News & Features

Two legends come together at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research’s 13th Annual Heritage Gala: Theodore Bikel and Sholem Aleichem. Theodore Bikel – world-renowned actor, singer, author, and activist – was honored with YIVO’s Lifetime Achievement Award for his commitment to popularizing Yiddish culture. YIVO also announced the creation of the Sholem Aleichem Family Legacy Collection donated in memory of Bel Kaufman, Sholem Aleichem’s granddaughter, by her children, Thea and Jon Goldstine. The collection includes rare family treasures.

The Award Committee of the Jan Karski and Pola Nirenska Award is pleased to announce that Prof. Jerzy Malinowski has been named the recipient of this year's prize. Endowed by Prof. Jan Karski at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in 1992, the $5,000 prize goes to authors of published ...

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. Enchanted by the book, YIVO commissioned a translation, making Lewando's charming, delicious, and practical ...

On April 15, 2015, YIVO sponsored a special Yom HaShoah program featuring Professor Avinoam J. Patt of the University of Hartford, who spoke about the era immediately following the Holocaust, the 1940s, when thousands of Jewish survivors (known as the She’erit Hapletah, or “Surviving Remnant”) were trying to build new lives for themselves, even as they remained in limbo, in displaced persons camps in Germany, Austria, and Italy.

By 1947, 250,000 survivors lived in displaced persons camps in Germany. Professor Patt, with the aid of photographs and artifacts from YIVO’s Archives and Library, detailed the ways in which they created a remarkably dynamic society that included a flourishing press, theater, Zionist youth movements, athletic clubs, historical commissions, yeshivas, and a fiercely independent political system.

The program included a memorial ceremony with the onstage participation of survivors and children of survivors.

The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is pleased to announce the establishment of The Horowitz Family Summer Internship, endowed by Rosemary Horowitz of Boone, North Carolina. This internship will provide professional training for young people in the YIVO Archives and Library, and to educate future generations of archivists and librarians ...

Assemble the letterheads of Jewish organizations, institutions, and individuals in Europe, North and South America, and Palestine from the 1890s to the eve of World War II in 1939 and you have a portrait of the Jewish world: transnational; diverse in language, political, and religious orientation; and flourishing. Di gantse velt ...

In this episode, originally broadcast on May 15, 1966, Zosa Szajkowski joins host Sheftl Zak to talk about the exhibition “Jewish Mass Settlement in the United States” that he had curated and which had just opened in the YIVO exhibition hall. From 1963-1976, YIVO had its own program on WEVD, the ...

YIVO’s exhibition Yiddish Fight Club has continued to receive wide media attention from mainstream publications. Reviews of the show appeared on Vice and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ “Marginalia,” and the exhibition’s curator, Edward Portnoy, was interviewed on NPR and for a Yiddish Book Center podcast. There was also a review of the exhibition in Jewish Currents.

The publication by Schocken of The Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook, a translation of a Yiddish cookbook from the YIVO Library, has also been receiving broad coverage. The book was fingered as a good hostess gift by Vogue, and reviewed in Observer. Tasting Table praised the book as being “totally on trend.” The book has also been reviewed by Tablet, Haaretz, the Jerusalem Post, and Jewlicious.

An article about YIVO’s upcoming exhibition Shtetl: Graphic Works And Sketches Of Solomon Yudovin (1920-1940), a joint project with the Russian American Foundation and the Russian Museum of Ethnography, which will open on June 21, appeared in the New York Post, “Carving the Shtetl.”

YIVO mourns the passing of Ezra Mendelsohn, Rachel & Michael Edelman professor emeritus of European Jewry and Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University, who died last week in Jerusalem at age 74.

Mendelsohn, a historian, published over 30 books and articles on the Jewish labor movement, Jews in Poland and Russia, Jewish politics, and modern Jewish art and music. He served as the co-editor of the journal Studies in Contemporary Jewry and Zion. Among his works are Class Struggle in the Pale (1970), The Jews of East Central Europe Between the World Wars (1987), On Modern Jewish Politics (1993), and Painting a People: Maurycy Gottlieb and Jewish Art (2002). At the time of his death, he was working on a book on Jewish universalism, to be published by Rutgers University Press.

by J.D. ARDEN, Reference Services & Genealogy Librarian, Center for Jewish History, Reference Division & Genealogy Institute

117 years ago in January 1898, Emile Zola boldly took up his pen to bring those famous words, “J’accuse…!,” to the defense of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery officer in the French army, whose conviction of espionage was widely believed to be an expression of anti-Semitism. The same year, Zola’s third book of the Three Cities Trilogy, Paris, was published—and subsequently translated into Yiddish in Warsaw by Israel Chaim Zagorodski. That book, in two editions, is in the collection of the YIVO Library.