YIVO in the News/Staff Notes - October 2014
YIVO's seven-year project to digitize prewar Vilna collections
The project continues to garner media attention with a piece in JSTOR Daily, "YIVO Vilna Project Will Digitize Jewish History," that also discusses in detail YIVO’s 1942 autobiographical essay contest. “Why I Left Europe and What I Have Accomplished in America.”
The project was also noted in a Jerusalem Post article, “On My Mind: Heritage Protection.” (YIVO is also mentioned in another article there, a piece by the son of Seymour Pomrenze, a Monuments Man who was instrumental in helping YIVO recover its looted archives at the end of World War II.)
Letters to Afar
The YIVO/Museum of the City of New York installation, Letters to Afar, received prominent attention in the media, beginning with a story in The New York Times on October 22. There were also thoughtful pieces in The Daily Beast and two articles in the The Jewish Week, "Letters from Afar Close Up” and a piece by George Robinson. The exhibition is also the subject of a feature in Jewniverse.
Other YIVO Projects & Public Programs
YIVO’s September 30 panel discussion,"Taras Shevchenko: Ukrainian Nationalism, Poetry and the Jews" was featured on the website of the group Ukrainian Jewish Encounter, where it was noted that “the panel’s exploration of aspects of Ukrainian-Jewish relations was an invaluable contribution to the festivities marking the bicentennial of the Ukrainian poet’s birth.”
YIVO’s participation in the Europeana JudaicaLinks project is featured in Lena Stanley-Clamp’s “JudaicaLink: pioneering initiative to link reference works on Jewish culture and history.”
The use of rare YIVO artifacts from Auschwitz in the Center for Jewish History dance/film installation, “Four Women,” is noted in an article about the exhibition in Broadway World.
Leonard Grunstein has made available a short video of the May 2014 launch of the YIVO Digital Archive on Jewish Life in Poland on his website. A link to the website is also featured in a resource guide on the website of Lilith Magazine.
Staff Notes
On October 3, YIVO Director of Education Jennifer Young delivered a talk at NYU’s Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies entitled “Fighting Anti-Semitism and Jim Crow: Blacks, Jews, and the Politics of Anti-Fascism in the 1940s.”
On October 28, YIVO Academic Advisor Eddy Portnoy delivered a talk on the history of Yiddish cartooning at a meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium at Parsons The New School.