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A battle for the soul of Yiddish pits two scholars against one another.

September 10-13, 1964 Conference Presented by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (then located at 1048 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028). Related Documents Proposal, submitted by Max Weinreich, April 12, 1963: A Conference on Jewish Participation in Movements Dedicated to the Cause of Social Progress » View PDF Fundraising letter, October 20, 1963: to Julius ...

How YIVO’s plundered collections were rescued after WWII is a dramatic story still unfolding today.

On Tuesday, February 25, at 7:00pm, YIVO’s Rose and Isidore Drench Memorial Fellow/Dora and Mayer Tendler Fellow Markus Krah will deliver a lecture based on his research: YIVO, Freud, and American Jewry: Discourse on Eastern Europe as a “Talking Cure” for American Jewish Ambivalence.

In the 1940s and 1950s, American Jewish leaders voiced concerns about the suppression and fragmentation of Jewishness in modern mass society and the pressure to assimilate to mainstream American expectations. Guided by Max Weinreich, who was intellectually engaged with Freudian ideas, YIVO advocated for a more holistic, integrated Jewishness modeled after the East European ideal of yidishkayt. YIVO was a key voice in a larger discourse, as American Jews encountered different images of what the East European past was about: shtetls and pogroms, piety and poverty, religious tradition and political progressivism, Hasidism and Socialism, among others.

Markus Krah’s dissertation traces these competing narratives in magazines, sermons, radio shows, and popular literature. His lecture will discuss the idea that this discourse served as a “talking cure,” as American Jews consciously searched the complex East European past for meaning and grounding in the complex American present.

Attend the event.

Markus Krah is a Ph.D. candidate in Modern Jewish Studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) in New York and a lecturer at the Potsdam School of Jewish Theology in his native Germany. He is interested in American and European Jewish history, particularly in the cultural and intellectual engagement of Jews with the modern challenges and opportunities for Jewish identity. His dissertation focuses on the role of the East European past in 20th-century American Jewish explorations of new ways to understand their Jewishness. This week, he answered the following questions for Yedies.

The YIVO Library holds the private library of Yiddish writer Chaim Grade, as well as the libraries of other writers and scholars.

This lecture will tell, for the first time, the dramatic story of how Kaczerginski and Sutzkever “stole” the treasures out of the Vilnius Jewish Museum, secretly moved them across the border to neighboring Poland, and later whisked them across Europe to Paris.

YIVO sometimes used its airtime on WEVD to broadcast recordings of its scholarly conferences. Here, Dr. Max Weinreich delivers the opening address at YIVO's Conference on Jewish Participation in Movements Devoted to the Cause of Social Progress, which took place in Carnegie Hall on September 10-13, 1964. From 1963-1976, YIVO had ...

A paper by Max Weinreich on Ashkanaz, 1100-1300

by ROBERTA NEWMAN

On August 29, we posted an article about how YIVO founder Max Weinreich and his son were stranded in Copenhagen in the early days of World War II. In it, the author, Bent Blüdnikow, wrote also about the small community of Yiddish-speaking Jews who took the Weinreichs in and about how these Jews, including Blüdnikow’s grandfather, Abraham Krakowsky, stayed in touch with YIVO over the years.

After the war, when the Danish Jews returned from Sweden, where they had been evacuated by the Danish underground and thus saved from death at the hands of the Nazis, Krakowsky and others began sending documents chronicling the social, cultural, and religious revival of the community to YIVO. They were zamlers (collectors), members of the worldwide network of volunteers who helped build the collections of the YIVO Archives and Library both before and after World War II.

Here are a few examples of what they sent to YIVO in the late 1940s and 50s, and which can now be found in RG 116 Territorial Collections – Denmark.

Digitization of images by Vital Zajka, YIVO Archives.

In 1939, Max Weinreich, his wife Regina, and their son Uriel-Eliezer were stranded in Copenhagen, Denmark because of the outbreak of WWII.