News & Features

On Monday, December 9, 2013, YIVO and the Center for Jewish History will host French and Jewish: Defining a Modern Jewish Identity in the 19th Century, in conjunction with anexhibition, a conference and two other public programs celebrating the pinkas (register) of the bet din (rabbinic court) of the Jewish community of Metz, France, two leather-bound volumes preserved in the YIVO Archives. Brimming with details of commercial transactions involving Jews and non-Jews, family law, inheritance, modes of jurisprudence, and recourse to civil courts, the pinkas is a monument to an extraordinary community and its remarkable rabbinical court.

Jay Berkovitz talks about how the Pinkas of Metz paints a portrait of a Jewish community in the era of the French Revolution.

by SARAH PONICHTERA New York will play host to a brilliant array of Yiddish events this winter, with offerings in music, theater, art, and education. With the recent loss of Chana Mlotek, z”l, music is very much on our minds here at di Nyu-yorkerin, and there is no lack of opportunities to ...

Kazimir Malevich (1879-1935) was a pioneer of abstract art and a founder of the avant-garde Suprematist movement in Russia. His painting, Black Square, was the quintessence of his Suprematist project and an outstanding breakthrough in the history of modern art, anticipating the development of geometrical abstraction in the West in ...

This episode of YIVO’s program on WEVD was originally broadcast on May 3rd, 1964. Ossip Walinsky (1887-1973), an active trade unionist and Labor Zionist, was born in Grodno (now in Belarus, close to the borders of Lithuania and Poland) and lived in London before immigrating to America. He served on ...

by ROBERTA NEWMAN

Fifty years ago today, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. In December 1963, Yedies marked the tragedy with death notices in both Yiddish and English.

On Tuesday, November 26th, Tony Michels, George L. Mosse Associate Professor of American Jewish History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will discuss his upcoming book on Communism, anti-Communism, and American Jews at YIVO's Ruth Gay Seminar in Jewish Studies, with moderator Daniel Soyer, Professor of History at Fordham University.

The outbreak of the Second World War precipitated an ideological-political crisis among Marxists in the United States. For much of the 1930s, Marxian intellectuals—specifically, those hostile to the Communist Party—had struggled to understand the rise of Nazism and the consolidation of Stalinism, but did so within Marxism's parameters. However, Germany's invasion of Poland, the systematic killing of Jews that followed, and the Soviet invasion of Finland raised questions about Marxism itself. Against the backdrop of totalitarianism, war, and genocide, intellectuals undertook a thorough reconsideration of Marxism. This process of rethinking Marxism entailed a new engagement with things Jewish: religion, Yiddish literature, Zionism, and the meaning of Jewish identity. This paper explores the turn to Jewishness by intellectuals during the 1940s and 1950s through the examples of Will Herberg and Irving Howe. Herberg rejected Marxism in the early 1940s, but over the next dozen years attempted to recast socialism on a theological basis, before he moved to the political right. Howe, who remained a socialist his entire life, negotiated a partial "reconquest" of Jewishness as an interpreter of Yiddish literature and the Jewish immigrant experience. Both individuals reflected larger political and cultural trends among American Jews in the post-World War II period.

Tony Michels is the author of A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Harvard, 2005) and editor of Jewish Radicals: A Documentary History (NYU, 2012). He is interviewed here by Yedies Editor Roberta Newman.

Adam Kirsch is a senior editor at The New Republic and contributing editor for Tablet magazine. He is the author of Why Trilling Matters (Yale, 2011), The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry, a Nextbook biography of Benjamin Disraeli, and two collections of poems, The Thousand Wells and Invasions.

For YIVO’s Winter Program (January 6-23rd, 2014), Kirsch will teach a course entitled “New York Intellectuals Revisited.” From the 1930s through the 1980s, a small group of mainly Jewish writers and thinkers known as the New York intellectuals helped to set the agenda for political and literary thought in America. In magazines like Partisan Review and Commentary, they charted their generation's complex relationship with Communism and Modernism. Many started on the far left and ended up as champions of neoconservatism. The class will explore the work of this seminal group.

Leah Falk spoke with Kirsch about the ideas behind the course, and why we should consider revisiting these writers today.

פֿון איציק גאָטעסמאַן

Parisian Yiddish singer Noemi Waysfeld visited New York and discussed her multilingual musical project on the subject of exile.

נאָך דעם ווי זי און איר מוזיקאַלישע גרופּע „בליק" זענען אויפֿגעטראָטן בײַ אַן אויסשטעלונג פֿונעם קינסטלער באָריס אַראָנסאָן אין פּאַריז, האָט אַראָנסאָנס זון, מאַרק, זיך פֿאַרליבט אין זייער פֿאָרשטעלונג און זיי פֿאַרבעטן קיין אַמעריקע צו שפּילן אויף זײַן זונס בר־מיצווה. דאָס האָט אונדז געגעבן די מעגלעכקייט זיך צו באַקענען און אַרומצורעדן נעמי ווײַספֿעלדס איצטיקע פּראָיעקטן.

Excerpts from an interview with YIVO Executive Director Jonathan Brent in the Forward’s online video, Philip Roth: Angst of a Retiring Novelist, exploring how Roth’s work both reflected and influenced American Jewish identity and culture.