News & Features

The Award Committee of the Jan Karski and Pola Nirenska Award has the pleasure to announce that Prof. Barbara Engelking of Warsaw, Poland was named the receipient of this year’s prize. Endowed by Prof. Jan Karski at YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in 1992, the $5,000 prize goes to authors ...

By JONATHAN BRENT
Executive Director, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research

Much ink has been spilled over the knaidel/kneydl quasi-controversy since it erupted in the wake of the Scripps National Spelling Bee on May 30, veering from the ponderous and scholarly to the frivolous and silly. While no YIVO scholar was consulted, expert opinion has been cited from the YIVO Institute, as has the hoary authority of Merriam-Webster.  Culinary and orthographic precedents have been invoked from generations past. The history of Jewish nationalism in Eastern Europe on the one hand, and the kitsch of the Borscht Belt have chimed in. “My Little Matzoh Ball,” sung by Little Rita Carol Age 12, a popular song from the 1950s, has begun to circulate on the internet thanks to the sound archivists at the YIVO Institute. The Carnegie Deli has enjoyed the spotlight again for what many might consider a dubious, commercial product. Fox News, TIME, The New York Times, Urdu language blogs in Pakistan and India, The Jewishpress.com, and esoteric Yiddishist blogs around the world have all joined in this celebration of—what? A word? A mystery of spelling?  Other such mysteries of spelling and transliteration abound: gray/grey; theater/theatre; travelling/traveling; Czar/Tsar; Tchekhov/Chekov/Chekhov.  Chances are that if the final question posed to young Arvind Mahankali were “theater,” it would have been prefaced with the injunction to provide the American spelling; or if of the word “Czar,” to provide the primary American spelling. No such caution occurred with “knaidel.” Why?

Joseph Berger’s article in The New York Times, “Some Say Spelling of a Winning Word Wasn’t Kosher” (May 31, 2013), notes that YIVO is by recognized by many as the authority on Yiddish. The winning word in the Scripps National Spelling Bee was knaidel (matzoh ball), or, as the spelling rules ...

Letters to Afar Museum of the History of Polish Jews May 18 – September 30, 2013 Video installation by Péter Forgács with music by The Klezmatics, commissioned by the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York The audiovisual installation Letters to Afar ...

(NEW YORK, April 9, 2013) – The YIVO Jewish Culture Series, a partnership with the YIVO Institute of Jewish Research and Riverdale Temple, will feature a special program on Sunday, April 14 at 2pm at the Riverdale Temple located at 4545 Independence Ave. (at 246th Street). This event will celebrate ...

(NEW YORK, March 28, 2013) – “Floating Worlds and Future Cities" will present the first comprehensive exhibition in the United States of the work of the great artist, architect, designer and theoretician, Lazar Khidekel (1904-1986). Lazar Khidekel worked closely with Marc Chagall, El Lissitzky and Kazimir Malevich in Vitebsk in ...

List of recipients of YIVO’s 2013-2014 faculty and graduate student fellowships.

(NEW YORK, February 12, 2013) – For almost 90 years, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research has been home to the largest and historically most important archive and library of Eastern European Jewish civilization in the world; including the single largest collection of Yiddish language materials. For more than 120 ...

(NEW YORK, January 16, 2013) – The YIVO Institute is delighted to announce the launching of its new website, the Online Guide to the YIVO Archives at yivoarchives.org. Created by the YIVO project team with the generous support of the Kronhill Pletka Foundation, the new site expands and upgrades the original ...

Outside media articles from 2013 about YIVO and YIVO-related topics.