YIVO in the News & Staff Notes, April-Early May 2015
In addition to extensive coverage of the Yiddish Fight Club exhibition, there has been media interest in three other major YIVO projects:
- The YIVO Vilna Collections project, YIVO’s international initiative to digitally reunite its prewar collections in New York and Vilnius, is the subject of an article in Le Monde. and an article about the project that originally appeared in Ami Magazine was reprinted in Long Island Jewish World.
- The Letters to Afar video installation, now on view at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, was reviewed in The Huffington Post and in Jewish Journal.
- The Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook, an English translation of a prewar Yiddish cookbook, slated for publication by Schocken Books and YIVO on May 26, was mentioned in Forward’s “The Jew and the Carrot” blog.
Edward Portnoy’s article in Tablet, “Death of a Yiddish Giant,” commemorating the Yiddish writer I.L. Peretz, features a slideshow of rare images from YIVO’s collections. Professor Portnoy, YIVO’s Academic Advisor, was also a consultant to a New York Times Magazine article about slang in New York’s diamond district. The article cited YIVO’s transliteration rules as the standard for how Yiddish words were rendered in the English text.
The review of Letters to Afar was not the only time that YIVO was mentioned in the Huffington Post in recent months. An article on Ukraine, Jews, and Jewish identity by Nikolas Kozloff on April 15 cited the article on “Ukraine” in the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe.
A review of Amanda Miryem-Khaye Seigel’s first album “Toyznt Tamen” (“A Thousand Flavors”) in The Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle mentions that she was a student three years in a row at YIVO’s intensive summer program.
Staff Notes
YIVO Executive Director Jonathan Brent delivered a talk on “The Jewish Problem of Jewish History” at the Polish-Jewish Studies Workshop at Princeton University on April 18-19. In April, he also delivered a talk on “Isaac Babel and the Russian-Jewish Avant Garde” at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow.
YIVO Director of Digital Initiatives Roberta Newman presented “The Vilna Collections Project: Cultural Restitution in the Digital Age” at the Harvard EVA Minerva Conference on April 14.
YIVO Sound Archivist Lorin Sklamberg gave a lecture on the YIVO Sound Archives at the Central Queens Y on May 4 to a capacity audience.