News & Features

Letters to Afar

YIVO’s and Polin’s video installation at the Museum of the City of New York, Letters to Afar, continues to draw in visitors and has been extended another week until March 31, 2015. An article in the New York Post reported on a visitor’s emotional encounter with one particular film in the exhibition, “Professor finds long-lost home movies playing at NYC museum.” The article was also translated into Dutch.

The installation will open at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco on February 26.

Rosaline Schwartz, YIVO, 1992. (YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, RG 100.) YIVO mourns the passing of Rosaline B. Schwartz (1925-2015) on January 10. Roz was YIVO’s Director of Public Programs from 1981-1996, presiding over YIVO’s cultural and fundraising events for over a decade. She was also a native-speaker of Yiddish and a ...

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 ...

The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Rakhmiel Peltz as the inaugural Atran Visiting Professor of Yiddish Language and Linguistics.

Dr. Peltz, a specialist in the social history of Yiddish language and culture, is the Founding Director of the Judaic Studies Program and Professor of Sociolinguistics at Drexel University. His numerous articles and publications include “From Immigrant to Ethnic Culture: American Yiddish Culture in South Philadelphia,” (Stanford University Press, 1997). Dr. Peltz has been a fellow at the Center for Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania, the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Patt and Choseed Fellowships at YIVO. He is currently working on a book on Uriel Weinreich’s research oeuvre, as well as a book on the future of the Yiddish language.

by ROBERTA NEWMAN

The Yiddish Academy library is looking for a new home and it needs one fast.

The 2,000-volume library is currently in a temporary storage space at Beyachad, the Jewish Community Center of Johannesburg, South Africa, but has been asked to vacate. “Many of the books are very valuable,” notes Cedric Ginsburg, a Yiddish Academy lecturer and activist. “Some were published in Vilna; some in South Africa. In fact, we have a pretty good coverage of South African Yiddish literature."

The library is only one project of the fledgling Yiddish Academy, a new organization first conceived in 2001 by translator and scholar Joseph Sherman (1934-2009) and Eli Goldstein, a businessman, who is today based in Johannesburg and Toronto. They started with Yiddish classes for a few students in 2003, and by 2006, the organization was stable enough to register as an official club.

A panel on the history of YIVO was one of the opening sessions at the 46th annual Conference of the Association for Jewish Studies in Baltimore on December 14. Organized by Sarah Zarrow of New York University, it was entitled "YIVO and Jewish Social Science: The Standardization of Practice and ...

YIVO's 89th Annual Benefit, which honored Faina Kukliansky, the Hon. Anne E. Derse, and Dr. Yitzhak Arad, has received attention in Lithuana, including the websites of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Lithuaniaand the Jewish Community of Lithuania. The Letters to Afarexhibition at the Museum of the City ...

In this episode, originally broadcast on April 9, 1965, Hannah Fryshdorf comes into the studio to talk about YIVO’s worldwide reach. Over her long career, Fryshdorf rose to be the Assistant Director of YIVO. Her personal papers can be found in the YIVO archives (RG 1243). She first talks about ...

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 ...