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The Congress for Jewish Culture, Friends of the Bund, the Jewish Labor Committee, Workers Circle, and YIVO join together to commemorate and remember the bravery of the partisans of the Warsaw Ghetto. This event takes place in Warsaw Ghetto Memorial Plaza in Riverside Park, NYC.

In 1939, Max Weinreich, his wife Regina, and their son Uriel-Eliezer were stranded in Copenhagen, Denmark because of the outbreak of WWII.

A number of YIVO public programs received press coverage. YIVO’s February 14th roundtable discussion on Lithuanian-Jewish relations, “Unresolved History: Jews and Lithuanians After the Holocaust,” is reported on by Ralph Seliger in the 3-part article “Israel & Lithuania: Parallel Dueling 'Narratives',” on the Partners for Progressive Israel Blog. Part III of the article can be read here.

Watch video of the roundtable.

An article on Steven Zipperstein’s January 6 lecture at YIVO, “Rethinking Kishinev: How a Riot Changed 20th Century Jewish History,” appears on the blog Mondoweiss, where it sparked an extensive and lively exchange of comments by readers.

The Forverts reported on the February 6 Yiddish lecture by Michael Steinlauf and program moderated by Eddy Portnoy , “Y.L. Peretz in a Time of Revolution.”

On June 16, 2013, Elissa Bemporad spoke at YIVO about her new book, Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (Indiana University Press), a case study of the Sovietization of Jews in the former Pale of Settlement. The book reveals the ways in which Jews acculturated to Soviet society in the 1920s and 1930s. But Jews also remained committed to older patterns of Jewish identity, such as Yiddish culture and education, attachment to the traditions of the Jewish workers’ Bund, and religious practices such as circumcision and kosher slaughter. In fact, most Jews attempted to walk the fine line between accepted Soviet behavior and social norms and expressions of Jewish particularity.

Elissa Bemporad holds the Jerry and William Ungar Chair in Eastern European Jewish history, and is assistant professor of History at Queens College, City University of New York. She was trained in Russian studies at the University of Bologna, and in Jewish studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. She received her PhD in history from Stanford University. Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk has been awarded the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary history as an outstanding work in twentieth-century history.

She was recently interviewed by Yedies editor Roberta Newman.

One hundred years ago there appeared a revolutionary, scholarly journal – complete with footnotes, bibliographies, and a page of errata at the end.

In 1939, Noah Golinkin, a student at Yeshiva University in New York, lately arrived from Vilna, wrote a booklet about YIVO for the Amopteyl, YIVO’s American division. His son, Professor David Golinkin, translated the booklet into English as a memorial on the occasion of his father’s tenth yahrzeit.

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Introduction to the English Translation

My father, Rabbi Noah Golinkin z"l, was born in Zhitomir, Ukraine, on the eighth night of Chanukah, 1913, to Rabbi Mordechai Ya'akov and Chana Chaya Freida Golinkin. When he was about seven years old, his family fled to Vilna in order to escape the Petlyura massacres.

The rest of his life can be divided into four periods.[1] He spent his formative years, ca. 1920-1938, in and around Vilna where he studied at the famous Ramayles Yeshiva together with the Yiddish writer Chaim Grade, as well as in a Polish gymnasium. He also spent time at YIVO, as is evident from this pamphlet. After graduating with a law degree from the Stefan Batory University in Vilna, which was rife with anti-Semitism, he realized that there was no future for the Jews of Poland. In February 1937, he wrote to Yeshiva University in New York and asked to study there; he finally arrived in the U.S. with a student visa in June of 1938.

Find out more about the 2013 Uriel Weinreich Summer Program in Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture.

Profiles of four students in the 2013 Uriel Weinreich Summer Program in Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture

YIVO mourns the passing of Dr. Benjamin Nadel, who died last last week on December 11 at the age of 96. Dr. Nadel was a linguist and a scholar of Ancient Greek and Yiddish, who received his early education in the Yiddish secular schools in Vilna. He was accepted into ...

YIVO is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2015-2016 Max Weinreich Center Research Fellowships.

With a large number of highly qualified applicants from a diverse number of countries and disciplines, the selection committee tackled the daunting task of choosing just one fellow for 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 will entail investigation of YIVO’s rich archival and bibliographic resources in the areas of children’s literature, literary correspondence, survivor testimony, records of philanthropic activity and pogroms, and Yiddish dance, theater, and performance archives.

The projects of the 2015-2016 cohort of fellows embody YIVO’s commitment to the highest levels of scholarship and inquiry, and we look forward to seeing the results. Stay tuned for upcoming programs and public lectures featuring our fellows!