News & Features

YIVO Institute for Jewish Research presents the world premiere of the film No Asylum: The Untold Chapter of Anne Frank’s Story. Based on recently-discovered letters by Otto Frank in YIVO’s archives, No Asylum interviews Anne Frank’s surviving family, Buddy Elias and Eva Geiringer-Schloss, about the family’s last efforts to seek refuge in America before going into hiding in 1942. The Frank family was discovered and arrested in 1944.  

German and Jewish labor unions on the Lower East Side: forgotten links.

The role of the Judenrat in the Holocaust.

A paper by Max Weinreich on Ashkanaz, 1100-1300

Archaeologists probe the site of Vilna’s Great Synagogue.

Theodore Bikel (1924 - 2015) sings "Di zun vet aruntergeyn" at the YIVO 13th Annual Heritage Luncheon in his honor on June 18, 2015.

With deepest sympathies, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research announces the passing of Vera Stern (July 11, 1927 - July 21, 2015), widow of Isaac Stern. Beloved mother and grandmother, Mrs. Stern was also a friend and longtime supporter of YIVO. We send our sincerest condolences to her family. To ...

It is with sadness that the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research mourns the passing of Theodore Bikel (1924-2015). Mr. Bikel was a true renassaince man of the 20th century with prolific achievements in theatre, film and music, as well as a humanitarian who fought for civil and workers' rights. He ...

The week of June 15, 2015 set the heads of Yiddish and Jewish culture aficionados in New York City spinning: Kulturfest, a week-long celebration of Jewish performing arts, offered an almost overwhelming array of concerts, theatrical performances, and lectures across the city, with sometimes more than one event taking place simultaneously.

YIVO’s contribution to Kulturfest was the world premiere of the Modicut Project, a reinterpretation of the first Yiddish language puppet theater in the U.S., which flourished in the 1920s-1930s in New York City. An artist-scholar collaboration between Great Small Works and Rutgers Professor Edward Portnoy, the new, original play brings together the sensibilities of 1920s avant garde puppet theater, socialism, political activism, Yiddish, ethnographic fieldwork, and identity politics with the stagecraft of Great Small Works.

Janet Hadda, Yiddish professor, psychoanalyst, and biographer of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Allen Ginsberg, died in California on June 23, 2015 at the age of 69. Professor Hadda, who studied and worked at YIVO in the 1960s-70s, was one of the first tenured professors of Yiddish in the United States. Her work is best known for bringing the techniques and insights of psychoanalysis to the study of Yiddish literature.

Read her obituary and a more personal tribute by David Roskies in the Forward.