YIVO in the News/YIVO Staff Notes – December 2013

On December 21, former YIVO assistant sound archivist Jenny Romaine was honored by the Adrienne Cooper Dreaming in Yiddish Fund at the second annual memorial concert in honor of the late Adrienne Cooper, a former assistant director at YIVO. The writer and performer Ezra Berkley Nepon pays homage to Jenny and to her roots at YIVO in “Introducing Jenny Romaine for the Adrienne Cooper Dreaming in Yiddish Award.”

YIVO Director of Education Jennifer Young delivered a paper, “In the Shadow of Liberty: Jewish Communists and the Politics of Deportation in the Cold War” on a panel entitled “Jews as New Americans: Ethnicity, Class, and the Politics of Belonging” at the 2013 Association of Jewish Studies Conference. Steven J. Zipperstein, inaugural Jacob Kronhill Visiting Scholar in Eastern European Jewish Studies at YIVO, for the Spring 2014 semester, delivered a paper, “Bialik, and the Excavation of History: ‘In the City of Killing’ Revisited” on a panel entitled “Revisiting Bialik’s Kishinev” and was the respondent on a panel entitled “The Holocaust and the Historical Imagination: New Cultural Approaches to the Nazi Genocide.”

YIVO Sound Archivist and member of the Klezmatics Lorin Sklamberg was interviewed by the Jewish Music Institute about his participation in Drawing Life, a work inspired by the poems and drawings made by children imprisoned in Terezin.

Marek Web, YIVO’s Senior Research Scholar, hosted a visit to YIVO by a Polish delegation of the organization Forum for Dialogue Among Nations.

In the Winter 2014 issue of Heritage, in “Sisters and Strangers,” Nancy Sinkoff writes about Hannah Arendt and Lucy Dawidowicz, who, in her youth, was a graduate fellow in YIVO’s aspirantur program in Vilna, and later played a key role in helping to rescue YIVO books and documents looted by the Nazis.

An article in Tablet mentions YIVO’s role as a resource for the new Red Star Line Museum in Antwerp. YIVO’s music archives is cited on this web page about about the Ukrainian Yiddish folksong, “Mikitka.”