News & Features

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern of Northwestern University discusses his book, The Golden Age Shtetl.

YIVO is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2014-2015 Max Weinreich Center Research Fellowships.

With a record number of applicants this year, our committee had a difficult task in choosing the awardees in each category. We thank all who applied, and encourage those who did not receive an award this year to re-apply in following years. Projects that received awards this year tended to focus more specifically on YIVO’s strong collections in the fields of Yiddish language, culture, and scholarship. Diverse in terms of scope, chronology, and cultural geography, the projects of the 2014-2015 cohort of fellows embody YIVO’s central commitment to investigating the Jewish past and present. Our fellows can anticipate a fruitful experience in our unique archives and library, and we look forward to seeing the results of their scholarly research. Look for upcoming programs and public lectures featuring our current and incoming fellows!

Videos of many of YIVO’s public programs are now available on our revamped YouTube page. The new collection of videos will make it possible to explore the full range of YIVO program videos from one centralized index. New videos will be added on a regular basis. Videos of events also remain available ...

by ROBERTA NEWMAN In April 1946, Yedies reported on the publication of Isaac Rivkind’s Der kamf kegn azartshpiln bay Yidn (The fight against gambling in Jewish literature). The Yiddish version of the article is more detailed, providing a list of topics covered by the book: Old Yiddish gambling songs Gambling and Yiddish folksongs Modern ...

The Tragedy of a Generation: The Rise and Fall of Jewish Nationalism in Eastern Europe (Harvard University Press, 2013) traces the origins of two influential but overlooked strains of Jewish thought, Diaspora Nationalism and Yiddishism. Its leading exemplars dreamed of an autonomous Jewish nation in Europe, but were forced to ...

On November 29, 1964, host Sheftl Zak interviewed YIVO historian Zosa Szajkowski about the Papers of Lucien Wolf (1857-1930) and David Mowshowitch (1887-1957) (YIVO Archives RG 348). Wolf was an English Jew who served as a delegate to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 and was involved in the drafting ...

by ROBERTA NEWMAN Elsewhere in this March 7, 2014 edition Yedies, historian Joshua Karlip discusses the Diaspora Nationalist movement in Eastern Europe and notes that the father of the movement and its ideology was the scholar Simon Dubnow. There are few more towering figures in the history of East European Jewry than ...

List of recipients of YIVO’s 2014-2015 faculty and graduate student fellowships.

by LEAH FALK The best parts of the Yiddish past are fragile: a yellowing installment of a serialized novel in Der tog, a barely legible handwritten letter, a fragment of song passed down from mother to daughter. Ruth Rubin, the celebrated scholar, singer, and collector of Yiddish folk music, knew how ...

A number of YIVO public programs received press coverage. YIVO’s February 14th roundtable discussion on Lithuanian-Jewish relations, “Unresolved History: Jews and Lithuanians After the Holocaust,” is reported on by Ralph Seliger in the 3-part article “Israel & Lithuania: Parallel Dueling 'Narratives',” on the Partners for Progressive Israel Blog. Part III of the article can be read here.

Watch video of the roundtable.

An article on Steven Zipperstein’s January 6 lecture at YIVO, “Rethinking Kishinev: How a Riot Changed 20th Century Jewish History,” appears on the blog Mondoweiss, where it sparked an extensive and lively exchange of comments by readers.

The Forverts reported on the February 6 Yiddish lecture by Michael Steinlauf and program moderated by Eddy Portnoy , “Y.L. Peretz in a Time of Revolution.”