News & Features

In this episode of YIVO’s program on WEVD, broadcast on November 22, 1964, host Sheftl Zak sits down with Dr. Shlomo Noble, historian and linguist, co-editor of YIVO Bleter and YIVO Annual, to talk about Ladino. Dr. Noble discusses the William Milwitzky Papers (RG 378), which includes linguistic, literary, and ...

On Tuesday, February 25, at 7:00pm, YIVO’s Rose and Isidore Drench Memorial Fellow/Dora and Mayer Tendler Fellow Markus Krah will deliver a lecture based on his research: YIVO, Freud, and American Jewry: Discourse on Eastern Europe as a “Talking Cure” for American Jewish Ambivalence.

In the 1940s and 1950s, American Jewish leaders voiced concerns about the suppression and fragmentation of Jewishness in modern mass society and the pressure to assimilate to mainstream American expectations. Guided by Max Weinreich, who was intellectually engaged with Freudian ideas, YIVO advocated for a more holistic, integrated Jewishness modeled after the East European ideal of yidishkayt. YIVO was a key voice in a larger discourse, as American Jews encountered different images of what the East European past was about: shtetls and pogroms, piety and poverty, religious tradition and political progressivism, Hasidism and Socialism, among others.

Markus Krah’s dissertation traces these competing narratives in magazines, sermons, radio shows, and popular literature. His lecture will discuss the idea that this discourse served as a “talking cure,” as American Jews consciously searched the complex East European past for meaning and grounding in the complex American present.

Attend the event.

Markus Krah is a Ph.D. candidate in Modern Jewish Studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) in New York and a lecturer at the Potsdam School of Jewish Theology in his native Germany. He is interested in American and European Jewish history, particularly in the cultural and intellectual engagement of Jews with the modern challenges and opportunities for Jewish identity. His dissertation focuses on the role of the East European past in 20th-century American Jewish explorations of new ways to understand their Jewishness. This week, he answered the following questions for Yedies.

Author Jeffrey Shandler talks about his book.

Author Jeffrey Shandler talks about his book.

by ROBERTA NEWMAN Just about 36 years ago, students in YIVO’s Max Weinreich Center for Advanced Jewish Studies formed a discussion group that met in its members’ apartments. Among the students were several academics who are now considerably further on in their careers. Steven Zipperstein is now the Daniel E. Koshland Professor ...

YIVO presents a panel discussion with European Union Parliament Member, Dr. Leonidas Donskis; award-winning writer and political dissident, Tomas Venclova; Faina Kukliansky, Chair and advocate for the Lithuanian Jewish Community; Saulius Sužiedėlis, of Millersville University; and Mikhail Iossel of Concordia University.

On Wednesday, February 19, 2014 at 7:00pm, Richard Pipes, Baird Professor of History, Emeritus, at Harvard University will deliver a lecture at YIVO about the cataclysmic impact of World War I and the Russian Revolution on East European Jewish life. Attend the event. YIVO was founded in 1925, less than a decade ...

by ROBERTA NEWMAN

The new Hollywood movie The Monuments Men has been drawing renewed attention to the postwar rescue by the Allies of art and other cultural treasures looted by the Nazis.

YIVO’s history is inextricably tied to the work of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA) program, established by the Allied armies in 1943 to protect important heritage sites on the battlefront. As the war drew to a close, its mission expanded to include the rescue of artworks and other cultural artifacts that had been stolen from the Nazis.

Eddy Portnoy tells the story of how the MFAA saved the remnants of YIVO’s prewar collections in this week’s Forward. Read “How Real 'Monuments Men' Saved Priceless YIVO Yiddish Treasure.”

By JENNIFER YOUNG and LEAH FALK

The YIVO-Bard Winter Program on Ashkenazi Civilization recently celebrated its third anniversary, as YIVO welcomed its largest ever Winter Program cohort, seventy students, who took part in eight morning, afternoon, and evening classes over three weeks this past January.

As always, the Winter Program attracted students of all ages, professional backgrounds, and perspectives: rabbinical students, teachers, social workers, lawyers, and architects shared classrooms with novelists, young historians, psychoanalysts, and genealogists.  Our faculty mirrored our student diversity, representing NYU, Columbia, Wesleyan, Trinity, Rutgers, the New School, and even YIVO itself.

On November 15, 1964, the featured guest on YIVO’s radio program was YIVO Chief Archivist Ezekiel Lifschutz, who discussed one particular archival collection under his care: the Papers of Kalman Marmor (RG 205). Marmor (1879-1956) was a Yiddish writer, literary critic, editor, lecturer, and political activist. In 1906, he joined ...