by ROBERTA NEWMAN

Ten years after relocating to New York, YIVO held its twenty-fourth annual conference, the program for which was publicized in advance in the February 1950 issue of Yedies. The wide range of topics focused on Jewish life in the U.S. and Israel, and included presentations on Yiddish dictionaries and the experiences of Jewish children during the war. Among the keynote speakers was Yiddish writer Joseph Opatoshu.

The next issue of Yedies reported on the conference and provided highlights from the program, noting that the Saturday night opening session at Hunter College attracted an audience of 2,500.

City College professor Sol Liptzin spoke about “the future of the Jewish community in America” in his Sunday night address on cultural dualism. He predicted that the establishment of the State of Israel marked the end of “the previous ideological divisions in Jewish life” and that American Jews would not be satisfied only to identify with Jewish culture. Instead, they would turn to “a kind of cultural dualism… a simultaneous participation in both Jewish and English [-language] cultures.”

Conservative rabbi Dr. Max Kadushin discussed the place of Jewish values in everyday Jewish life and suggested that they are “not strictly definable,” but flexible and dynamic. “It is significant that many of the terms designating those values actually cannot be accurately translated into non-Jewish languages. In Yiddish, which has been a vehicle of Jewish life for so many generations, most of that original terminology has been retained. The wide use of those concepts, in turn, has had a powerful effect upon the development of the Yiddish language.”

Historian Rudolf Glanz gave a presentation on Jews and Mormons, noting that to Mormons, Jews are “Gentiles.” He maintained that there was little friction between Mormons and Jews in Utah.