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On Tuesday, November 19, 2013, The Klezmatics will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award at YIVO’s 88th Annual Benefit Dinner and will perform excerpts of a work-in-progress based on the Letters to Afar installation by Péter Forgács and The Klezmatics, (featuring YIVO’s unique collection of Polish Jewish home movies from the 1930s) at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. Péter Forgács will also be at the event.

The Klezmatics are world-renowned superstars of klezmer. Since their emergence from New York City’s East Village in 1986, they have revitalized Yiddish music for the 21st century. The band has helped to change the face of contemporary Yiddish culture, not least through their career-long research and use of materials found in the Max and Frieda Weinstein Archive of YIVO Sound Recordings. They have performed in more than 20 countries, released ten acclaimed albums and served as the subject of a feature-length documentary film, The Klezmatics: On Holy Ground.

On October 9, 2013, The Klezmatics’ lead vocalist Lorin Sklamberg, who is also YIVO’s Sound Archivist, was interviewed by Yedies Editor Roberta Newman. (This is the first of a 2-part series.)

by SARAH PONICHTERA

Welcome to Di Nyu-yorkerin!*

This monthly blog will announce Yiddish happenings taking place in and around New York City, and sometimes beyond.

In the cultural sphere, the New Yiddish Rep and Castillo Theater’s production of “Waiting for Godot” has been getting rave reviews both from people well-versed in Yiddish culture (such as Leyzer Burko’s review) and mainstream news outlets (such as Anita Gates’ review in the New York Times). The Folksbiene is holding a concert series featuring previously unheard songs gathered from Jewish families who lived in Soviet Russia, titled “Notes from the Underground.” The songs will be performed by members of the klezmer band Golem, and the performance is directed by the eminent Zalman Mlotek. Details can be found here.

by TOVA MESSER This year's Uriel Weinreich Summer Program in Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture was kicked off on Tuesday, June 18, 2013 by a retro-chic evening of drinks, refreshments and entertainment celebrating avant-garde Yiddish-Russian culture. A lively cocktail hour in the Great Hall was followed by performances by Artists in ResidenceShane ...

The performer, puppeteer, and former sound archivist turns YIVO upside-down. By LEAH FALK Jenny Romaine has been spending a lot of time at YIVO lately. This summer, she co-led, with Shane Baker, the theater workshop for the Uriel Weinreich Summer Program in Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture, introducing students to troll costumes, ...

The week of June 15, 2015 set the heads of Yiddish and Jewish culture aficionados in New York City spinning: Kulturfest, a week-long celebration of Jewish performing arts, offered an almost overwhelming array of concerts, theatrical performances, and lectures across the city, with sometimes more than one event taking place simultaneously.

YIVO’s contribution to Kulturfest was the world premiere of the Modicut Project, a reinterpretation of the first Yiddish language puppet theater in the U.S., which flourished in the 1920s-1930s in New York City. An artist-scholar collaboration between Great Small Works and Rutgers Professor Edward Portnoy, the new, original play brings together the sensibilities of 1920s avant garde puppet theater, socialism, political activism, Yiddish, ethnographic fieldwork, and identity politics with the stagecraft of Great Small Works.

Fenia and Yaakov Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies Awarded to Gabriella Safran and Steven J. Zipperstein; Chana Mlotek and Mark Slobin Receive Honorable Mention (NEW YORK, December 2, 2008) – The Modern Language Association of America today announced it is awarding its fourth Fenia and Yaakov Leviant Memorial Prize in ...

Enhancement of Critically Acclaimed Work Adds Selections from YIVO’S Vast Archive of Images and Media (NEW YORK, June 10, 2010)– What is the history of the shtetl? How far was Minsk from Pinsk? Who wrote the first Yiddish novel? What did the Misnagdim believe? Why were so many Polish Jews tavern ...

Letters to Afar Museum of the History of Polish Jews May 18 – September 30, 2013 Video installation by Péter Forgács with music by The Klezmatics, commissioned by the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York The audiovisual installation Letters to Afar ...

A previously unpublished manuscript by the late Ruth Rubin, indefatigable collector and researcher of Yiddish folksongs.

YIVO Executive Director Jonathan Brent's review of Seth Lipsky’s newly published biography of Abraham Cahan, founder of the Forward, was published in the latest issue of Moment Magazine.

On October 11, Jonathan traveled to Vilnius to participate in a meeting of the International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania. The Commission is a member of the European Union’s Platform of European Memory and Conscience and is charged with researching the crimes of both the Nazi and the Soviet occupations of Lithuania beginning in 1940, with the aim of creating accurate historical narratives. As a member of the commission, Jonathan’s  specific role will be to work with the sub-group devoted to the crimes of Stalinism in Lithuania.