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In Yankel's Tavern: Jews, Liquor & Life in the Kingdom of Poland (Oxford University Press, 2014), Glenn Dynner examines the iconic Polish Jewish tavernkeeper in the Kingdom of Poland.

In nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, the Jewish-run tavern was often the center of leisure, hospitality, business, and even religious festivities. This unusual situation came about because the nobles who owned taverns throughout the formerly Polish lands believed that only Jews were sober enough to run taverns profitably, a belief so ingrained as to endure even the rise of Hasidism's robust drinking culture.

As liquor became the region's boom industry, Jewish tavernkeepers became integral to both local economies and local social life, presiding over Christian celebrations and dispensing advice, medical remedies and loans. Nevertheless, reformers and government officials, blaming Jewish tavernkeepers for epidemic peasant drunkenness, sought to drive Jews out of the liquor trade. Their efforts were particularly intense and sustained in the Kingdom of Poland, a semi-autonomous province of the Russian empire that was often treated as a laboratory for social and political change.

Historians have assumed that this spelled the end of the Polish Jewish liquor trade. However, newly discovered archival sources demonstrate that many nobles helped their Jewish tavernkeepers evade fees, bans and expulsions by installing Christians as fronts for their taverns. The result—a vast underground Jewish liquor trade—reflects an impressive level of local Polish-Jewish co-existence that contrasts with the more familiar story of antisemitism and violence.

Buy the book.

Glenn Dynner is Professor of Judaic Studies at Sarah Lawrence College and the 2013-14 Senior NEH Scholar at the Center for Jewish History. In addition to Yankel’s Tavern, he is author of "Men of Silk": The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society (Oxford University Press), winner of the Koret Publications Prize and finalist for the National Jewish Book Awards. He is editor of Holy Dissent: Jewish and Christian Mystics in Eastern Europe (Wayne State University Press); and co-editor of a forthcoming volume of Polin and of Warsaw, the Jewish Metropolis: Essays in Honor of the 70th Birthday of Professor Antony Polonsky.

He is interviewed here by Yedies editor, Roberta Newman.

Three men who made their mark on Jewish life and culture passed from this world in the last week. Judith Berg and Felix Fibich, in four different poses, New York (?), ca. 1950s. (YIVO) Simon Alperovitch (Simonas Alperavičius), who served as executive director ofthe Lithuanian Jewish Community in 1989, and later, as chairman ...

In this episode of YIVO’s radio program on WEVD, originally heard on December 12, 1964, host Sheftl Zak talks about the 39th Annual YIVO Conference, which would convene in January 1965 in New York. Many of the upcoming episodes of the series focus on the conference and present excerpts from ...

by LEAH FALK

On Sunday, March 30 at YIVO, at 2:00pm, Professors Steven Aschheim, Hasia Diner, David Fishman, and Anson Rabinbach will gather to discuss the encounters between Jews from Eastern and Western Europe during and after the upheaval of World War I. These Jews met on the war front in Germany and in Eastern Europe, and their intra-cultural exchanges and interactions with new, non-Jewish neighbors helped reshape notions of Jewish identity and community.

Attend the program.

We asked our panelists to recommend the best books to get acquainted with the stories of these Jews and the impact of World War I on these communities, focusing on three major pockets of immigration and exchange: Eastern Europe, Germany, and the United States.

by ROBERTA NEWMAN Among the rare books in the YIVO Library is a Hebrew-Yiddish wordbook first published in Krakow in 1640, Hinukh hakatan (Digest of Education). In September 1952, Yedies reported on the donation of a 1739/1740 edition of the book. The article notes that the title of the book is ...

Drawing depicting Red Army cadres ousting capitalists and other enemies of the Russian Revolution, from a handmade Yiddish book produced in a Jewish orphanage in Bershad (now Bershad’, Ukr.), 1924. (YIVO) YIVO’s Max Weinreich Center is proud to announce a special 6-session course on Jews and the Russian Revolution, which will be taught by ...

YIVO is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2014-2015 Max Weinreich Center Research Fellowships.

With a record number of applicants this year, our committee had a difficult task in choosing the awardees in each category. We thank all who applied, and encourage those who did not receive an award this year to re-apply in following years. Projects that received awards this year tended to focus more specifically on YIVO’s strong collections in the fields of Yiddish language, culture, and scholarship. Diverse in terms of scope, chronology, and cultural geography, the projects of the 2014-2015 cohort of fellows embody YIVO’s central commitment to investigating the Jewish past and present. Our fellows can anticipate a fruitful experience in our unique archives and library, and we look forward to seeing the results of their scholarly research. Look for upcoming programs and public lectures featuring our current and incoming fellows!

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern of Northwestern University discusses his book, The Golden Age Shtetl.

On November 29, 1964, host Sheftl Zak interviewed YIVO historian Zosa Szajkowski about the Papers of Lucien Wolf (1857-1930) and David Mowshowitch (1887-1957) (YIVO Archives RG 348). Wolf was an English Jew who served as a delegate to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 and was involved in the drafting ...

by ROBERTA NEWMAN In 1937, Yedies reported on its survey of pinkasim (Jewish communal registers), whose mission was the gathering of information about pinkasim in Jewish communities all over Poland. Over one hundred communities had responded to YIVO’s call for participation in the survey, yielding information on over 300 pinkasim, including several ...