Past Events

In this talk, Itzik Gottesman examines the fascinating Jewish beliefs and traditions related to Christmas in the Old World, followed by a Hanukkah candle lighting ceremony and a kosher Chinese food dinner.

The opera State of the Jews follows Theodor Herzl in the last year of his life, as his efforts to secure a Jewish homeland become increasingly desperate. This event takes place at the 14th Street Y.

The opera State of the Jews follows Theodor Herzl in the last year of his life, as his efforts to secure a Jewish homeland become increasingly desperate. This event takes place at the 14th Street Y.

The opera State of the Jews follows Theodor Herzl in the last year of his life, as his efforts to secure a Jewish homeland become increasingly desperate. This event takes place at the 14th Street Y.

The opera State of the Jews follows Theodor Herzl in the last year of his life, as his efforts to secure a Jewish homeland become increasingly desperate. This event takes place at the 14th Street Y.

On November 20, 2019, YIVO honored Roberta Grossman and Dr. Samuel Kassow at our Gala Award Dinner, with Master of Ceremonies Nancy Spielberg.

This presentation endeavors to elucidate the crystallization of a distinct Yiddish anarchist satire towards the end of the 19th century, within the broader cultural context of (radical) Yiddish literature.

Brendan McGeever presents his new book, Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution. The evening includes an introduction by Jack Jacobs, and a panel discussion with McGeever, Jacobs, and YIVO’s Jonathan Brent. 

This film recounts the incredible story of Emanuel Ringelblum, who secretly led a team of writers and intellectuals to preserve a vibrant Jewish culture in the Warsaw Ghetto shortly after the Nazis took over.

Ofer Dynes explores the legend that Saul Wahl was elected the king of Poland for one day and how this legend informed the perspectives of those who considered themselves part of this Polish-Jewish royal dynasty.

This program is located at Solihull School in Solihull, UK. Solihull School and The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, UK, host a groundbreaking conference with bespoke options for Primary & Secondary teachers involving Holocaust survivors, educators, keynote speakers & organisations tackling hate crime.

This program is located at Solihull School in Solihull, UK. Solihull School and The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, UK, host an event geared to secondary school groups from all over the Midlands about the extraordinary family history of Holocaust survivor Eva Schloss, stepsister of Anne Frank. Eva will join us for a Q&A after a performance of And Then They Came for Me, a critically acclaimed play about her remarkable life story.

This program is located at Solihull School in Solihull, UK. Solihull School and The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, UK, host a public event about the extraordinary family history of Holocaust survivor Eva Schloss, stepsister of Anne Frank. Eva will join us for a Q&A after a performance of And Then They Came for Me, a critically acclaimed play about her remarkable life story.

Join us for our annual event commemorating the Jewish community of Vilna through poetry, music, and presentation.

This program is located at JW3 in London, UK. The event will feature a presentation by David Fishman discussing the incredible story of the Paper Brigade, as well as how the work to rescue Jewish culture and heritage from oblivion continues to this very day at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

Today we are witnessing a revival of the ideas of the Jewish Labor Bund, an organization which had been a powerful force in Russian and Polish Jewish communities during the first half of the 20th century. This panel, made up of activists and cultural workers ranging in age from their 20s to their 80s, will discuss what they see in Bundist ideas, and how it affects their current political and cultural practices.

This class will explore the world of Isaac Bashevis Singer, one of the greatest Jewish writers of all time and the only Yiddish writer to win a Nobel Prize.

Under the auspices of Litvak Days NYC, a celebration of Lithuanian Jewish heritage, Professor Tomas Venclova will give a presentation titled, "Lithuanians and Jews: What’s Changed and What Hasn’t over the last Forty Years?”, followed by a panel discussion.

This image-filled presentation commemorates the 100th anniversary of author Jacob Dinezon’s passing, with Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, author, and publisher Scott Hilton Davis, translator Tina Lunson, and Yiddishist and teacher Sheva Zucker.

Almost precisely 100 years ago, the company that would form the basis for the future Moscow Yiddish Art Theater performed the only play ever written by Shloyme Mikhoels, its star actor, future director, and head of the wartime Jewish Antifascist Committee. Now, for the first time in a hundred years, Mikhoels’ play will be performed in a dramatic reading.

YIVO presents a rehearsed reading of Leon Kobrin’s 1912 play Breach of Promise—a tragicomic slice of tenement life in New York City. The reading will be in English, in a newly-commissioned translation by director and translator Allen Lewis Rickman, and will feature a cast of professional actors.

As only one of three survivors of Emanuel Ringelblum's Oyneg Shabes archive in the Warsaw Ghetto, Rachel Auerbach dedicated the rest of her life to preserving Ringelblum's memory and defending the vital importance of survivor testimony.

During the 1930s, YIVO organized three competitions for youth autobiographies. These extraordinary documents – more than 600 of them were submitted – are unique testimony to the hopes and dreams, as well as to the reality of those who were growing up in Poland at the time.

Varieties of Yiddish are distinguished – some in professional but some only in informal usage. This lecture will identify what the several terms refer to and bust some myths where the terminology is misleading.

This lecture will review the American Yiddish theater’s formative years, its performance style, and the intense bond between auditorium and stage.

Between the 1870s and the 1920s, perhaps a million and a half East European Jewish immigrants settled in New York City. This lecture will examine the mutual influence of New York on Yiddish and Yiddish on New York in the years around the turn of the twentieth century.

This talk will explore the origins of Yiddish scholarship and why YIVO’s work was seen as crucial to constructing a modern Jewish identity in the Diaspora.

The word “pogrom” has come to serve as a sturdy coda for all that transpired to the Jews of Eastern Europe and Russia at the turn of the 20th century. How consistent these assumptions are with history, how they surfaced and with such persistence and resonance and what else transpired in this culturally diverse, singularly fertile community will be the subject of this talk.  

This talk will examine how Jewish folklore, and Ashkenazic (Yiddish) Jewish folklore in particular is different from other folklores around the world, while at the same time, discussing how it shares many of the same characteristics.

This talk will survey the radical traditions of Yiddish poetry, focusing on anarchist poetics and the press.

Beginning with the first complete Yiddish sentence found in the Worms Mahͅzor (1272), this lecture will discuss the chief features of Old Yiddish literature (14th-16th century), and the role of women in its creation.

This talk will explore the intersection between the linguistic architecture of modern Jewish psyche, in which Yiddish and other Jewish languages lie "deeper" than European tongues, and Freud's stratified notion of the psyche.

YIVO hosted an enlightening journey to Lithuania and Poland in June of 2019. Participants examined the life that was lived and lost as they reconnected with their own heritage, and discovered the fascinating treasures of old Warsaw, Krakow, Vilnius, and the magical Białowieża Forest.

An elegant illuminating retrospective program devoted to classic treasures of secular Hebrew song and the poetry that has inspired this rich variety of musical expression for more than a century.

YIVO hosted its inaugural literary journey to Jewish Ukraine in May of 2019. Participants experienced the landscapes, environment, and culture that influenced such writers as Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Babel, Osip Mandelstam, and Mendele Moykher Sforim.

A performance of two choral masterworks, Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel and David Lang’s Little March Girl Passion, featuring the young artists of the OS Ensemble, led by Raquel Acevedo-Klein, including the performance of a new secular sacred work by composer Adam Roberts, commissioned for the occasion.

Between 1881 and 1914, about two million Jews left the Tsarist Empire and departed westwards, primarily for the United States. What were the logistics of this often difficult process? This presentation will highlight the complex decision-making and border-crossing processes that individual Jews went through on their journeys to America.

For decades, scholarship on the Holocaust in Kovno has been dominated by the writings of ghetto elites, relegating the testimonies of Jews who did not occupy positions of authority during the war to the margins. This talk will highlight Yiddish and Hebrew accounts of the Kovno ghetto whose evidentiary value has been minimized or ignored.

Join us for a talk by founder and president of Yahad-In Unum, Catholic priest Father Patrick Desbois. Yahad-In Unum identifies mass Jewish killing sites and collects forensic evidence of the executions, and conducts international workshops and graduate-level seminars to contribute to Holocaust scholarship and the study of genocide. 

The 2018-2019 “In Dialogue” series culminates in this daylong conference discussing Polish-Jewish relations in the post-war era, including contemporary issues such as Poland’s controversial Holocaust law.

Join Anita Norich in conversation with Joseph Berger about Jewish refugees in America, female authors, Yiddish novels, translation and more to celebrate the launch of Professor Norich’s translation of Kadya Molodovsky’s novel.

Dear Erich is inspired by 200 newly discovered letters written in Germany between 1938 and 1941 by Herta Rosenthal to her son Erich, the composer's father. Dear Erich tells a refugee story for our times. How can a family cope as the walls of their nation's hatred close in around them? For those who escape, what lies ahead?  

Award-winning actors Ed Asner and Tovah Feldshuh star in a concert reading of The Soap Myth, a powerful play about survival, memory, and truth. Performed in tribute to Yom HaShoah, The Soap Myth dramatizes the painful confrontation between survivors, scholars, and Holocaust deniers, and questions who has the right to write history.

Mark Slobin, acclaimed scholar of East European and American Jewish music, will discuss Carnegie Hall’s April 15th musical program, From Shtetl to Stage using images and recordings and cover a range of Yiddish theater songs, novelty numbers, concert music, and songs of social movements. 

and all the days were purple, a new album by composer Alex Weiser, features songs which set Yiddish and English poems to music that search for the divine while reflecting on the longing, beauty, and tumult of life.

The Rise of the Modern Yiddish Theater examines its origins, from roughly 1876 to 1883, through the works of one of its best-known and most colorful figures, Avrom Goldfaden. Join us for the launch of this new book with a discussion of this rich theatrical tradition as well as the broader social life that its study sheds light on.

This book talk and concert will explore the emergence of the Bais Yaakov schools in interwar Poland, when it grew from a one-room school in Sarah Schenirer's living quarters to a school system with over 200 schools, 36,000 students, and an international reach.

Black Honey: The Life and Poetry of Avraham Sutzkever (2018) recounts the story of one of the greatest Yiddish poets who became a symbol of national resistance and creative survival. This film screening will be followed by a discussion with Yiddish literature scholar Ruth Wisse.

Join us for a Purim-themed children’s festival! Activities will take place from 11:00am until 1:00pm throughout the Center for Jewish History.

For over 40 years, poet Rosa Lebensboym (better known by her pen name Anna Margolin) made her living as a journalist. This talk will explore Lebensboym’s life and career, and what they reveal about the roles female journalists played in the development of the American Yiddish press.

Join YIVO Sound Archivist Lorin Sklamberg for a heymish springtime singing circle surveying Yiddish folk, theater and art songs drawn from over 30 years of collecting.

Best known for the reportages from the Warsaw Ghetto he wrote for the famed Oyneg-Shabes archive while working as a mailman in the ghetto, Peretz Opoczynski was also a journalist and poet in the years before the war, an account of which is the subject of this lecture.

Join us for a live score and film screening  of the silent film classic East and West (1923) presented with live music by Pete Sokolow and Michael Winograd (Klezmer Trio, Sandaraa).

This talk will focus on the literary intersection between kashrut, social injustice and the concept of the modern Jewish protest. Works by canonical Maskilic writers such as Mendele Moykher-Sforim, and Y.L Gordon will be discussed, as will a little-known Yiddish play by Morris Winchevsky, the father of Yiddish proletarian literature.

Explore the neglected creative phenomenon of Jewish-based operas and how the medium of opera can provide artistic expression of Jewish culture.

This program in the “In Dialogue: Polish-Jewish Relations” series focuses on the history of World War II and the Holocaust. This event takes place at Columbia University.

This special program reunites the legendary klezmer duo of Andy Statman (clarinet/mandolin) and Walter Zev Feldman (tsimbl/hammered dulcimer) for the first time in 35 years! The evening will include  a performance and multimedia presentation celebrating the duo’s work in the 1970s with legendary klezmer clarinetist Dave Tarras and other important immigrant musicians.

In this book talk, Mark Slobin discusses his recently published Motor City Music: A Detroiter Looks Back. Motor City Music examines the melting pot of musical life throughout Detroit, including its Jewish, African American, and Southern white roots.

Join us for an in-depth conversation between acclaimed author and scholar Michael Walzer and the Tel Aviv Review’s Gilad Halpern, where they will be discussing Walzer’s new critically-acclaimed book A Foreign Policy for the Left.

This reading group is designed for those who can comfortably read Yiddish (aloud), or who don’t want to read aloud but can understand Yiddish when it is read to them.

This conference, the first of its kind, highlights the emerging new scholarship on the forgotten world of Yiddish-speaking anarchists. It brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars whose multilingual research examines the origin, evolution, and contributions of Jewish anarchism in New York City and beyond.

With a wealth of archival footage and detailed re-enactments, this film recounts the incredible story of Emanuel Ringelblum, who secretly led a team of writers and intellectuals to preserve a vibrant Jewish culture in the Warsaw Ghetto shortly after the Nazis took over.

Historical memory has become a deeply contentious topic in the post-communist societies of Eastern Europe, particularly so with regards to World War II, communism, and nationalism. Christoph Dieckmann will share his experiences and impressions of both history and memory in Eastern Europe from the perspective of an engaged German historian. 

Gain insight into how and why the illustrative communication medium of cartooning continues to grow and evolve. Featuring guest appearances from cartoonists and editors.

This course will consider three examples of turning to law and courts to deal with historical past: France’s reckoning with the Vichy regime, the recent public trials in the US for racial crimes committed in the Civil Rights Era, and Poland’s turn to law and legislation while facing its Holocaust era past.

Examining the works of Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, and Leonard Bernstein through the lens of their Jewish identity to reveal divergent manifestations of Jewishness in music, and draw out meaningful threads that contribute to a broader story of Jewish history and culture.

Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate is the great Soviet novel of military victory and human, moral catastrophe, joining the Jewish tragedy with the tragedy of Soviet reality. Today, when so much discussion worldwide is given to the subject of the so-called “Double Genocide” theory, Life and Fate dramatizes the need to understand the crimes of Hitler and those of Stalin as part of a single anti-human world that took shape in the middle of the twentieth century.

What makes a story “Jewish?” What makes it “American?” What is a “short” story? What are the narrative strategies of the storytellers we read? Trace the cultural and historical development of the American Jewish community over more than a century through these questions.

A journey through five centuries of Jewish life in the Americas, beginning with the Spanish Inquisition and the crypto-Jewish diaspora that came along with the 1492 expulsion to the “shtetl.”

This course will look for a plausible liberal/secularist response to religious zealotry, as well as look at alternative and critical views of secularism.

This course with Christoph Dieckmann applies a broad approach for reconstructing and analyzing the Shoah in Lithuania, looking at the history from several perspectives. What were the power relations and choices of the German occupier, and of the occupied Lithuanians and Jews?

What can we learn from the stuff we keep, and how do things help us remember? How do archival objects enrich and complicate the stories we tell about the past?  

A look at the Jewish experience in America through the prism of food— especially that of the great wave of Jews who arrived from Eastern Europe in the 19th century—considering the interplay between dietary laws and popular culture to understand how Jewish foods have been mainstreamed.