This weekly class covers the alef-beys and grammar, vocabulary, and conversational basics. It is for those who are new to the Yiddish language or would like a review.

This weekly class develops listening, speaking, writing, and reading skills. It is primarily for students who have completed Beginner I Yiddish or equivalent coursework.

This weekly standard class enhances listening, speaking, writing, and reading skills. It is primarily for students who have completed Advanced I Yiddish or equivalent coursework.

Samuel Kassow explores the Oyneg-shabes archive as an act of spiritual and cultural resistance in the face of Nazi oppression.

This weekly class develops listening, speaking, writing, and reading skills. It is primarily for students who have completed Beginner III Yiddish, Beginner IV Yiddish, or equivalent coursework.

This weekly class develops listening, speaking, writing, and reading skills. It is primarily for students who have completed Intermediate II Yiddish or equivalent coursework.

This twice-weekly class enhances listening, speaking, writing, and reading skills. It is primarily for students who have completed Intermediate IV Yiddish or equivalent coursework.

Joshua Meyers provides an overview of the Bund, rooted not in our world or imaginations, but in the reality of the party’s own members, while exploring its legacy and that of Diaspora Socialism in the 21st century.

This weekly class covers the alef-beys and grammar, vocabulary, and conversational basics. It is for those who are new to the Yiddish language or would like a review.

Vera Szabó guides students through excerpts from the memoir of educator, feminist, and Zionist Puah Rakovsky, examining its historical and cultural context, voice, and stylistic variation.

This weekly class covers the alef-beys and grammar, vocabulary, and conversational basics. It is for those who are new to the Yiddish language or would like a review.

This weekly class develops listening, speaking, writing, and reading skills. It is primarily for students who have completed Beginner III Yiddish or equivalent coursework.

This weekly class develops listening, speaking, writing, and reading skills. It is primarily for students who have completed Intermediate III Yiddish or equivalent coursework.

This weekly class covers the alef-beys and grammar, vocabulary, and conversational basics. It is for those who are new to the Yiddish language or would like a review.

This weekly class develops listening, speaking, writing, and reading skills. It is primarily for students who have completed Intermediate IV Yiddish or equivalent coursework.

Aleksandra Jakubczak explores how Jews in Eastern Europe understood and experienced the body, sexuality, and desire in the modern era, looking beyond marriage and family life to examine a wide range of intimate experiences and practices.

This weekly class develops listening, speaking, writing, and reading skills. It is primarily for students who have completed Intermediate I Yiddish or equivalent coursework.

This weekly class develops listening, speaking, writing, and reading skills. It is primarily for students who have completed Beginner II Yiddish or equivalent coursework.

This weekly class enhances listening, speaking, writing, and reading skills. It is appropriate for Yiddish students at the advanced level.

Netta Ehrlich examines Jewish self-defense as a response to anti-Jewish violence in the Russian Empire, exploring both the practice itself and how it was represented in literature and contemporary documentation.

This weekly class enhances listening, speaking, writing, and reading skills. It is primarily for students who have completed Advanced IV Yiddish or equivalent coursework.

This weekly class develops listening, speaking, writing, and reading skills. It is primarily for students who have completed Beginner III Yiddish or equivalent coursework.

This weekly class develops listening, speaking, writing, and reading skills. It is primarily for students who have completed Beginner II Yiddish or equivalent coursework.

This weekly class enhances listening, speaking, writing, and reading skills. It is primarily for students who have completed Advanced IV Yiddish or equivalent coursework.

This weekly class develops listening, speaking, writing, and reading skills. It is primarily for students who have completed Beginner I Yiddish or equivalent coursework.

This weekly class enhances listening, speaking, writing, and reading skills. It is primarily for students who have completed Advanced II Yiddish or equivalent coursework.

This weekly class develops listening, speaking, writing, and reading skills. It is primarily for students who have completed Beginner IV Yiddish or equivalent coursework.

Directed by Mikhl Yashinsky, this classic play reading will feature a telling of Sh. An-ski’s legendary 1916 folk drama of spiritual possession and predestined love.

Join YIVO for a screening of Jan Němec’s Diamonds of the Night, a film about two young Jewish men who escape from a train taking them to their death.

In a discussion moderated by Annie Polland, Tony Michels, Sam Adler Bell, and Hasia Diner reflect on the legacy of Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers, a classic history of Eastern European Jewish immigrant life in America.

This talk by Anita Norich will trace the development of Yiddish literature from the early nineteenth century onward, examining its major writers, movements, and cultural contexts.

Performed by students from the Mannes School of Music, this concert celebrates the legacy of Jewish composers who fled Nazi persecution in Germany, Austria, France, and elsewhere.

Danielle Padley gives an overview of Leonora Braham’s life on- and off-stage and describes the reasons for and methods involved in giving her a platform beyond traditional scholarly materials.

Join us for a documentary about the Polish Jewish vegetarian chef Fania Lewando, who operated a Vilna restaurant frequented by a variety of celebrity guests, including Marc Chagall and Jonas Turkow.

Celebrate the release of the two latest volumes in YIVO and Bloomsbury Academic’s Yiddish Voices series – Mississippi: A Yiddish Play about the Scottsboro Affair and Hasidic Warsaw: Reb Zalmen and the Aleksander Shtibl.

Dovid Katz provides an introduction to Yiddish’s origins, evolution, dialects, literature, and cultural history, separating enduring scholarly consensus from persistent myths and debates.

Always a popular event, the annual Hanukkah concert celebrates this joyous holiday with music, story, and song.

Drawing on children’s diaries, letters, testimonies, and memoirs, Joanna Beata Michlic illuminates how children experienced and remembered trauma under Nazi occupation, in a conversation led by Samuel Kassow. 

Join YLMC Educator Susannah Trubman for a two-hour walking tour dedicated to the history of the Yiddish theater in the Lower East Side.

Jonathan Brent, Gal Beckerman, and Rabbi David Ingber explore what it means to protect culture in a time of war, why archives matter long before they become history, and how preserving the stories, voices, and artifacts of the past becomes an act of resilience — and, ultimately, of hope.

Enjoy a documentary tracing the history of Yiddish theater from its origins in Eastern Europe and early developments in America to the present day, detailing how musicians with humble origins became the voices of an entire immigrant generation.

Have yourself a very Jewish Christmas with YIVO and learn about how Christmas celebrations once flourished in the Yiddish language. A kosher Chinese food dinner will follow the presentation.

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

Abraham Lichtenbaum traces how the one-act play brought great literature to Yiddish-speaking audiences and helped make Yiddish theater a lasting cultural force.

Reading aloud in the tradition of Yiddish literary salons, Mikhl Yashinsky leads a group through Der yidisher hamlet, an 1897 adaptation that moves Shakespeare’s tragedy to a Hasidic rebbe’s court.

Samuel Kassow traces Warsaw’s rise as a Jewish metropolis, where the Jewish population grew five-fold and the city became a center of Jewish politics, literature, and culture.

David Fishman explores Ukraine as a site of both great Jewish tragedy and extraordinary Jewish creativity, from the sixteenth century to the present day.

Josh Price introduces Sholem Aleichem, the torchbearer of modern Yiddish literature, and the tragicomic tradition his unique voice helped create.

From biblical times to the modern era, Ilan Stavans examines the great Jewish translators and the texts they carried across more than a dozen languages.

Jonathan Dekel-Chen reveals how hundreds of thousands of Jewish farmers worked millions of acres around the world, and the philanthropic campaigns that made it possible.

Jenna Weissman Joselit examines the life and ideas of Mordecai Kaplan, one of the most celebrated and most criticized figures in twentieth-century American Judaism.

Elly Moseson examines where science, magic, and religion met in Ashkenazi culture, and how Jewish scholars responded to the rise of modern science.

Kalman Weiser explores the intertwined careers of Max Weinreich and Solomon Birnbaum, two giants of Yiddish scholarship with competing visions of the language.

Ofer Dynes and Alex Valdman trace the making of Jewish modernity, from Hasidism and the Jewish Enlightenment to modern Jewish politics, through Hebrew and Yiddish classics and primary documents.

Eve Jochnowitz recreates recipes and techniques from Yiddish sources that Jewish balebostes used to stay healthy through bitter Eastern European winters.

The Klezmatics’ Lorin Sklamberg leads a singalong through the Yiddish folksongs collected by Ruth Rubin, celebrating the 120th anniversary of her birth.

Join us for an evening exploring the musical legacy of the Third Seder, the secular Passover celebration that became a vibrant feature of Yiddish cultural life in twentieth-century America.

Join YIVO for an enlightening journey to Lithuania and Poland. Reclaim your heritage as you examine the life that was lived in these lands. View the remarkable history of old Warsaw, Kraków, Vilnius, and Białowieża.

Join YIVO on a journey of discovery across northern Italy, exploring the fascinating, troubled, and glorious history of Italian Jews in the northern tier, unfamiliar to most of us.

Join YIVO for its first-ever tour of Israel where we will learn the fascinating story of Yiddish culture in the Jewish state.