YIVO in the News, May 2015

YIVO’s exhibition Yiddish Fight Club has continued to receive wide media attention from mainstream publications. Reviews of the show appeared on Vice and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ “Marginalia,” and the exhibition’s curator, Edward Portnoy, was interviewed on NPR and for a Yiddish Book Center podcast. There was also a review of the exhibition in Jewish Currents.

The publication by Schocken of The Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook, a translation of a Yiddish cookbook from the YIVO Library, has also been receiving broad coverage. The book was fingered as a good hostess gift by Vogue, and reviewed in Observer. Tasting Table praised the book as being “totally on trend.” The book has also been reviewed by Tablet, Haaretz, the Jerusalem Post, and Jewlicious.

An article about YIVO’s upcoming exhibition Shtetl: Graphic Works And Sketches Of Solomon Yudovin (1920-1940), a joint project with the Russian American Foundation and the Russian Museum of Ethnography, which will open on June 21, appeared in the New York Post, “Carving the Shtetl.”

A mini-exhibition of photos from YIVO has been posted on the website of its partner Judaica Europeana, “Jewish urban life in the YIVO Institute’s collections.”

The YIVO Vilna Collections project is mentioned in an article about a new commission to address issues related to Jewish heritage sites and history in Lithuania on the website of the Jewish Community of Lithuania.

An article about autobiographies and biographies of workers in the Austrian newspaper Der Standard cites the youth autobiographies collected by YIVO in the 1930s. Ri Turner, an alumna of YIVO’s intensive Yiddish summer program, has published an article, “Ethnic Solidarity Without Militarized Nationalism: Insights from Jewish Eastern Europe” in Tikkun that mentions YIVO in the context of Diaspora Nationalism.

A public program featuring scholar Miriam Isaacs’ research on the Stonehill Collection of songs sung by Holocaust survivors, housed at YIVO and the Library of Congress, was covered by Forward and NPR.

Alyssa Quint has reviewed Cecile Esther Kuznitz’s book about the early history of YIVO, YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture, in a piece for Forward called “How YIVO Became a Lasting Cultural Center.”