News & Features

Radzyn Stories is a graphic novel for the Internet, interweaving text and art to tell a story based on the legacy of the Izhbits-Radzin Hasidic Dynasty, a small, but influential branch of Hasidism, some of whose teachings have become known to a wider audience through the work of the late Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach (1925–1994).

On their website, Michael Weber and Joel Golombeck have set out to tell a modern folktale about Radzyn and its Hasidim. As their introduction notes, Radzyn Stories is “a fictional story inspired by a very real place.”

Michael Weber was interviewed by Yedies Editor Roberta Newman.

by ROBERTA NEWMAN This year, the 1938 Yiddish film classicMamele, starring Molly Picon, perhaps the world’s best-known Yiddish actress, was screened at the New York Jewish Film Festival in a version newly restored by the National Center for Jewish Film. But the first rediscovery of this film occurred in September 1978, when ...

In Yankel's Tavern: Jews, Liquor & Life in the Kingdom of Poland (Oxford University Press, 2014), Glenn Dynner examines the iconic Polish Jewish tavernkeeper in the Kingdom of Poland.

In nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, the Jewish-run tavern was often the center of leisure, hospitality, business, and even religious festivities. This unusual situation came about because the nobles who owned taverns throughout the formerly Polish lands believed that only Jews were sober enough to run taverns profitably, a belief so ingrained as to endure even the rise of Hasidism's robust drinking culture.

As liquor became the region's boom industry, Jewish tavernkeepers became integral to both local economies and local social life, presiding over Christian celebrations and dispensing advice, medical remedies and loans. Nevertheless, reformers and government officials, blaming Jewish tavernkeepers for epidemic peasant drunkenness, sought to drive Jews out of the liquor trade. Their efforts were particularly intense and sustained in the Kingdom of Poland, a semi-autonomous province of the Russian empire that was often treated as a laboratory for social and political change.

Historians have assumed that this spelled the end of the Polish Jewish liquor trade. However, newly discovered archival sources demonstrate that many nobles helped their Jewish tavernkeepers evade fees, bans and expulsions by installing Christians as fronts for their taverns. The result—a vast underground Jewish liquor trade—reflects an impressive level of local Polish-Jewish co-existence that contrasts with the more familiar story of antisemitism and violence.

Buy the book.

Glenn Dynner is Professor of Judaic Studies at Sarah Lawrence College and the 2013-14 Senior NEH Scholar at the Center for Jewish History. In addition to Yankel’s Tavern, he is author of "Men of Silk": The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society (Oxford University Press), winner of the Koret Publications Prize and finalist for the National Jewish Book Awards. He is editor of Holy Dissent: Jewish and Christian Mystics in Eastern Europe (Wayne State University Press); and co-editor of a forthcoming volume of Polin and of Warsaw, the Jewish Metropolis: Essays in Honor of the 70th Birthday of Professor Antony Polonsky.

He is interviewed here by Yedies editor, Roberta Newman.

Three men who made their mark on Jewish life and culture passed from this world in the last week. Judith Berg and Felix Fibich, in four different poses, New York (?), ca. 1950s. (YIVO) Simon Alperovitch (Simonas Alperavičius), who served as executive director ofthe Lithuanian Jewish Community in 1989, and later, as chairman ...

In this episode of YIVO’s radio program on WEVD, originally heard on December 12, 1964, host Sheftl Zak talks about the 39th Annual YIVO Conference, which would convene in January 1965 in New York. Many of the upcoming episodes of the series focus on the conference and present excerpts from ...

by ROBERTA NEWMAN In September 1965, Yedies proudly reported on the inclusion of a happy birthday message to YIVO in the Congressional Record. The speech was delivered by Indiana congressman John Brademas. John Brademas (1927-2013) was the first Greek-American to serve in Congress who later served as president of New York University. ...

YIVO publishes the Milstein Conference Proceedings, “New York and the American Jewish Communal Experience,” containing 8 scholarly papers based on the Milstein Conference which took place at the YIVO Institute in November 2009.

On March 25, YIVO Executive Director Jonathan Brent delivered a lecture at the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Washington, DC, “The Last Books: Recovering the East European Jewish Past,” on the dramatic story of YIVO’s collections in Vilna: looted by the Nazis, destroyed, hidden, and, in part, rescued.

YIVO Kronhill Scholar in Residence Steven J. Zipperstein will deliver a lecture entitled “Hayyim Nahman Bialik, Michael Davitt and the Burdens of Truth” on April 2 at the Columbia University Seminar in Jewish Studies. On April 7, he will be a roundtable participant at an international conference on Zionism and Jewish Culture at Brown University.

by LEAH FALK

On Sunday, March 30 at YIVO, at 2:00pm, Professors Steven Aschheim, Hasia Diner, David Fishman, and Anson Rabinbach will gather to discuss the encounters between Jews from Eastern and Western Europe during and after the upheaval of World War I. These Jews met on the war front in Germany and in Eastern Europe, and their intra-cultural exchanges and interactions with new, non-Jewish neighbors helped reshape notions of Jewish identity and community.

Attend the program.

We asked our panelists to recommend the best books to get acquainted with the stories of these Jews and the impact of World War I on these communities, focusing on three major pockets of immigration and exchange: Eastern Europe, Germany, and the United States.

Drawing depicting Red Army cadres ousting capitalists and other enemies of the Russian Revolution, from a handmade Yiddish book produced in a Jewish orphanage in Bershad (now Bershad’, Ukr.), 1924. (YIVO) YIVO’s Max Weinreich Center is proud to announce a special 6-session course on Jews and the Russian Revolution, which will be taught by ...