News & Features

The YIVO Archives receives new items and collections on a weekly basis. These include donations of organizational records, manuscripts, printed materials, family history materials, photographs, sound recordings, artworks, and films related to the many topics covered by YIVO's archives and library.

Yedies will begin reporting on these acquisitions on a monthly basis. This week, we feature a couple of highlights from the most recent donations.

(Special thanks to YIVO Associate Archivist Leo Greenbaum for providing the information for this report.)

by ROBERTA NEWMAN In 1938, Yedies reported on the progress of its creation of a special permanent exhibition in honor of the great Yiddish writer Yitskhok Leibush (Isaac Leib) Peretz: As a precursor to the opening of a Peretz Museum, YIVO organized in one of its galleries an exhibition of some of ...

(NEW YORK, January 2014) – On Thursday, February 13 the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research presents Unresolved History: Jews and Lithuanians After the Holocaust with European Union Parliament Member, Dr. Leonidas Donskis, and award-winning writer and political dissident, Tomas Venclova, to address Lithuania’s controversial treatment of the Holocaust, and Lithuanian-Jewish ...

On June 16, 2013, Elissa Bemporad spoke at YIVO about her new book, Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (Indiana University Press), a case study of the Sovietization of Jews in the former Pale of Settlement. The book reveals the ways in which Jews acculturated to Soviet society in the 1920s and 1930s. But Jews also remained committed to older patterns of Jewish identity, such as Yiddish culture and education, attachment to the traditions of the Jewish workers’ Bund, and religious practices such as circumcision and kosher slaughter. In fact, most Jews attempted to walk the fine line between accepted Soviet behavior and social norms and expressions of Jewish particularity.

Elissa Bemporad holds the Jerry and William Ungar Chair in Eastern European Jewish history, and is assistant professor of History at Queens College, City University of New York. She was trained in Russian studies at the University of Bologna, and in Jewish studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. She received her PhD in history from Stanford University. Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk has been awarded the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary history as an outstanding work in twentieth-century history.

She was recently interviewed by Yedies editor Roberta Newman.