A Turning Point in Remembrance: YIVO in the 1940s
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Yiddish Civilization Lecture Series
Admission: Free Registration is required. |
Jeffrey Shandler | Delivered in English.
Shortly after the start of World War II, YIVO’s New York branch was designated as its temporary central headquarters, assuming that the institute would return to Europe after the war. But by 1943, scholars from the Vilna YIVO who had recently moved to New York realized that there would be no going back; the city would now be the institute’s permanent home. How did YIVO’s leaders reconfigure its mission in the wake of the Holocaust and in response to their American home? This talk by Jeffrey Shandler will examine some of the institute’s undertakings during this crucial decade—including unrealized plans to create a Museum of the Homes of the Past—as its leaders forged a new sense of purpose in response to their radically altered circumstances.
Buy Homes of the Past: A Lost Jewish Museum.
About the Speaker
Jeffrey Shandler is Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University. His publications include Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (University of California Press, 2005); Shtetl: A Vernacular Intellectual History (Rutgers University Press, 2014); Yiddish: Biography of a Language (Oxford University Press, 2020); and Homes of the Past: A Lost Jewish Museum (Indiana University Press, 2024). Among other titles, he is editor of Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust (Yale University Press, 2002) and translator of Emil and Karl (Square Fish/Macmillan, 2006), a Holocaust novel for young readers by Yankev Glatshteyn.