Search results

On Sunday, December 7, 2014, YIVO’s Max Weinreich Center for Advanced Jewish Studies and NYU’s Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies held a symposium for scholars on Der Tog (The Day), the Yiddish daily that began publishing in New York in 1914, and then, after a merger with another ...

On this episode of YIVO’s radio program, originally aired on April 25, 1965, Yiddish and Hebrew writer, bibliographer, lexicographer, and journalist Moshe Starkman talks about important Yiddish writers and how YIVO in Vilna was influential in documenting and helping their careers. Today, Moshe Starkman's papers can be found in the ...

In this episode, originally broadcast on October 17, 1965, Zosa Szajkowski joins Sheftl Zak to talk about a YIVO exhibition on Yiddish orthography that was presented in conjunction with a class by Dr. Mordkhe Schaechter on the same subject. The scope of the exhibition reached as far back as the ...

This episode was originally broadcast on November 7, 1965. Host Sheftl Zak provides some facts about Yiddish in America that he thinks will be of particular interest to two types of listeners: people using the textbook College Yiddish to learn the language and people who have written in to YIVO ...

On February 23, 2015, Bard College professor Cecile Kuznitz broke new ground in the study of Jewish material culture with a lecture entitled “Towards a Yiddish Architecture.”

While Jews once comprised a sizable element of most East European cities, they were never the dominant culture. How did they assert their presence in the urban landscape despite their lack of political power? Professor Kuznitz’s work-in-progress looks beyond synagogues and examines institutional and residential architecture created by Yiddish-speaking Jews in Poland and their émigré communities in the United States, and explores the role of the built environment in constructing a modern Jewish culture in the Diaspora.

In this episode, originally broadcast on November 28, 1965, Dr. Marvin (Mikhl) Herzog interviews Dr. Florence Guggenheim-Grünberg on Western Yiddish. Recorded examples of native speakers of Western Yiddish are featured, with the discussion in English. Among Guggenheim-Grunberg’s publications are "Horse Dealers' Language of the Swiss Jews in Endingen and Lengnau" ...

by J.D. ARDEN, Reference Services & Genealogy Librarian, Center for Jewish History, Reference Division & Genealogy Institute

117 years ago in January 1898, Emile Zola boldly took up his pen to bring those famous words, “J’accuse…!,” to the defense of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery officer in the French army, whose conviction of espionage was widely believed to be an expression of anti-Semitism. The same year, Zola’s third book of the Three Cities Trilogy, Paris, was published—and subsequently translated into Yiddish in Warsaw by Israel Chaim Zagorodski. That book, in two editions, is in the collection of the YIVO Library.

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.

In this episode from January 8, 1967, Dr. Arieh Tartakower, sociologist and chairman of the Israeli Division of the World Jewish Congress and president of the World Hebrew Confederation delivers a speech on the differences between Hebrew and Yiddish culture, during a visit to YIVO on December 27, 1966: "We are ...