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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.

by ROBERTA NEWMAN

The new Hollywood movie The Monuments Men has been drawing renewed attention to the postwar rescue by the Allies of art and other cultural treasures looted by the Nazis.

YIVO’s history is inextricably tied to the work of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA) program, established by the Allied armies in 1943 to protect important heritage sites on the battlefront. As the war drew to a close, its mission expanded to include the rescue of artworks and other cultural artifacts that had been stolen from the Nazis.

Eddy Portnoy tells the story of how the MFAA saved the remnants of YIVO’s prewar collections in this week’s Forward. Read “How Real 'Monuments Men' Saved Priceless YIVO Yiddish Treasure.”

In this episode, believed to have been broadcast on October 25, 1964, host Sheftl Zak interviews Yudel Mark, editor of the journal Yidishe Shprakh and co-editor of the Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language, about his work on the Great Dictionary and YIVO's involvement with the project. (Yudel Mark's papers ...

Spring Yiddish classes are here! Brush up on your grammar, tackle the Yiddish writers of the first world war, or read the Forverts.

Register for a course.

Have questions? Contact Jennifer Young or Leah Falk (lfalk@yivo.cjh.org).

by SARAH PONICHTERA As is appropriate for this time of year, we’ll begin with a look back and end with a gaze ahead. The annual conference of the Association for Jewish Studies met in Boston in mid-December, featuring several panels on Yiddish topics, including Yiddish in the twentieth century, and new ...