New York, NY – The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is pleased to announce the 2019 YIVO-Bard Winter Program on Ashkenazi Civilization, to take place at the YIVO Institute (in the Center for Jewish History, 15 W 16th Street) from January 3-23, 2019.

Held annually in January since 2012, the YIVO-Bard Winter Program invites students to delve into Ashkenazi Jewish life and culture covering its thousand-year history in Eastern Europe and across the diaspora.

The 2019 Winter Program is the largest to date, featuring ten courses taught by leading scholars and artists, including Christoph Dieckmann, one of the world’s leading experts on the history of the Lithuanian Holocaust, Ken Krimstein, New Yorker cartoonist and author of The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt, political theorist Michael Walzer, literary critics Anita Norich and Ilan Stavans, and many more.

Christoph Dieckmann is one of the foremost scholars of the Holocaust whose expertise is recognized internationally. Dieckmann's studies of the annihilation of the Jews in the Baltics have become a classic and are a must read for any student of the history of the Shoah.
- Jan Grabowski, Professor of History at the University of Ottawa

Christoph Dieckmann's prize-winning two-volume history of the Holocaust in Lithuania is the definitive work on the topic and a landmark in Holocaust historiography.
- Christopher R. Browning, Professor of History Emeritus, UNC Chapel Hill

Our 2019 courses cover topics ranging from history and literature to popular culture, Jewish food, music, and more. The program attracts scholars and students from around the world, with past participants coming from Sweden, Germany, Australia, and Mexico.

Those who cannot attend the full Winter Program can participate in some of the public events this January, including a keynote lecture by Christoph Dieckmann, to be held on Wednesday January 9th at 7:00pm, and an all-day academic conference, “Yiddish Anarchism: New Scholarship on a Forgotten Tradition,” to be held on Sunday, January 20th, 2019. The Yiddish Anarchism conference, the first of its kind, it will be free and open to the public, and will highlight the emerging new scholarship on the forgotten world of Yiddish-speaking anarchists.

Key Dates:

• January 3-23, 2019: The 2019 YIVO-Bard Winter Program on Ashkenazi Civilization Admission: $200-250 YIVO members/ $275-350 non-members. Register at yivo.org/Winter-Program
• January 9, 7:00pm: Public Keynote Lecture by Christoph Dieckmann, “Beyond Simple Myths: History and Memory of the Shoah in Eastern Europe.” yivo.org/WP2019-Keynote
• January 20, 10:00am – 8:00pm: Public Conference (FREE) — “Yiddish Anarchism: New Scholarship on a Forgotten Tradition.” yivo.org/Anarchism

For more information about the Winter program and the public events, please visit yivo.org/Winter-Program.

For any media inquiries please contact:

Ben Kaplan
Director of Education
(212) 294-6153

About YIVO

The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is dedicated to the preservation and study of the history and culture of East European Jewry worldwide. For nearly a century, YIVO has pioneered new forms of Jewish scholarship, research, education, and cultural expression. Our public programs and exhibitions, as well as online and on-site courses, extend our outreach to a global community. The YIVO Archives contains 24 million unique items and YIVO’s Library has over 400,000 volumes—the single largest resource for the study of East European Jewish life in the world. yivo.org / yivo.org/the-whole-story