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In this broadcast from January 24, 1965, we hear the paper on Yiddish literature that Dr. Mikhl (Michael) Astour delivered not long before at YIVO’ annual conference: "One Hundred Years of Yiddish Literature: From Mendele's Little Man to Date." As the report on the conference in Yedies noted: Professor Michael Astour surveyed ...

Say you're a woman living in a shtetl in 1900: what do you say in a letter to your husband in America if you think he's cheating on you? What about to your son to express your disapproval of how he's been letting his schoolwork slide in favor of hanging out with a bad crowd? Or how about to a friend to express your shock over the fact that you've heard he has a Christmas tree in his Jewish home?

These are sort of letters that Alice Nakhimovsky and Roberta Newman translated for their book Dear Mendl, Dear Reyzl: Yiddish Letter Manuals from Russia and America (Indiana University Press, 2014) and which they will present at YIVO on June 17, 2014 at 7:00pm. If you were a Jew in Russia or Poland or a new Jewish immigrant to America in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century and facing these and other dilemmas, you might find yourself turning for help to a brivnshteler, a Yiddish letter manual.

by LEAH FALK

Traduttore, traditore, goes the Italian proverb: to translate is to betray. But at YIVO, the opposite seems true. Six recipients of the Yiddish Book Center’s 2014 Translation Fellowships are fiercely loyal YIVO Max Weinreich Center alumni. The fellows include Beata Kasiarz, Helen Mintz, Sarah Ponichtera, Sasha Senderovich, Anna Torres, and Ri Turner.

Karolina Szymaniak The recipient of YIVO’s Dina Abramowicz Emerging Scholar Fellowship for 2013-2014, Karolina Szymaniak, is an Assistant Professor at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, where she also heads the Yiddish Culture Lab. Having earned her Ph.D. in literary and cultural studies from the Jagiellonian University in Kazimierz, Poland, she ...

by SARAH PONICHTERA

Yiddish – an Eastern European visitor that arrived on these shores at the turn of the twentieth century – has made a home in America like no other. Yiddish has become a part of the English language, contributing flavorful words like shmooze, kvetch, and shlep. However, the embrace in which Yiddish has been enveloped can be so tight as to threaten its own vitality as a distinct language, with its own grammar, literature, and historical specificity.

A Polish book on the Yiddish alphabet has won the main prize at one of the most important international events dedicated to the children’s publishing and multimedia industry around the world – the Bologna Children's Book Fair. The book, Majn Alef Bejs [My Alef Beys], with Yiddish poems written by Jehoszua ...

On Sunday, December 6, 1964 Dr. Mordkhe Schaechter joined host Sheftl Zak to talk about College Yiddish, the textbook first published by YIVO in 1946. By the time of the program, a fourth edition of the book was in the works. Zak talks about which colleges and universities are using ...

by SARAH PONICHTERA As the heavy monotony of all the snow begins to be broken with longer and longer stretches of sun and warmth, it’s time to emerge from the cocoon, and there are plenty of options to choose from. March starts out with Ruth Wisse’s lecture on Jacob Glatstein, “A Yiddish ...

Yiddish literature and poetry took off in America on the crest of a huge Jewish immigrant wave at the beginning of the twentieth century. Yiddish writers kept ripening their talent as most other speakers of their language were swept into the English mainstream. Can individual genius flourish during its culture’s decline? Jacob Glatstein, or Yankev Glatshteyn, became an American original by turning that question into the driving force of his poetry and the concern of his prose. On Tuesday, March 4, 2014 at 7:00pm, Ruth Wisse, Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, will discuss Jacob Glatstein’s life and work and will read excerpts from his poetry in Yiddish.

Attend the program.

A Yiddishkayt of folk air
to prick the heart and pour
warm honey at the sight
of things that touch the cockles?
If that's the stuff we celebrate
we'd better do without.
Yiddish poets, are you bees
who close the feast
with honey-store
of song, and nothing more?

From "Yiddishkayt” by Jacob Glatstein
Translation by Cynthia Ozick

On Tuesday, February 25, at 7:00pm, YIVO’s Rose and Isidore Drench Memorial Fellow/Dora and Mayer Tendler Fellow Markus Krah will deliver a lecture based on his research: YIVO, Freud, and American Jewry: Discourse on Eastern Europe as a “Talking Cure” for American Jewish Ambivalence.

In the 1940s and 1950s, American Jewish leaders voiced concerns about the suppression and fragmentation of Jewishness in modern mass society and the pressure to assimilate to mainstream American expectations. Guided by Max Weinreich, who was intellectually engaged with Freudian ideas, YIVO advocated for a more holistic, integrated Jewishness modeled after the East European ideal of yidishkayt. YIVO was a key voice in a larger discourse, as American Jews encountered different images of what the East European past was about: shtetls and pogroms, piety and poverty, religious tradition and political progressivism, Hasidism and Socialism, among others.

Markus Krah’s dissertation traces these competing narratives in magazines, sermons, radio shows, and popular literature. His lecture will discuss the idea that this discourse served as a “talking cure,” as American Jews consciously searched the complex East European past for meaning and grounding in the complex American present.

Attend the event.

Markus Krah is a Ph.D. candidate in Modern Jewish Studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) in New York and a lecturer at the Potsdam School of Jewish Theology in his native Germany. He is interested in American and European Jewish history, particularly in the cultural and intellectual engagement of Jews with the modern challenges and opportunities for Jewish identity. His dissertation focuses on the role of the East European past in 20th-century American Jewish explorations of new ways to understand their Jewishness. This week, he answered the following questions for Yedies.