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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 ...

(NEW YORK, April 8, 2008) – Columbia University Libraries and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research announced today a joint initiative to preserve unique and historically significant South American Yiddish newspapers and make them accessible to scholars, researchers, and students. In 2001, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research—a preeminent research and ...

(NEW YORK, March 1, 2009)– The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is proud to announce the opening of its new exhibition Stars, Strikes, and the Yiddish Stage: The Story of the Hebrew Actors’ Union, 1899–2005 on March 12, at the Center for Jewish History. A major gift from Eli Broad, ...

(NEW YORK, February 12, 2013) – For almost 90 years, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research has been home to the largest and historically most important archive and library of Eastern European Jewish civilization in the world; including the single largest collection of Yiddish language materials. For more than 120 ...

(NEW YORK, January 5, 2015) – The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Rakhmiel Peltz as the inaugural Atran Visiting Professor of Yiddish Language and Linguistics. Dr. Peltz, a specialist in the social history of Yiddish language and culture, is the Founding Director of ...

Night Songs from a Neighboring Village is a concert program pairing two musical traditions—East European Jewish and Ukrainian—that have existed side by side and nourished each other for centuries.

Join Eddy Portnoy, Jody Rosen, and Alana Newhouse for a look at the images, language, and music of the “stage Jew,” a common character in vaudeville a century ago.

Samuel Kassow, YIVO’s Jacob Kronhill Visiting Scholar in East European Jewish History, considers Jewish cultural resistance through literature during the Holocaust.