Paul Berman Appointed YIVO’s Jacob Kronhill Visiting Scholar for Spring 2018

(New York, NY) – The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is pleased to announce the appointment of Paul Berman as the Jacob Kronhill Visiting Scholar in East European Jewish History for the Spring 2018 semester.

Paul Berman is the critic-at-large of Tablet Magazine. He has contributed essays on politics and literature to many magazines and newspapers and has taught at various universities. He is the author of two histories of the modern political left, A Tale of Two Utopias and Power and the Idealists, and two books about liberalism and its struggle with the Islamists, Terror and Liberalism and The Flight of the Intellectuals. And he is the editor of various anthologies, the earliest of which, in 1972, was called Quotations from the Anarchists.

As the Jacob Kronhill Visiting Scholar, Mr. Berman will teach a public evening class, “Jewish Anarchism: A History & Present-Day Reflections,” on Thursdays beginning March 1. The course will follow the Jewish anarchists as they emerged in Russia under the czars, and then as they emigrated to other parts of the world and especially to the United States, where they contributed significantly and constructively to American Jewish life and the labor movement.

“I can hardly think of a more timely and important subject today than that of the history of Jewish Anarchism, and I cannot think of a scholar and political theorist more suited than Paul Berman as this year’s Kronhill Visiting Scholar to teach this course.”
            —Jonathan Brent, Executive Director, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research 

Berman will also present a public lecture, “The Unknown and Heroic Anarchist Struggle Against Communism” on Thursday, June 7 at 7:00pm.

The Jacob Kronhill Visiting Scholar program at YIVO was established with a gift from the Kronhill Pletka Foundation, which was created by Irene Pletka in 2007 to honor the memory of her parents, Julia and Jacob Kronhill (Kronzylberg), who fled Poland in 1939. After spending the war in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, the family succeeded in reaching Australia, where they were active in Jewish community life, with Jacob particularly committed to Jewish welfare, increasing access to Yiddish education, freeing Soviet Jewry, and the defense of human rights.

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