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In 2013, Isaac Bleaman launched Leyenzal (Reading Room), a website that commissions original biweekly Yiddish-language video lectures about Yiddish literature, which can be downloaded for free along with the texts being discussed.

Bleaman is a first-year doctoral student in the Department of Linguistics at New York University, with interests in sociolinguistic variation, language contact, and language shift. He earned an MSt in Yiddish Studies at Oxford, and a BA in Linguistics and Comparative Literature at Stanford. Earlier this year, he was profiled in “36 Under 36: Three Dozen Millenials And Gen-Xers Reinventing The Jewish Community” in The Jewish Week.

He is interviewed here by Yedies Editor Roberta Newman.

Outside media articles from 2016 about YIVO and YIVO-related topics.

Klezmer-rock band Golem has been reinterpreting Yiddish and East European Jewish music for the 21st century since 2000. YIVO Public Program Director Helena Gindi spoke with founder and lead singer of the band, Annette Ezekiel Kogan, about Golem’s latest album, Tanz, which was released on May 13 on the Mexican label Discos Corason.

Golem’s CD release party for Tanz will be held at Joe’s Pub on May 29, 2014.

Listen to clips from Tanz on Golem’s website.

by ROBERTA NEWMAN In April 1946, Yedies reported on the publication of Isaac Rivkind’s Der kamf kegn azartshpiln bay Yidn (The fight against gambling in Jewish literature). The Yiddish version of the article is more detailed, providing a list of topics covered by the book: Old Yiddish gambling songs Gambling and Yiddish folksongs Modern ...

The YIVO Archives receives new items and collections on a weekly basis. These include donations of organizational records, manuscripts, printed materials, family history materials, photographs, sound recordings, artworks, and films related to the many topics covered by YIVO's archives and library.

Yedies will begin reporting on these acquisitions on a monthly basis. This week, we feature a couple of highlights from the most recent donations.

(Special thanks to YIVO Associate Archivist Leo Greenbaum for providing the information for this report.)

The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research mourns the death of its longtime music archivist, Chana Mlotek, known worldwide for her expertise on the musical traditions of Jewish Eastern Europe.

Senior Archivist Fruma Mohrer comments, “Chana had every single piece of music from the YIVO Archives at her fingertips: every arrangement, every title, from the 19th century to the present. She was a woman of vast knowledge, and yet was unfailingly unassuming and unpretentious.” The many catalogs and guides to music collections that Chana created at YIVO are used on a daily basis by composers, conductor, performers, folklorists, and musicologists.

Chana (neé Eleanor "Chana" Gordon) was born on April 9, 1922, in New York in a Yiddish-speaking family. She attended the Yiddish High School of the Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute, and was a graduate of Hunter College.

In addition to extensive coverage of the Yiddish Fight Club exhibition, there has been media interest in three other major YIVO projects:

• The YIVO Vilna Collections project, YIVO’s international initiative to digitally reunite its prewar collections in New York and Vilnius, is the subject of an article in Le Monde. and an article about the project that originally appeared in Ami Magazine was reprinted in Long Island Jewish World.
• The Letters to Afar video installation, now on view at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, was reviewed in The Huffington Post and in Jewish Journal.
• The Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook, an English translation of a prewar Yiddish cookbook, slated for publication by Schocken Books and YIVO on May 26, was mentioned in Forward’s “The Jew and the Carrot” blog.

YIVO’s exhibition Yiddish Fight Club has continued to receive wide media attention from mainstream publications. Reviews of the show appeared on Vice and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ “Marginalia,” and the exhibition’s curator, Edward Portnoy, was interviewed on NPR and for a Yiddish Book Center podcast. There was also a review of the exhibition in Jewish Currents.

The publication by Schocken of The Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook, a translation of a Yiddish cookbook from the YIVO Library, has also been receiving broad coverage. The book was fingered as a good hostess gift by Vogue, and reviewed in Observer. Tasting Table praised the book as being “totally on trend.” The book has also been reviewed by Tablet, Haaretz, the Jerusalem Post, and Jewlicious.

An article about YIVO’s upcoming exhibition Shtetl: Graphic Works And Sketches Of Solomon Yudovin (1920-1940), a joint project with the Russian American Foundation and the Russian Museum of Ethnography, which will open on June 21, appeared in the New York Post, “Carving the Shtetl.”

"From Dream to Reality : Zionism and the Birth of Israel" (NEW YORK, June 11, 2008) – The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is proud to announce the opening of a new exhibit to mark the 60th anniversary of the creation of the State of Israel. "From Dream to Reality: Zionism ...

(NEW YORK, November 4, 2013) – The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research announces with sadness the death of its longtime music archivist, Chana Mlotek, known worldwide for her expertise on the musical traditions of Jewish Eastern Europe. Senior Archivist Fruma Mohrer comments, “Chana had every single piece of music from the ...