YIVO in the News & Staff Notes, January 2015
Letters to Afar
YIVO’s and Polin’s video installation at the Museum of the City of New York, Letters to Afar, continues to draw in visitors and has been extended another week until March 31, 2015. An article in the New York Post reported on a visitor’s emotional encounter with one particular film in the exhibition, “Professor finds long-lost home movies playing at NYC museum.” The article was also translated into Dutch.
The installation will open at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco on February 26.
YIVO’s Vilna Project
YIVO’s international project to digitize and make available online its prewar archival and library collections rescued from the Nazis has received extensive press coverage. An English-language article in The Lithuanian Tribune, “Unique digital archive from interwar Vilnius to be reassembled in digital library,” was picked up by several Lithuanian-language news websites.
The Jewish Week also reported on the project, “Digitizing the Jewish Past,” and mentioned it in a profile on George Blumenthal, a philanthropist and pioneer in the field of digitization of Jewish collections.
Masha Leon reported on YIVO’s December Gala on the Forward’s “The Shmooze.” A portion of her article was reprinted in the Spanish-language Aurora, an online news website for Spanish-speakers in Israel.
The Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania documented the January visit of YIVO’s Head of Library and Archives Lyudmila Sholokhova and Director of Digital Initiatives Roberta Newman on their website. Sholokhova and Newman were in Vilnius for meetings to work out final details about the project, which is now underway in Lithuania.
More on YIVO
A rare micrographic portrait of Yiddish playwright Jacob Gordin is the focus of an article by David Mazower in the new “Digital Yiddish Theater Project” blog.
Mosaic featured a link to Professor Ruth Wisse’ September 10, 2014 lecture at YIVO on Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever.
The anniversary of the January 29, 1969 death of YIVO founder Max Weinreich was noted both in an article in Haaretz’s “This Day in Jewish History” column and in a similar column in the Cleveland Jewish News.
An entry on Simon Dubnow in Oxford Bibliographies lists the online finding aid to YIVO’s RG 87, Papers of Simon Dubnow, as an important resource for information on the illustrious historian.
Staff Notes
YIVO Executive Director Jonathan Brent was interviewed by the Yale Daily News and the Chronicle of Higher Education in connection to the terrorist attack against Charlie Hebdo in Paris. He commented on a book entitled The Cartoons That Shook the World, published when he was an editor at Yale University Press.
YIVO Academic Advisor Edward Portnoy, a professor at Rutgers University and an expert on cartoons, was interviewed by the New Jersey Jewish Standard about Charlie Hebdo.