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by ROBERTA NEWMAN The first News from YIVO appeared as a short article in the Yiddish literary journal, Literarishe bleter (Literary Pages) on October 9, 1925, shortly after YIVO was formally founded in Vilna (then Wilno, Poland; now Vilnius, Lithuania). The article reports on the meeting of the Bibliographical Commission, a group ...

By JONATHAN BRENT
Executive Director, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research

Much ink has been spilled over the knaidel/kneydl quasi-controversy since it erupted in the wake of the Scripps National Spelling Bee on May 30, veering from the ponderous and scholarly to the frivolous and silly. While no YIVO scholar was consulted, expert opinion has been cited from the YIVO Institute, as has the hoary authority of Merriam-Webster.  Culinary and orthographic precedents have been invoked from generations past. The history of Jewish nationalism in Eastern Europe on the one hand, and the kitsch of the Borscht Belt have chimed in. “My Little Matzoh Ball,” sung by Little Rita Carol Age 12, a popular song from the 1950s, has begun to circulate on the internet thanks to the sound archivists at the YIVO Institute. The Carnegie Deli has enjoyed the spotlight again for what many might consider a dubious, commercial product. Fox News, TIME, The New York Times, Urdu language blogs in Pakistan and India, The Jewishpress.com, and esoteric Yiddishist blogs around the world have all joined in this celebration of—what? A word? A mystery of spelling?  Other such mysteries of spelling and transliteration abound: gray/grey; theater/theatre; travelling/traveling; Czar/Tsar; Tchekhov/Chekov/Chekhov.  Chances are that if the final question posed to young Arvind Mahankali were “theater,” it would have been prefaced with the injunction to provide the American spelling; or if of the word “Czar,” to provide the primary American spelling. No such caution occurred with “knaidel.” Why?

Yedies fun YIVO (News from YIVO) has a long history in print. With few interruptions, it has been published continually since 1925, from the very first days of the existence of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, as YIVO was then known. It began life as an article in Literarishe bleter (Literary ...

Joseph Berger’s article in The New York Times, “Some Say Spelling of a Winning Word Wasn’t Kosher” (May 31, 2013), notes that YIVO is by recognized by many as the authority on Yiddish. The winning word in the Scripps National Spelling Bee was knaidel (matzoh ball), or, as the spelling rules ...

There has been little attention paid to the history of letterhead, the pre-printed stationery used almost everywhere by companies, institutions, organizations, and individuals for correspondence. According to "The History of Letterhead,"the first use of the term in English was in 1890, as a new commercial term for printed letter paper. ...

Assemble the letterheads of Jewish organizations, institutions, and individuals in Europe, North and South America, and Palestine from the 1890s to the eve of World War II in 1939 and you have a portrait of the Jewish world: transnational; diverse in language, political, and religious orientation; and flourishing. Di gantse velt ...

An exhibition honoring doctor and Jewish communal leader Tsemakh Shabad (Szabad; 1864-1935) opened at the Lithuanian Parliament (Seimas) on September 21, 2014. Based on photographs and artifacts from YIVO’s Archives and Library and curated by Edward Portnoy, it explores the life and legacy of a man celebrated not only for ...

YIVO Executive Director Jonathan Brent and Director of Development Suzanne Leon held a press conference to announce YIVO’s new international project to preserve and digitize all of the YIVO prewar collections that survived looting by the Nazis and which are now located in both YIVO in New York and in Lithuanian repositories.

Newly discovered documents in the Lithuanian Central State Archive from YIVO’s prewar collection, now in the process of being sorted andconserved. Their damaged appearance is testament to the circumstances in which they were rescued and hidden. Photo by Roberta Newman. The press conference held by YIVO Executive Director Jonathan Brent and Director of Development Suzanne Leon in ...

In this episode, originally broadcast on March 21, 1965, Dr. Shlomo Noble visits the WEVD studio for a program entitled “Mentshn fregn dem YIVO” (People Ask YIVO). Dr. Noble reports on the types of questions that YIVO gets and how YIVO receives the inquiries and answers them, as well as ...