YIVO in the News & Staff Notes, February - March 2015
Letters to Afar
YIVO’s and Polin’s video installation at the Museum of the City of New York, Letters to Afar, closed on March 31 but now West Coast residents have a chance to see the exhibition: it opened on February 26 at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, where it will run through May 24.
Thoughtful reviews of Letters to Afar on the West Coast include Tom Teichholz’s article, “From Here to ‘Afar’: The Art of Peter Forgacs” in The Huffington Post (also appearing in Jewish Journal), Sura Wood’s review for The Bay Area Reporter, reviews in Examiner.com, the San Francisco Examiner, and SF Weekly, and a paeon to Peter Forgacs by film scholar Bill Nichols on his blog.
YIVO’s Vilna Collections Project
YIVO’s international project to digitally reunite its prewar collections has received extensive press coverage. An Agence France-Presse article, “Jerusalem of the North comes to life online” was widely syndicated, and has now appeared in online news publications all around the world, including India and China, with a variety of titles and illustrations.
Another French article about the project, by Marielle Vitureau, features photographs of YIVO’s Vilnius archivist Lara Lempert, at work on YIVO materials in the Lithuanian Central State Archives.
The project was also the subject of a long article by Roizy Waldman in the March 25th edition of Ami Magazine, an Orthodox weekly.
More on YIVO
A slide-show of images of I.L. Peretz from YIVO’s archival and library collections was curated by YIVO Academic Advisor Eddy Portnoy in Tablet to mark the 100th centenary of the Yiddish writer’s death.
YIVO’s soon to be released translation of the Yiddish vegetarian cookbook of Fania Lewando, The Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook (Schocken, 2015) has begun to receive press attention. The book was featured in a discussion on KCRW’s “Good Food Program”, which also included a recipe from the book on its blog.
A publicity campaign has begun for No Asylum, a new documentary about Anne Frank’s father Otto’s attempts to save his family from the Holocaust produced in association with YIVO. A description of the film appears in Review Seeker and Pub Memo.
A review of Amanda Miryem-Khaye Seigel’s new CD, “Madison-native sings Yiddish songs on her first CD” in Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle notes that she spent three summers studying in YIVO’s intensive summer Yiddish course.
Former YIVO Executive Director Carl Rheins spoke at The Chatham Synagogue at a preview of “Above and Beyond,” a film about Jewish American pilots who served in Israel’s War of Independence. Rheins served as a consultant to the documentary.
In an article about the Polish film Ida’s winning of an Academy Award in Tablet, film critic and scholar J. Hoberman mentions first hearing the expression “Shoah business” in the 1970s while working as an intern in the YIVO Archives in the 1970s.
Staff Notes
YIVO Executive Director Jonathan Brent’s review of Bettina Stangneth’s book, Eichmann Before Jerusalem appears in the January-February issue of Moment Magazine.
YIVO Director of Digital Initiatives Roberta Newman and her co-author Alice Nakhimovsky appeared at Bookculture on Manhattan’s Upper West Side to talk about their book, Dear Mendl, Dear Reyzl: Yiddish Letter Manuals in Russia and America.