik, Michael Davitt and the Burdens of Truth” on April 2 at the Columbia University Seminar in Jewish Studies. On April 7, he will be a roundtable participant at an international conference on Zionism and Jewish Culture at Brown University.

by LEAH FALK

On Sunday, March 30 at YIVO, at 2:00pm, Professors Steven Aschheim, Hasia Diner, David Fishman, and Anson Rabinbach will gather to discuss the encounters between Jews from Eastern and Western Europe during and after the upheaval of World War I. These Jews met on the war front in Germany and in Eastern Europe, and their intra-cultural exchanges and interactions with new, non-Jewish neighbors helped reshape notions of Jewish identity and community.

Attend the program.

We asked our panelists to recommend the best books to get acquainted with the stories of these Jews and the impact of World War I on these communities, focusing on three major pockets of immigration and exchange: Eastern Europe, Germany, and the United States.

Drawing depicting Red Army cadres ousting capitalists and other enemies of the Russian Revolution, from a handmade Yiddish book produced in a Jewish orphanage in Bershad (now Bershad’, Ukr.), 1924. (YIVO) YIVO’s Max Weinreich Center is proud to announce a special 6-session course on Jews and the Russian Revolution, which will be taught by ...

A Polish book on the Yiddish alphabet has won the main prize at one of the most important international events dedicated to the children’s publishing and multimedia industry around the world – the Bologna Children's Book Fair. The book, Majn Alef Bejs [My Alef Beys], with Yiddish poems written by Jehoszua ...

by SARAH PONICHTERA

Yiddish – an Eastern European visitor that arrived on these shores at the turn of the twentieth century – has made a home in America like no other. Yiddish has become a part of the English language, contributing flavorful words like shmooze, kvetch, and shlep. However, the embrace in which Yiddish has been enveloped can be so tight as to threaten its own vitality as a distinct language, with its own grammar, literature, and historical specificity.

On Sunday, December 6, 1964 Dr. Mordkhe Schaechter joined host Sheftl Zak to talk about College Yiddish, the textbook first published by YIVO in 1946. By the time of the program, a fourth edition of the book was in the works. Zak talks about which colleges and universities are using ...

by ROBERTA NEWMAN Among the rare books in the YIVO Library is a Hebrew-Yiddish wordbook first published in Krakow in 1640, Hinukh hakatan (Digest of Education). In September 1952, Yedies reported on the donation of a 1739/1740 edition of the book. The article notes that the title of the book is ...

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern of Northwestern University discusses his book, The Golden Age Shtetl.

YIVO is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2014-2015 Max Weinreich Center Research Fellowships.

With a record number of applicants this year, our committee had a difficult task in choosing the awardees in each category. We thank all who applied, and encourage those who did not receive an award this year to re-apply in following years. Projects that received awards this year tended to focus more specifically on YIVO’s strong collections in the fields of Yiddish language, culture, and scholarship. Diverse in terms of scope, chronology, and cultural geography, the projects of the 2014-2015 cohort of fellows embody YIVO’s central commitment to investigating the Jewish past and present. Our fellows can anticipate a fruitful experience in our unique archives and library, and we look forward to seeing the results of their scholarly research. Look for upcoming programs and public lectures featuring our current and incoming fellows!

Videos of many of YIVO’s public programs are now available on our revamped YouTube page. The new collection of videos will make it possible to explore the full range of YIVO program videos from one centralized index. New videos will be added on a regular basis. Videos of events also remain available ...