News & Features

by ROBERTA NEWMAN While there is plenty of Jewish anxiety these days about Jews associated with Wall Street scandals and financial scams (e.g., Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme), attention paid to Jewish perpetrators of non-white-collar crimes is considerably less common. Not so, it seems, in September 1950, when this item, “Criminality Among ...

Lana Adler, a recent graduate of Hampshire College, is assisting Acquisitions Archivist Leo Greenbaum in the YIVO Archives. Editor Roberta Newman interviewed her recently about her experiences as an intern.

RN: Can you tell us what you’re working on right now, Lana?

LA: Right now, I’m going through items that have been recently donated to the YIVO Archives. These include unpublished memoirs, family histories, letters, various types of documents, photographs, and pamphlets. They’re extremely varied and super interesting. I’m making a definitive list for publication in Yedies and also picking out things that might be of particular interest for special features.

I’m a huge historical voyeur! I really enjoy these basic pieces of people’s lives, such as letters talking about pretty mundane things. It might not seem important because it’s just one person, but to me it’s really cool. It gives me a chance to commune with that person a little bit. I also really like looking at historical documents, which are pieces of time that has passed.

by ROBERTA NEWMAN As the end of World War II drew near, attention began to shift to what might immediately follow in the postwar era. While the full magnitude of the destruction of Jewish life in Europe was still beyond the grasp of most observers, it was clear to those who ...

Find out more about the 2013 Uriel Weinreich Summer Program in Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture.

Profiles of four students in the 2013 Uriel Weinreich Summer Program in Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture

by ROBERTA NEWMAN The July 1935 edition of Yedies reports on a controversy involving Hebrew University and graduates of Yiddish secondary schools in Vilna. The university in Jerusalem was refusing to accept graduates from two of these schools, the Sofia M. Gurevitch Gymnasium and the Vilna Real-Gymnasium (Mathematics-Natural Sciences Gymnasium), for ...

On June 24, 2013, in a program co-presented in partnership with the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Katka Reszke appeared at YIVO to launch her new book, Return of the Jew: Identity Narratives of the Third Post-Holocaust Generation of Jews in Poland, with Dr. Sheila Skaff serving as ...

August 7, 2013 marks the 88th anniversary of the establishment of YIVO. It was at this five-day conference in Berlin in 1925 that leading scholars from Western and Eastern Europe came together to craft a vision for what would become YIVO, the Yiddish Scientific Institute.

A few months later in October, supporters in Vilna (Wilno, Poland; now Vilnius, Lithuania) founded the Society of Friends of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, which became the main headquarters of YIVO. Concurrently in New York, an American branch of YIVO was established.

by ROBERTA NEWMAN This short item in the Winter 1970-71 edition of Yedies reported on a meeting of a group of YIVO Yiddish scholars with the Chief of the Terminology Section of the Department of Conference Services at the United Nations. Mordkhe Schaechter (1927-2007)was a distinguished Yiddish linguist and teacher. One of ...

by RIVKA SCHILLER In the spring of this year, I began to research in earnest one of my ancestral towns in Poland. For those who may be familiar with it, the town’s name is Chmielnik, and it is situated approximately 30 kilometers (or 19 miles) southeast of the largest neighboring city ...