News & Features

A Polish book on the Yiddish alphabet has won the main prize at one of the most important international events dedicated to the children’s publishing and multimedia industry around the world – the Bologna Children's Book Fair. The book, Majn Alef Bejs [My Alef Beys], with Yiddish poems written by Jehoszua ...

by SARAH PONICHTERA

Yiddish – an Eastern European visitor that arrived on these shores at the turn of the twentieth century – has made a home in America like no other. Yiddish has become a part of the English language, contributing flavorful words like shmooze, kvetch, and shlep. However, the embrace in which Yiddish has been enveloped can be so tight as to threaten its own vitality as a distinct language, with its own grammar, literature, and historical specificity.

On Sunday, December 6, 1964 Dr. Mordkhe Schaechter joined host Sheftl Zak to talk about College Yiddish, the textbook first published by YIVO in 1946. By the time of the program, a fourth edition of the book was in the works. Zak talks about which colleges and universities are using ...

by ROBERTA NEWMAN Among the rare books in the YIVO Library is a Hebrew-Yiddish wordbook first published in Krakow in 1640, Hinukh hakatan (Digest of Education). In September 1952, Yedies reported on the donation of a 1739/1740 edition of the book. The article notes that the title of the book is ...

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern of Northwestern University discusses his book, The Golden Age Shtetl.

YIVO is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2014-2015 Max Weinreich Center Research Fellowships.

With a record number of applicants this year, our committee had a difficult task in choosing the awardees in each category. We thank all who applied, and encourage those who did not receive an award this year to re-apply in following years. Projects that received awards this year tended to focus more specifically on YIVO’s strong collections in the fields of Yiddish language, culture, and scholarship. Diverse in terms of scope, chronology, and cultural geography, the projects of the 2014-2015 cohort of fellows embody YIVO’s central commitment to investigating the Jewish past and present. Our fellows can anticipate a fruitful experience in our unique archives and library, and we look forward to seeing the results of their scholarly research. Look for upcoming programs and public lectures featuring our current and incoming fellows!

Videos of many of YIVO’s public programs are now available on our revamped YouTube page. The new collection of videos will make it possible to explore the full range of YIVO program videos from one centralized index. New videos will be added on a regular basis. Videos of events also remain available ...

by ROBERTA NEWMAN In April 1946, Yedies reported on the publication of Isaac Rivkind’s Der kamf kegn azartshpiln bay Yidn (The fight against gambling in Jewish literature). The Yiddish version of the article is more detailed, providing a list of topics covered by the book: Old Yiddish gambling songs Gambling and Yiddish folksongs Modern ...

The Tragedy of a Generation: The Rise and Fall of Jewish Nationalism in Eastern Europe (Harvard University Press, 2013) traces the origins of two influential but overlooked strains of Jewish thought, Diaspora Nationalism and Yiddishism. Its leading exemplars dreamed of an autonomous Jewish nation in Europe, but were forced to ...

On November 29, 1964, host Sheftl Zak interviewed YIVO historian Zosa Szajkowski about the Papers of Lucien Wolf (1857-1930) and David Mowshowitch (1887-1957) (YIVO Archives RG 348). Wolf was an English Jew who served as a delegate to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 and was involved in the drafting ...