News & Features

The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is pleased to announce the establishment of The Horowitz Family Summer Internship, endowed by Rosemary Horowitz of Boone, North Carolina. This internship will provide professional training for young people in the YIVO Archives and Library, and to educate future generations of archivists and librarians ...

Assemble the letterheads of Jewish organizations, institutions, and individuals in Europe, North and South America, and Palestine from the 1890s to the eve of World War II in 1939 and you have a portrait of the Jewish world: transnational; diverse in language, political, and religious orientation; and flourishing. Di gantse velt ...

In this episode, originally broadcast on May 15, 1966, Zosa Szajkowski joins host Sheftl Zak to talk about the exhibition “Jewish Mass Settlement in the United States” that he had curated and which had just opened in the YIVO exhibition hall. From 1963-1976, YIVO had its own program on WEVD, the ...

YIVO’s exhibition Yiddish Fight Club has continued to receive wide media attention from mainstream publications. Reviews of the show appeared on Vice and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ “Marginalia,” and the exhibition’s curator, Edward Portnoy, was interviewed on NPR and for a Yiddish Book Center podcast. There was also a review of the exhibition in Jewish Currents.

The publication by Schocken of The Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook, a translation of a Yiddish cookbook from the YIVO Library, has also been receiving broad coverage. The book was fingered as a good hostess gift by Vogue, and reviewed in Observer. Tasting Table praised the book as being “totally on trend.” The book has also been reviewed by Tablet, Haaretz, the Jerusalem Post, and Jewlicious.

An article about YIVO’s upcoming exhibition Shtetl: Graphic Works And Sketches Of Solomon Yudovin (1920-1940), a joint project with the Russian American Foundation and the Russian Museum of Ethnography, which will open on June 21, appeared in the New York Post, “Carving the Shtetl.”

YIVO mourns the passing of Ezra Mendelsohn, Rachel & Michael Edelman professor emeritus of European Jewry and Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University, who died last week in Jerusalem at age 74.

Mendelsohn, a historian, published over 30 books and articles on the Jewish labor movement, Jews in Poland and Russia, Jewish politics, and modern Jewish art and music. He served as the co-editor of the journal Studies in Contemporary Jewry and Zion. Among his works are Class Struggle in the Pale (1970), The Jews of East Central Europe Between the World Wars (1987), On Modern Jewish Politics (1993), and Painting a People: Maurycy Gottlieb and Jewish Art (2002). At the time of his death, he was working on a book on Jewish universalism, to be published by Rutgers University Press.

by J.D. ARDEN, Reference Services & Genealogy Librarian, Center for Jewish History, Reference Division & Genealogy Institute

117 years ago in January 1898, Emile Zola boldly took up his pen to bring those famous words, “J’accuse…!,” to the defense of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery officer in the French army, whose conviction of espionage was widely believed to be an expression of anti-Semitism. The same year, Zola’s third book of the Three Cities Trilogy, Paris, was published—and subsequently translated into Yiddish in Warsaw by Israel Chaim Zagorodski. That book, in two editions, is in the collection of the YIVO Library.

Assemble the letterheads of Jewish organizations, institutions, and individuals in Europe, North and South America, and Palestine from the 1890s to the eve of World War II in 1939 and you have a portrait of the Jewish world: transnational; diverse in language, political, and religious orientation; and flourishing. Di gantse velt ...

In this episode, originally broadcast on February 13, 1966, Dr. Mordkhe Schaechter talks about a course in standardized Yiddish orthography recently offered by YIVO. Host Sheftl Zak talks about a class for public school teachers entitled “One Hundred Years of Yiddish Literature” that is about to begin and about the ...

The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research receives a generous anonymous challenge grant of $1,160,000. The challenge grant, the single largest gift in YIVO’s 90 year history, will provide funds over the next 5 years to support the creation of The YIVO Vilna Collections project. The anonymous donor will match all contributions, 1:2, up to $1,160,000.

Last week, YIVO hosted two audience-packed events: the opening of the exhibition, Yiddish Fight Club and “YIVO at 90,” an all-day conference in honor of YIVO’s 90th anniversary.

Yiddish Fight Club is based on a 1926 linguistic study of Yiddish fighting terms and combines the now-forgotten slang of a violent Yiddish underworld with images of Jewish brawlers from the past. The exhibition was curated by YIVO Academic Advisor Edward Portnoy and designed by YIVO Web and Graphics Designer Alix Brandwein. It runs through September 1, 2015.

“Building a Future in America,” which took place on May 3, focused on YIVO’s work and activities in the 75 years since its relocation to New York and featured a keynote address by Kalman Weiser, as well as three panels with presentations by leading scholars. Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs of Lithuania Mantvydas Bekešius was an honored guest.