News & Features

“In 1921 the GOSET troupe moved into a theater less than a mile from the Kremlin. For 28 years, through purge, terror, and paranoia, they presented world-class theater in Yiddish to audiences that only spoke Russian. And then they went too far.”

On May 17 and May 18, New Yiddish Rep will present a multi-lingual workshop production of David Schneider’s “Making Stalin Laugh" at Theater 80 in New York. The play features Israeli television star Gera Sandler and Yelena Shmulenson (“A Serious Man”)  and is directed by Allen Lewis Rickman (“The Big Bupkis”; the Yiddish “Pirates of Penzance”).

Originally presented in London, New Yiddish Rep’s production will be the play’s American premiere. In this revised version of the play, which first appeared in English, the characters will sometimes speak Russian, sometimes Yiddish, sometimes English, sometimes German, etc., just like their real-life counterparts did — but all dialogue will be simultaneously translated via English supertitles projected directly over the actors’ heads.

Two weeks ago, we reported on the death of Benjamin Harshav, translator, poet and eminent scholar of Hebrew and Yiddish literature. He died at age 86 in New Haven, Connecticut.

Since then, several full-length obituaries have appeared online, mourning his passing and celebrating his work and accomplishments. Forward notes that he was a mentor to “generations of students” and discusses his career in Israel as a poet and as a scholar at Tel Aviv University, where he founded the Department of Poetics and Comparative Literature.

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 November 28, 1965, Dr. Marvin (Mikhl) Herzog interviews Dr. Florence Guggenheim-Grünberg on Western Yiddish. Recorded examples of native speakers of Western Yiddish are featured, with the discussion in English. Among Guggenheim-Grunberg’s publications are "Horse Dealers' Language of the Swiss Jews in Endingen and Lengnau" ...

In addition to extensive coverage of the Yiddish Fight Club exhibition, there has been media interest in three other major YIVO projects:

• The YIVO Vilna Collections project, YIVO’s international initiative to digitally reunite its prewar collections in New York and Vilnius, is the subject of an article in Le Monde. and an article about the project that originally appeared in Ami Magazine was reprinted in Long Island Jewish World.
• The Letters to Afar video installation, now on view at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, was reviewed in The Huffington Post and in Jewish Journal.
• The Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook, an English translation of a prewar Yiddish cookbook, slated for publication by Schocken Books and YIVO on May 26, was mentioned in Forward’s “The Jew and the Carrot” blog.

The Lithuanian Government-designated joint commission, bringing together various governmental officials and Jewish representatives from the Lithuanian Jewish Community and international Jewish organizations, held its first meeting in Vilnius. Topics addressed were the protection and preservation of Jewish cemeteries and mass graves of Holocaust victims, the restoration of synagogues and other Jewish heritage sites, the education of Lithuanian children about the history of Lithuanian Jewry, and the gaps in Lithuanian law on private property restitution and its subsequent implementation.

Jack Jacobs talks about his book.

YIVO’s Letters to Afar video art installation at the Museum of the City of New York featured home movies from the YIVO Archives made by American Jews who traveled back to their hometowns in Poland during the 1920s and 1930s. What can we learn from and what are we looking for in these films when we look at them so many years later?

On March 10, 2015 writers Dani Shapiro and Glenn Kurtz appeared at YIVO in a program in conjunction with the Letters to Afar exhibition to discuss their own family films from prewar Poland, their search to identify individuals in the films, and how they used the home movies to deepen their understanding of a vanished world. The Shapiro footage of Horodok, Poland, became the basis for YIVO’s 1981 documentary, Image Before My Eyes, and the Kurtz family film of a visit to Nasielsk, Poland inspired Glenn Kurtz’s book Three Minutes in Poland, which was voted “Best of 2014” by The New Yorker and National Public Radio.

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 ...