Past Events

As part of the first Yiddish New York festival, YIVO archivists present gems from YIVO’s rare book, sound, and manuscript collections.

The annual concert honoring Yiddish singer and scholar Adrienne Cooper presents the award for “Dreaming in Yiddish” to Joshua Dolgin, aka Socalled.

Joshua Zimmerman sheds new light on the Polish Underground’s treatment of Jews during World War II.

The Sidney Krum Young Artists and scholar Orin Grossman explore the Jewish influences on the work of three seminal 20th century American composers.

Pianist Evgeny Kissin, Boris Sandler, and others present an evening of popular Soviet music from their album Songs with a Jewish Flavor.

Elissa Bemporad uses the story of the Dubovo shtetl during the Russian Civil War as a case study for the “death of the shtetl” and its impact on Soviet Jews.

Judith Berkson, Frank London, and ensemble present Berkson’s original cantorial composition inspired by YIVO holdings, and reinterpretations of music from the golden age of cantorial music.

Lecture by Thomas Chopard, recipient of the YIVO Fellowship in Eastern European Jewish Studies (The Professor Bernard Choseed Memorial Fellowship and the Natalie and Mendel Racolin Memorial Fellowship).

Join Eddy Portnoy, Jody Rosen, and Alana Newhouse for a look at the images, language, and music of the “stage Jew,” a common character in vaudeville a century ago.

Scholar Daniel Heller follows the tensions between urban Betar organizers and small-town Jewish youth as activist movements swept 1930s Poland.

Acclaimed tsimbl players Pete Rushefsky and Walter Zev Feldman join special guests for a multi-media presentation and performance exploring Poland's klezmer heritage.

In the USC Shoah Foundation’s interviews with Jewish survivors, dozens of them recite poems and sing songs in Yiddish. Jeffrey Shandler explores the meaning of these performances amid memories of the Holocaust.

Join us to celebrate the life and work of Benjamin Harshav (1928-2015), eminent translator, poet, and scholar of Hebrew and Yiddish literature.

YIVO Fellow Isabelle Rozenbaumas presents her multi-modal journey toward understanding Lithuanian Jewry through the lens of a Jewish girls’ school.

The YIVO 90th Anniversary Gala honored Leon Botstein, President of Bard College, and New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast.

This program marks the 120th anniversary of the birth of poet and playwright Peretz Markish, discussing his Yiddish writing, biography, and the political context surrounding the 1952 “Night of the Murdered Poets.”

On the 100th anniversary of Peretz's death, Michael Steinlauf, Jeremy Dauber, Ken Frieden, and Martin Peretz discuss the great Yiddish author’s contributions to folklore, literary culture, and Jewish political consciousness.

Joint Distribution Committee archivist Misha Mitsel shares his discovery of the stories of 200 Agro-Joint employees targeted by Stalin’s Great Purge.

This symposium brings together scholars and curators to discuss photographer Roman Vishniac’s East European oeuvre as well as his newly appreciated artistic range. 

Author Rita Gabis reads from her new memoir and discusses her discovery of her bewildering family heritage: part Jewish, part Lithuanian resistance, part Gestapo.

Lawrence Summers analyzes the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement and its impact on academic freedom.

This screening of the Academy Award-winning Ida marks the anniversary of the seminal Second Vatican Council document denouncing anti-Semitism.

No Asylum, a film informed by YIVO’s “Otto Frank File,” reveals the story of the Frank family as they sought American asylum during World War II.

This course will explore the life, death, and afterlife of Jewish Vilna during the fateful years 1939-1949.

In YIVO’s annual commemoration of the Vilna Jewish community, Rita Gabis, Yelena Shmulenson, Ellen Perecman, and others explore Vilna’s presence in poetry, music, and personal history.

On August 12, 1952, thirteen Jews were murdered by Stalin’s regime, falsely accused of treason and espionage. Half of these Jews were celebrated Yiddish writers and artists.

Chava Rosenfarb, noted Yiddish writer and major Holocaust literary figure, discusses her life in Lodz before the Holocaust, her years in the Lodz Ghetto, in Auschwitz, in Bergen-Belsen, and her career as a Yiddish writer in Montreal.

Former students, colleagues, family, and friends of the celebrated Yiddish language teacher, linguist and scholar gather in his honor for this annual commemoration.

In his most recent book, The Pious Ones (Harper Collins), veteran New York Times journalist Joseph Berger investigates the complex web of issues surrounding American Hasidim today.

Presented in collaboration with the Russian American Foundation and the Russian Museum of Ethnography, this exhibit features works of the renowned Russian-Jewish artist, ethnographer and scholar of Jewish traditional art, Solomon Yudovin.

Night Songs from a Neighboring Village is a concert program pairing two musical traditions—East European Jewish and Ukrainian—that have existed side by side and nourished each other for centuries.

If you were lucky enough to see the Great Small Works’ work-in-progress version of their reinterpretation of Modicut, the first Yiddish language puppet theater in the U.S., you’ll definitely want to return for this world premiere.

Dmitry Bykov and Jonathan Brent join for an intimate conversation about Isaac Babel's Russian Jewish identity, his life, the myth of Babel, and his contribution to literature.

In 1938, Fania Lewando, the proprietor of a popular vegetarian restaurant in Vilna, published a Yiddish vegetarian cookbook including 400 recipes, impassioned essays about the benefits of vegetarianism, and lush full-color drawings of vegetables and fruit.

Miriam Trinh presents the two writers’ reactions to the Holocaust from the twin Jewish perspectives of ghetto and exile.

In this talk, Anna Rozenfeld discusses Yiddish radio programs in postwar Poland, and why they were especially meaningful to survivors and Jews abroad.

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), a famous Soviet composer and Mieczyslav Weinberg (1919-1996), a Jewish composer who was persecuted by the Soviet State, had an unusual and long-term personal and professional relationship.

A day-long celebration of YIVO’s 90th anniversary with film screenings, panels and more, exploring the history of YIVO’s pioneering work in the U.S. over the last 75 years, and its future.

In the decades following Israel’s establishment, subtle variations appeared in the attitudes of key Jewish members of the Frankfurt School—figures like Max Horkheimer, Leo Lowenthal, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse—toward the Jewish state.

By 1947, 250,000 survivors lived in Displaced Persons Camps in post-war Germany. Avinoam Patt and others mark the 70th anniversary of the end of the Shoah with a special look at life in the DP camps following the war.

In this talk, Zohar Weiman-Kelman draws on multiple projects that examined Yiddish sexuality in the twentieth century, and takes initial steps in generating a queer Yiddish archive of sexuality.

For centuries, Poland was home to the world's largest Jewish population—totaling 3.5 million in 1939, before the Holocaust all but extinguished their world. Today the culture has made a small comeback.

French singers Eléonore Biezunski and Eléonore Weill team up as the ‘Lib’Ele Duo’ (The Dragonflies) to present this rare concert blending French and Yiddish music with special musical guest Pete Rushefsky.

Each year from 1922 until 1978, when it closed, the secular Yiddish summer camp Camp Boiberik hosted the “Felker Yontev” (Holiday of Nations) Yiddish pageant, enacting Isaiah’s prophetic vision of world peace.

The home movies featured in Letters to Afar were taken by NY Jewish immigrants who traveled back to Poland to visit during the 1920s and 30s. How do we view these films generations later?

Join a panel of leading food writers, purveyors and restaurant owners for a panel discussion about the powerful connection between Jewish food and East European Jewish memory.

While Jews once comprised a sizable element of most East European cities, they were never the dominant culture. How did they assert their presence in the urban landscape despite their lack of political power?

How does standardizing Yiddish relate to planning a healthy Jewish future? In this lecture, Dr. Rakhmiel Peltz leads us on a panoramic trip through the struggle for standards in society and Jewish culture.

Celebrate the release of Toyznt Tamen = A Thousand Flavors, a new recording by Yiddish singer and songwriter Miryem-Khaye Seigel.

In this program, four historians dig into the YIVO Institute's archives and present us with a rarely-seen portrait of New York Jewish life in the 1920s and 30s.

In this evening, the Grammy-winning, New York-based Klezmatics will perform an acoustic version of the score they composed for the installation, along with related music.

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.