News & Features

On Friday, August 1, 32 students graduated from the 47th Uriel Weinreich Summer Program in Yiddish Language and Culture. The siem (graduation ceremony) opened with remarks by Dr. Sheva Zucker, the program’s Academic Director, and Chava Lapin, YIVO board member and instructor in the program. Guest speaker Kalman Weiser (York ...

On August 12, 1952, thirteen prominent Soviet Jews were executed in Moscow, among them the poets Itsik Fefer, Dovid Hofshteyn, Leyb Kvitko, and Peretz Markish; and the novelist Dovid Bergelson.

Every year, Jewish communities around the world hold commemorations on what has become known as the "Night of the Murdered Poets." This year, on Tuesday, August 12, at 6:30 pm, the Congress for Jewish Culture, the Jewish Labor Committee, and the Workmen's Circle will present a free memorial concert at YIVO.

Dutch soprano Sofie Van Lier and pianist Dimitri Dover will perform in a program that will include the following works:

by ROBERTA NEWMAN The June 1967 issue of Yedies reported on the untimely death of Uriel Weinreich, noted linguist and lexicographer, in whose name YIVO established its intensive summer Yiddish immersion program. Forty-seven years later, his legacy continues in other ways, too: in the Yiddish-English English-Yiddish dictionary that saw publication a ...

by ROBERTA NEWMAN On May 23, 2014, we posted an article from the December 1965 issue of Yedies about a visit to YIVO by nuns from Milwaukee who were writing a play based on the book I Never Saw Another Butterfly, an anthology of poems and drawings by children in the ...

Sholem Aleichem, his wife Olga, and their three children, Tissa, Lyala (Bel Kaufman’s mother), and Emma, Kiev, 1889. The family portrait was used as a Rosh Hashana greeting card (see Hebrew inscription at bottom). (YIVO Archives) Bel Kaufman, the granddaughter of Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem and the author of the 1965 bestselling novel Up the Down ...

An international conference dedicated to the 90th anniversary of YIVO's establishment and the 75th anniversary of its transition to New York will take place in Vilnius, Lithuania on April 21-23, 2015.

This broadcast from February 21, 1965 presents excerpts from two papers delivered at YIVO’s annual conference, which had taken place the month before: 1. "Variety of Functions of the Yiddish Adjective," a paper delivered by Professor Uriel Weinreich at a session of the Linguistic Circle, about certain cases of the ...

The Yiddish Daily Forward ran two features focusing on YIVO on July 17: A geshikhte fun YIVO [A History of YIVO], a review of Cecile Kuznitz’s book YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture by Gennady Estraikh, YIVO’s new Albert B. Ratner Visiting Scholar in East European Jewish Literature; and Khayem Grades arkhiv antplekt [Chaim Grade’s Archive Revealed], a report on YIVO’s public program "YIVO's Newest Treasure: The Chaim Grade and Ina Hecker-Grade Archive" (July 13). Professor Estraikh is quoted, along with Professor Agi Legutko (director of the Yiddish language program at Columbia University and an instructor in the YIVO-Bard Winter Program on Ashkenazic Civilization) in a Jewish News Service article, "Nearly lost Yiddish language increasingly popular among Jewish college students."

This is the third post in a series about alumni of YIVO’s intensive summer program in Yiddish, offered by YIVO and Bard College. The program, which was established in 1968, is in its 47th year. This year’s session runs from June 23 – August 1, 2014. 

On May 22, 2014, four cultural organizations in Vilnius teamed up to present “Resonances from Vilna,” a concert at the Tolerance Center of the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum, featuring works by Jewish composers Joseph Achron, Alexander Krein, and other Jewish Lithuanian composers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The ...