Past Events

Join us for a discussion about Yiddish: A Global Culture with author and curator David Mazower, led by YIVO Senior Academic Advisor & Director of Exhibitions Eddy Portnoy.

Join Dovid Braun for an immersive journey into the voices of YIVO’s founding scholars and discover how their words still shape Yiddish thought today.

Have you always wanted to study Yiddish at the YIVO-Bard Summer Program? Are you wondering what it would be like to spend six weeks studying at YIVO in New York City? Join faculty and staff of the Summer Program for a brief information session.

In this lecture, Sir Richard J. Evans argues that while many factors contributed to the fall of the Weimar Republic, its collapse ultimately stemmed from Germany’s weak democratic culture, which left it unable to withstand the economic challenge of the Depression and the political onslaught of Hitler and the Nazis.

Adi Mahalel explores classic Yiddish writer I. L. Peretz’s engagement with early Jewish socialist circles during the 1890s.

Bring your Yiddish to life through storytelling, style, and imagination in a creative writing course led by Boris Sandler.

J. Hoberman traces how German and Austrian Jewish directors redefined American cinema in the 1940s.

Jonathan Brent explores the lives and memoirs of revolutionaries Victor Serge and Isaac Nachman Steinberg.

Maya Benton explores the unique contributions of Jews to shaping the history and medium of photography.

Tony Michels explores the ways in which Jews in different countries, but especially the United States, responded to the Russian Revolution.

Through the words of Yiddish writers and firsthand memoirs, this course with Samuel Kassow reveals the “real” shtetl, a complex community that had an enormous impact on Jewish life over the centuries.

From the Rosenberg trial to McCarthyism, Harvey Klehr reveals how fear, politics, and Jewish identity intertwined in the drama of Cold War America.

Ilan Stavans uncovers the intertwined stories of Sephardim, Ottomans, Ashkenazim, Communists, Shoah survivors, Hasidim, and Israelis whose experiences have defined Jewish identity in Mexico.

Through the words of Yiddish writers and firsthand memoirs, this course with Samuel Kassow reveals the “real” shtetl, a complex community that had an enormous impact on Jewish life over the centuries.

Through literary texts, Anita Norich explores how Yiddish writers have imagined where they and the Jewish people belong.

Elżbieta Janicka explores how Kosów Lacki’s physical and symbolic landscapes reveal the complex realities of Jewish life, survival, and persecution during the Holocaust.

Eugene Orenstein analyzes selected texts from Soviet Yiddish poet Dovid Hofshteyn in order to appreciate the genius of his poetics and the synthesis of his Jewishness and universalism.

Josh Price examines the life and work of Chaim Grade, one of the most profound voices in modern Yiddish literature.

Josh Price prepares students to start learning Yiddish with an introduction to the Yiddish alphabet, basic reading, writing, and pronunciation.

Follow Esther-Rokhl Kaminska from her native shtetl, to the barns in which her wandering troupe first performs, and eventually to the brightly lit stages of Warsaw in this class taught by Mikhl Yashinsky.