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by ROBERTA NEWMAN

Fifty years ago today, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. In December 1963, Yedies marked the tragedy with death notices in both Yiddish and English.

This episode of YIVO’s program on WEVD was originally broadcast on May 3rd, 1964. Ossip Walinsky (1887-1973), an active trade unionist and Labor Zionist, was born in Grodno (now in Belarus, close to the borders of Lithuania and Poland) and lived in London before immigrating to America. He served on ...

On Monday, December 9, 2013, YIVO and the Center for Jewish History will host French and Jewish: Defining a Modern Jewish Identity in the 19th Century, in conjunction with anexhibition, a conference and two other public programs celebrating the pinkas (register) of the bet din (rabbinic court) of the Jewish community of Metz, France, two leather-bound volumes preserved in the YIVO Archives. Brimming with details of commercial transactions involving Jews and non-Jews, family law, inheritance, modes of jurisprudence, and recourse to civil courts, the pinkas is a monument to an extraordinary community and its remarkable rabbinical court.

פֿון איציק גאָטעסמאַן

Parisian Yiddish singer Noemi Waysfeld visited New York and discussed her multilingual musical project on the subject of exile.

נאָך דעם ווי זי און איר מוזיקאַלישע גרופּע „בליק" זענען אויפֿגעטראָטן בײַ אַן אויסשטעלונג פֿונעם קינסטלער באָריס אַראָנסאָן אין פּאַריז, האָט אַראָנסאָנס זון, מאַרק, זיך פֿאַרליבט אין זייער פֿאָרשטעלונג און זיי פֿאַרבעטן קיין אַמעריקע צו שפּילן אויף זײַן זונס בר־מיצווה. דאָס האָט אונדז געגעבן די מעגלעכקייט זיך צו באַקענען און אַרומצורעדן נעמי ווײַספֿעלדס איצטיקע פּראָיעקטן.

On Tuesday, November 26th, Tony Michels, George L. Mosse Associate Professor of American Jewish History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will discuss his upcoming book on Communism, anti-Communism, and American Jews at YIVO's Ruth Gay Seminar in Jewish Studies, with moderator Daniel Soyer, Professor of History at Fordham University.

The outbreak of the Second World War precipitated an ideological-political crisis among Marxists in the United States. For much of the 1930s, Marxian intellectuals—specifically, those hostile to the Communist Party—had struggled to understand the rise of Nazism and the consolidation of Stalinism, but did so within Marxism's parameters. However, Germany's invasion of Poland, the systematic killing of Jews that followed, and the Soviet invasion of Finland raised questions about Marxism itself. Against the backdrop of totalitarianism, war, and genocide, intellectuals undertook a thorough reconsideration of Marxism. This process of rethinking Marxism entailed a new engagement with things Jewish: religion, Yiddish literature, Zionism, and the meaning of Jewish identity. This paper explores the turn to Jewishness by intellectuals during the 1940s and 1950s through the examples of Will Herberg and Irving Howe. Herberg rejected Marxism in the early 1940s, but over the next dozen years attempted to recast socialism on a theological basis, before he moved to the political right. Howe, who remained a socialist his entire life, negotiated a partial "reconquest" of Jewishness as an interpreter of Yiddish literature and the Jewish immigrant experience. Both individuals reflected larger political and cultural trends among American Jews in the post-World War II period.

Tony Michels is the author of A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Harvard, 2005) and editor of Jewish Radicals: A Documentary History (NYU, 2012). He is interviewed here by Yedies Editor Roberta Newman.

Every month, the YIVO Library receives complimentary copies of books whose content has been drawn in part from research done by the authors in the YIVO Archives and Library. Below is a partial list of books published in 2011-2013.

This third episode, which originally aired on April 19, 1964, features host Sheftl Zak interviewing Michael Zylberberg, journalist and YIVO representative in London. Zylberberg, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, discusses Jewish life and Yiddish in London and his work collecting documents and other historical materials. His collection, which deals extensively with Polish and Jewish anti-Nazi resistance, is in the YIVO Archives (Michael Zylberberg, Papers, RG 493).

YIVO, in cooperation with the National Library of Lithuania and the Lithuanian Central State Archives (LCSA), is developing a detailed plan for the digitization of its collections in Lithuania, including newly discovered materials at the LCSA.

פֿון איציק גאָטעסמאַן

In Yiddish literature the building of the sukkah was often portrayed with humor - suddenly every Jew becomes an architect! But Dr. Gabrielle A. Berlinger's research on Sukkot in contemporary southern Tel-Aviv shows how the sukkot structures in a struggling community display individual creativity and a variety of expressions of the ritual; all going on as political and social issues of the day intersect with vernacular religion.

דער ענטפֿער אויף דעם העברעיִשן קינדערליד „למה סוכּה זו?" איז מער קאָמפּליצירט ווי מען וואָלט זיך פֿאָרגעשטעלט, לויט דער פֿאָרשונג פֿון ד״ר גבריאלה בערלינגער, אַ מומחה אין פֿאָלקלאָר און פֿאָלק־אַרכיטעקטור, און אַן „אַנדרו־מעלאָן נאָך־דאָקטאָראַט־חבֿר" בײַם „באַרד־גראַדויִר־צענטער". זי האָט עטלעכע יאָר פֿאַרבראַכט אין ישׂראל און עטנאָגראַפֿיש געקוקט אויף די סוכּות אין לאַנד: ווי אַזוי מען בויט זיי, ווער בויט זיי, און וואָס פֿאַר אַ ראָלע זיי שפּילן אין דער משפּחה און קהילה.

As YIVO mourns the passing of our longtime music archivist Chana Mlotek, we look back at what may be the first mention of her in Yedies: News from YIVO, in June 1948, four years after she arrived at YIVO to be secretary to YIVO’s research director Max Weinreich. This article from ...