Through our programs, YIVO makes discoveries and treasures from our collections accessible and fosters the creation of contemporary Jewish culture. Explore our upcoming events below.
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The Bashevis Singers
Join YIVO for the first US performance by The Bashevis Singers, a band with songs that span centuries of Yiddish and have brought to life classic 20th century folksongs and new compositions based on mystical poetry written by legends of Jewish culture.
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Singing with Ghosts: Hauntology and Musical-Culinary Remembrance in Iraqi Jewish Biographical Songs
This program explores the secretive practices of biographical Arabic song-making among Iraqi Jews living in Israel. Liliana Carrizo considers how these musical-culinary remembrances relate to theories of ghosting and hauntology, and brings them into a conversation with the burgeoning field of gastromusicology.
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[FALL2024] Advanced Topics in Yiddish Literature & Grammar: Autobiographical Writing in Yiddish
This twice-weekly class enhances listening, speaking, writing, and reading skills. It is primarily for students who have completed Intensive Advanced II Yiddish or equivalent coursework.
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[FALL2024] Beginner II Yiddish (Sunday)
This weekly class develops listening, speaking, writing, and reading skills. It is primarily for students who have completed Beginner I Yiddish or equivalent coursework.
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[FALL2024] The Shtetl: Jewish Community in Transition
This mini-course will explore four major arenas where changes occurred in the shtetl—spirituality, politics, gender, and culture—dispelling the myth of the shtetl as a stagnant and isolated Jewish community.
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[FALL2024] Beginner III Yiddish (Sunday)
This weekly class develops listening, speaking, writing, and reading skills. It is primarily for students who have completed Beginner II Yiddish or equivalent coursework.
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[FALL2024] Advanced Topics in Yiddish Literature & Grammar: What is Modern about the Yiddish Classics?
This weekly class enhances listening, speaking, writing, and reading skills. It is primarily for students who have completed Advanced I Yiddish or equivalent coursework.
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[FALL2024] Advanced I Yiddish (Sunday Afternoon)
This weekly class enhances listening, speaking, writing, and reading skills. It is primarily for students who have completed Intermediate IV Yiddish or equivalent coursework.
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[FALL2024] Intermediate II Yiddish (Sunday)
This weekly class enhances listening, speaking, writing, and reading skills. It is primarily for students who have completed Intermediate I Yiddish or equivalent coursework.
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[FALL2024] Intermediate III Yiddish (Monday Morning)
This weekly class enhances listening, speaking, writing, and reading skills. It is primarily for students who have completed Intermediate II Yiddish or equivalent coursework.
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[FALL2024] Intermediate IV Yiddish
This weekly class enhances listening, speaking, writing, and reading skills. It is primarily for students who have completed Intermediate III Yiddish or equivalent coursework.
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[FALL2024] Intermediate III Yiddish (Monday Afternoon)
This weekly class enhances listening, speaking, writing, and reading skills. It is primarily for students who have completed Intermediate II Yiddish or equivalent coursework.
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[FALL2024] Intermediate II Yiddish (Monday)
This weekly class enhances listening, speaking, writing, and reading skills. It is primarily for students who have completed Intermediate I Yiddish or equivalent coursework.
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[FALL2024] Beginner II Yiddish (Monday)
This weekly class develops listening, speaking, writing, and reading skills. It is primarily for students who have completed Beginner I Yiddish or equivalent coursework.
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[FALL2024] Beginner II Yiddish (In-person)
This weekly class develops listening, speaking, writing, and reading skills. It is primarily for students who have completed Beginner I Yiddish or equivalent coursework.
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[FALL2024] Advanced II Yiddish
This weekly class enhances listening, speaking, writing, and reading skills. It is primarily for students who have completed Advanced I Yiddish or equivalent coursework.
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[FALL2024] Beginner Reading Yiddish
This weekly reading class covers grammar and how to read Yiddish texts with the help of a dictionary. It is for students new to Yiddish, especially those interested in obtaining reading proficiency for academic or archival research.
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[FALL2024] Intermediate II Yiddish (Tuesday)
This weekly class enhances listening, speaking, writing, and reading skills. It is primarily for students who have completed Intermediate I Yiddish or equivalent coursework.
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[FALL2024] Beginner III Yiddish (Tuesday)
This weekly class develops listening, speaking, writing, and reading skills. It is primarily for students who have completed Beginner II Yiddish or equivalent coursework.
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My Life as a Jew
Join YIVO for a discussion with Michael Gawenda about his new autobiography, My Life as a Jew, led by editor at large of the New York Jewish Week Andrew Silow-Carroll.
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[FALL2024] Readings in Yiddish Prose
Read, listen to, and talk about short stories, essays, journalistic writing, folklore, and more from a literary and linguistic point of view.
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After Orthodoxy: Cultural Creativity and the Break with Tradition
Join YIVO for the first conference and festival organized by and featuring formerly Orthodox Jewish scholars, activists, performers, and artists, as we explore the cultural achievements that emerged from this break with tradition.
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[FALL2024] Intermediate I Yiddish
This weekly class enhances listening, speaking, writing, and reading skills. It is primarily for students who have completed Beginner IV Yiddish or equivalent coursework.
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[FALL2024] Beginner I Yiddish (Sunday Morning)
This weekly class covers the alef-beys and grammar, vocabulary, and conversational basics. It is for those who are new to the Yiddish language or would like a review.
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[FALL2024] Beginner I Yiddish (Sunday Afternoon)
This weekly class covers the alef-beys and grammar, vocabulary, and conversational basics. It is for those who are new to the Yiddish language or would like a review.
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[FALL2024] Mothers, Revolutionaries, and Workers: Women during the Great Transformation of Eastern European Jewish Society
Explore women’s experiences at the turn of the twentieth century, a transformative period in modern Eastern European Jewish history that included industrialization, mass migrations, and the rise of nationalisms.
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[FALL2024] Advanced I Yiddish (Sunday Evening)
This weekly class enhances listening, speaking, writing, and reading skills. It is primarily for students who have completed Intermediate IV Yiddish or equivalent coursework.
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2024 Study Tour of Northern Italy
Join YIVO on a fascinating journey of discovery across northern Italy from Torino, Genova via Firenze, Parma, Modena, Ferrara, Padua to Trieste and Venezia, discovering the fabled Jewish history, unfamiliar to most of us.
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[FALL2024] Beginner III Yiddish (Monday)
This weekly class develops listening, speaking, writing, and reading skills. It is primarily for students who have completed Beginner II Yiddish or equivalent coursework.
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[FALL2024] Beginner IV Yiddish
This weekly class develops listening, speaking, writing, and reading skills. It is primarily for students who have completed Beginner III Yiddish or equivalent coursework.
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[FALL2024] Beginner I Yiddish (In-person)
This weekly class covers the alef-beys and grammar, vocabulary, and conversational basics. It is for those who are new to the Yiddish language or would like a review.
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[FALL2024] Beginner IV Yiddish (In-person)
This weekly class develops listening, speaking, writing, and reading skills. It is primarily for students who have completed Beginner III Yiddish or equivalent coursework.
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[FALL2024] Getting From Oy To Vey: Yiddish as an Expression of Traditional Jewish Life and Learning
Michael Wex leads an in-depth analysis of Yiddish, revealing how Jewish texts and non-Jewish concepts have been incorporated into the language.
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Family Treasures Lost & Found
In Family Treasures Lost & Found, journalist Karen A. Frenkel investigates her parents’ unspoken WWII stories. Join the American Jewish Historical Society and YIVO for a film screening of this documentary, followed by a talkback with filmmakers Frenkel and Marcia Rock.
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Yiddish on the Move: Yiddish Writing and Publishing after the Holocaust
Rachelle Grossman, Matt Johnson, Harriet Murav, and Christin Zühlke, in a panel discussion moderated by Erin McGlothlin, delve into the elaborate dynamics of Yiddish writing and publishing across transnational literary networks after the Holocaust.
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Remembering Fishl Kutner
Commemorate the life and achievements of Yiddish culture advocate Philip (Fishl) Kutner through a virtual tribute program complete with lectures, theater performances, Yiddish conversation, and resources for learning Yiddish.
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Music in Our Time 2024 - A Bouquet of Jewish Choral Music
Join us for a concert of Jewish choral music performed by the acclaimed New York Virtuoso Singers, under the direction of its award-winning conductor Harold Rosenbaum. The concert includes music by Pulitzer Prize-winning composers, as well as new and exciting Jewish composers.
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[FALL2024] Beginner Conversational Yiddish for Heritage Learners
This weekly conversational class covers grammar, vocabulary, and conversational basics. It is for students with some basic familiarity with spoken Yiddish.
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[FALL2024] Continuing Conversational Yiddish for Heritage Learners
This weekly conversational class is for students who already have some experience speaking in Yiddish, can hold a basic conversation, and want to take their self-expression to the next level.
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Darius Milhaud’s Opera 'Esther de Carpentras'
Esther de Carpentras is an opera-bouffe composed by Darius Milhaud and based on a text by Armand Lunel. Premiered in 1938, the opera references the literary and theatrical interpretations of the Purim story and integrates the Jewish heritage of Milhaud and Lunel with that of papal domains of southern France.
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Jewish Musicians in 18th-Century London with the Raritan Players
Eighteenth-century London was a cosmopolitan and tolerant city, attracting Jewish musicians from across Europe—from Sephardic, Ashkenazic, Italian, and Eastern descent—though conditions would soon change as antisemitism increased. Join the Raritan Players for a concert exploring the music of Jews amidst this cultural shift.
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New Perspectives on European Jewish History
Nancy Sinkoff, Jonathan Karp, James Loeffler, and Howard Lupovitch delve into their new volume, A Jew in the Street: New Perspectives on European Jewish History, about how early modern and modern Jews navigated schisms between Jewish community and European society.
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Nusakh Vilne Memorial
For 2024’s commemoration of the Jewish community of Vilna, Bret Werb discusses Shmerke Kaczerginski’s work collecting songs of the Holocaust. The lecture will be followed by musical settings of Kaczerginski’s poetry performed by Temma Schaechter and Binyumen Schaechter.
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Two Revolutionary Jews: Leon Trotsky and Chaim Zhitlowsky
Tony Michels analyzes left-wing Jewish politics since the 19th century, focusing on the seminal Jewish Russian revolutionaries Leon Trotsky and Chaim Zhitlowsky and their radically different answers to the predicament of modern Jewry.
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In Search of Greener Fields: Rurality, Nostalgia, and Ideology in Yiddish-American Folksong
Zeke Levine considers themes of rurality in 20th century Yiddish-American folksong amongst Eastern European antecedents and the emerging American folk revival.
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The Yiddish Supernatural on Screen
Rebecca Margolis, in conversation with Olga Gershenson, investigates how translated and subtitled Yiddish dialogue in film and television reimagines Jewish lore and tells new stories, where the supernatural looms over the narrative.
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Jewish Folk Medicine in Eastern Europe
Marek Tuszewicki examines folk healing practices performed by Eastern European Jews and their intersection with modern medical knowledge, in a discussion led by cultural critic and playwright Rokhl Kafrissen.
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Joseph Brodsky: Epitaph for a Centaur, Six Years Later
Join YIVO for a screening of a short film exploring the poet Joseph Brodsky’s Jewish identity, his legacy, and the political undertones of his writing.
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Jewish Songs and Dances for Piano: Joel Engel's "A krants yidishe folksnigunim" (1924)
Ryan MacEvoy McCullough and Sahun Sam Hong perform Joel Engel’s A krants yidishe folksnigunim (1924): a collection of Jewish folksongs, dances, Hasidic nigunim, and religious melodies in arrangements for piano and four hand piano.
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Representations of the Israeli Experience in Yiddish Prose, 1948–1967
Gali Drucker Bar-Am, in a conversation led by Barbara Mann, describes how Yiddish-Israeli writers played a vital role in shaping Israel’s cultural identity in its early years.
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'Tefilatah' (Her Prayer): The Female Experience Through the Eyes of Male Composers
Join the American Society for Jewish Music and YIVO for a concert offering a beautiful and culturally rich experience of how various male composers from different eras captured the female experience.
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Yiddish Language During the Holocaust
Through the lenses of cultural history, philology, and literary interpretation, Hannah Pollin-Galay investigates how the Holocaust radically altered the way many Eastern European Jews spoke Yiddish, in a discussion led by Samuel Kassow.
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Proof of Identity
This US premiere of the POLIN Museum’s new documentary by Mikołaj Grynberg offers viewers a glimpse into what it means to be a Polish Jew today. Through interviews with the generation that has had no direct contact with the Holocaust survivors in their families, Grynberg’s film reflects on how Holocaust memory has evolved in Poland.
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Burning Off the Page
Join YIVO for the New York premiere of a documentary about Yiddish poet and fiction writer Celia Dropkin, followed by a discussion with filmmaker Eli Gorn and poet Edward Hirsch.
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A Very Jewish Christmas: Jewish Sitcom Characters Navigate December
Jennifer Caplan explores several examples of Jewish television characters attempting to survive the holiday season. A kosher Chinese food dinner will follow the presentation.
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Hanukkah Concert 2024 - The Andy Statman Trio
This annual Hanukkah concert showcases songs and stories that charm and delight audiences in celebration of this joyous holiday. This year's concert will feature a performance by The Andy Statman Trio.