Yiddish Scholarship Comes to America: The YIVO Institute at 100
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Book Talk
Admission: Free Registration is required. |
The book Yiddish Scholarship Comes to America: The YIVO Institute at 100 provides a comprehensive history of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, detailing its longstanding efforts to preserve Eastern European Jewish culture during a century of genocide and mass emigration. Founded in 1925, YIVO was a global organization with headquarters in Vilna until World War II. It represented the symbolic pinnacle of building a modern, secular Yiddish culture.
Yet post-war, YIVO struggled to establish itself on a new continent, to reclaim what had survived of its Vilna collections, to document a lost world, and to impart the value of Eastern European Jewish history and culture to new generations. Through the Institute's steady commitment to establishing itself in New York and beyond, Yiddish language learning and scholarship became a crucial part of post-Holocaust Jewish life in a time when Hebrew was increasingly promoted in Jewish communities. Drawing on extensive archival research and oral histories, Kalman Weiser focuses on the transitional period of the YIVO Institute from 1940 to 1970 and showcases how the Institute carved its own path toward scholarship and public engagement that remained true to its founding ethos—"from the folk, for the folk, and with the folk"—while acclimating to American society and mainstream Jewish culture.
Join YIVO for a discussion with Weiser about this new book, moderated by Andrew Silow-Carroll.
About the Speaker
Kalman Weiser is the Silber Family Professor of Modern Jewish Studies and the Director of the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York University. A native of NYC (BA,Yale; MA and PhD, Columbia), he is the author of several studies about Jewish nationalism and Jews’ relationship to language, especially in Eastern Europe. His study Jewish People, Yiddish Nation: Noah Prylucki and the Folkists in Poland won the 2012 Canadian Jewish Book Award for scholarship. He is also a contributor to and co-editor of Czernowitz at 100: the First Yiddish Language Conference in Historical Perspective (2010); a revised and expanded edition of Solomon Birnbaum's seminal work Yiddish: a Survey and a Grammar (2016); and Key Concepts in the Study of Antisemitism (2021). In 2018, he was the co-organizer of Teaching about Antisemitism in the 21st Century, an intensive summer institute for advanced graduate students and junior faculty that is scheduled to be renewed in 2023. He has recently completed the manuscript for a book about Nazi scholars of Yiddish and their relationships with Jewish colleagues before, during, and after World War II. Weiser regularly teaches courses about modern Jewish and general Eastern European history, antisemitism, Yiddish, and Jewish languages. He has lectured widely in the US, Europe, Japan, and Israel.
Andrew Silow-Carroll is New York Jewish Week's Editor at Large and Managing Editor for Ideas of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Previously he served as editor in chief of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, editor-in-chief and CEO of the New Jersey Jewish News and wrote an award-winning weekly column in the Times of Israel. He was also the managing editor of the Forward newspaper, editor of the Washington Jewish Week, senior editor of Moment magazine, and a reporter for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.