Past Events

For many Ashkenazi Jews in the United States, Christmastime sparks memories of egg rolls and General Tso's chicken. How did the affinity for Chinese food amongst many Jews begin?

Join YIVO Sound Archivist, Lorin Sklamberg for a show and tell of YIVO’s Sound Archives, which houses over 15,000 recordings.

Celebrate the publication of Tsen Lider. Ten poems. Dešimt eilėraščių with a discussion panel on Avrom Sutzkever's work with Mindaugas Kvietkauskas, Lara Lempertienė, and Justin Cammy, moderated by Jonathan Brent and with welcoming remarks by Prof. Dr. Renaldas Gudauskas.

This panel will explore today’s innovative tactics and the historical precedents for fermenting and foraging in the Ashkenazi Jewish immigrant kitchen at the turn of the 20th century.

Join us for a performance of Joel Engel's Jewish Folksongs (Volume I, 1909/ Volume II, 1912). These 20 songs will be performed by singer Lucy Fitz Gibbon with pianist Ryan MacEvoy McCullough, with a special guest appearance by Yurie Mitsuhashi. 

In commemoration of Kristallnacht (Nov 9-Nov 10 1938) Mannes Sounds Festival in partnership with the American Society for Jewish Music, the Leo Baeck Institute, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and the Center for Jewish History presents “Kristallnacht and Its Aftermath.”

Conducted in Yiddish, this class will read popular Yiddish children’s stories. Suitable for advanced-beginner or beginner-intermediate students.

The Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre invites you to a webinar about the incredible journey of a teenage girl of pre-war Vilna, the Holocaust, and post war America through the landmark YIVO Cernia Slovin Online Museum.

Join us for a brief, fast-paced history of the Paper Brigade, a group of poets and scholars who risked their lives to smuggle Jewish books and materials from YIVO’s collections during World War II.

Join Director of the YIVO Archives, Dr. Stefanie Halpern for a show and tell of YIVO’s theater collections, showcasing playscripts, scores, costumes, set models and designs, photographs, playbills, posters, and more.

This is a conversation course (no reading or writing involved) for beginners who have had some exposure to Yiddish but lack the basics of grammar and vocabulary, which will be provided in this course.

This is a conversation course (no reading or writing involved) for beginners who have had some exposure to Yiddish but lack the basics of grammar and vocabulary, which will be provided in this course.

Join us for a virtual gala celebrating the diversity of Jewish cuisines around the globe. Chefs prepare a feast of their favorite remembered Sukkot dishes – from Ethiopia to Hungary and Italy to North Africa. This will be a unique, interactive, at-home event that includes an exclusive VIP virtual program and reception, offering a live opportunity to network, engage, and connect with our featured chefs, food experts, and other guests.

This program is presented by University of Birmingham College of Arts and Law. This 2-hour webinar is for teachers across the curriculum in Key Stages 3-5 who want to learn more about cross-curricula approaches to Holocaust Education and the potential of testimony. Speakers include Karolina Ziulkoski, Chief Curator of the YIVO Bruce and Francesca Cernia Slovin Online Museum.

The Jewish children’s literature field is booming and the call to provide representation of Jewish children, for Jewish children, has played a large part in that. The publication of Miriam Udel’s new book of translated Yiddish children’s literature, Honey on the Page, is the perfect opportunity to celebrate the history of Yiddish children’s literature, and to examine the roles it can play for children today.

Reading primary medieval texts (in English translation) alongside contemporary articles and poetry, this class will explore the history of Jews in medieval Europe, and how writers of the Jewish diaspora imagine the medieval past.

Join us for a brief, fast-paced history of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, richly illustrated with a variety of photos, documents, and books from YIVO's collections.

This course will examine how writers Y.L. Peretz and Sholem Aleichem laid the groundwork for modern Yiddish literature. The course will be taught in English.

May God Avenge Their Blood: A Holocaust Memoir Triptych presents three memoirs by the Yiddish writer Rachmil Bryks (1912–1974). Join us for a presentation by and discussion with translator Yermiyahu Ahron Taub and Bryks' daughter, cultural activist Bella Bryks-Klein, exploring Bryks' life and work, the genesis of this project, and the related holdings in YIVO's collections.

Beginner Yiddish is for students who are new to the Yiddish language or would like a review. It covers the alphabet, elementary grammar, and conversational and reading basics.

Advanced Intermediate Yiddish is for students who have taken at least three semesters of Yiddish before, and are comfortable with reading, writing, and conversing in Yiddish.

Intermediate is for students who have taken two semesters of Yiddish before, are comfortable with reading and writing the alef-beys, and can have simple conversations.

Beginner Yiddish is for students who are new to the Yiddish language or would like a review. It covers the alphabet, elementary grammar, and conversational and reading basics.

Advanced Beginner Yiddish is for students who have taken one semester of Yiddish and know the Yiddish alef-beys. The class will integrate listening, reading, writing, and speaking.

Beginner Yiddish is for students who are new to the Yiddish language or would like a review. It covers the alphabet, elementary grammar, and conversational and reading basics.

Join us for our annual event commemorating the Jewish community of Vilna through poetry and music. This year's program, the first ever to take place digitally via Zoom, will feature a conversation reflecting on the role that music, poetry, and ritual play in holocaust commemoration.

Join Elisheva Carlebach, Deborah Dash Moore, Dara Horn, and Itamar Borochov in a discussion about Confronting Modernity, 1750–1880, Vol. 6 of The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, edited by Elisheva Carlebach.

Join YIVO for our inaugural arts tour in August of 2020. Participants will explore the influence of Jewish artists on the Russian avant-garde in the visual arts, music, stage design, and literature.

Join us for a special online concert celebrating the 100th birthday of Yiddish songwriter, poet, and singer Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman (1920-2013), featuring a number of the Yiddish world’s leading contemporary performers.

This talk will explore the history of the Bund, and its ideological development, and will attempt to explain both the reasons for the Bund’s success, and the party’s limitations.

This lecture explores the particular social, commercial, cultural, linguistic, and historical circumstances that gave rise to the first public performances of Yiddish operetta in Romania and Russia from 1876 to 1883, a period considered the first chapter of the modern Yiddish theater.

This talk will explore how German scholar Franz Beranek presented himself to Jewish colleagues and how Jewish colleagues sought to respond to him as a person and to his scholarship in the aftermath of the Holocaust.

This lecture will explore Nahum Stutchkoff’s legacy within the “golden age” of Yiddish radio, drawing on his rich archive in the Dorot Jewish Division, New York Public Library.

Who was Chaim Zhitlovsky and what was his philosophy of Yiddishism? This lecture explores the life and thought of one of the most intriguing Jewish thinkers of the modern era.

The speaker will analyze the language and content of "Di Sedre" and the original version of Rafol Naaritsokh for the purpose of broadening the scope of scholarly evaluation of Cahan's early contribution to the Yiddish press.

Close readings of selected tracks by the Barton Brothers, Mickey Katz, and Allan Sherman will focus on their language, their music, their delivery, and what made them so influential and so very funny.

Yiddishists understood Yiddish as a global language and its secular culture as a global culture whose centre lay in eastern Europe. But where was the capital the "Yiddishland"?

We will explore what it means to limn the contours of a canon of Yiddish kidlit and discuss the unique vantage point that studying children’s literature and culture affords with respect to the rest of modern Jewish civilization.

Sari J. Siegel examines the roles and circumstances of two doctors in different Nazi camps during the Holocaust.

A digital preview of a concert surveying the history of Yiddish folksongs in classical music repertoire, featuring performances of new compositions commissioned by YIVO, performed alongside archival recordings of the Yiddish folksongs they engage with.

This lecture will use intriguing texts and images to examine what values Yiddish writers in Europe, the Americas, and Palestine considered “liberal,” and how they saw food practices including both embracing or rejecting vegetarianism, as advancing those values.

Mezzo-soprano and music scholar Lori Şen will discuss the history, language, and culture of the Sephardim, with a special focus on the elements and stylistic features of Sephardic music. The lecture will be followed by a recital of Sephardic songs for voice, piano, and guitar with Şen, Jeremy Lyons, and Alexei Ulitin.

Join YIVO for our second literary journey to Jewish Galicia in June of 2020. Participants will experience the landscapes, environment, and culture that influenced such writers as Peretz, Bruno Schulz, Agnon, Celan, and Babel.

Leon Trotsky ranks among the 20th century’s most important political leaders. This lecture will explore Jewish perceptions of Trotsky, as they appeared in Yiddish and English.

Join us for the premiere performance of 10 Children’s Songs of Y. L. Peretz (1921) by composer Moses Milner, performed by singer Lucy Fitz Gibbon with pianist Ryan MacEvoy McCullough.

Join us for a discussion of the lasting influence of An-ski’s masterwork with literary scholar Ilan Stavans, actor/director/translator Allen Lewis Rickman, and YIVO’s Executive Director Jonathan Brent.

In The Dybbuk, boundaries separating the natural from the supernatural dissolve as ill-fated pledges, unfulfilled passions and untimely deaths ensnare two families in a tragic labyrinth of spiritual possession. Join us for a screening of this classic film, remastered and with new English subtitles by The National Center for Jewish Film.

Join YIVO Executive Director and CEO Jonathan Brent in conversation with David Weisberg, CEO of the Federation for Jewish Philanthropy, to learn about the Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Online Collections project, as well as other important activities of YIVO today.

S. An-ski’s play The Dybbuk, a story of possession set in a shtetl (think The Exorcist meets Fiddler on the Roof), is the foundation of modern Jewish drama. This talk by scholar Gabriella Safran explores its roots: in Jewish folklore, the scandalous blood libel trial in Kiev in 1913, and the political passions of Russian-Jewish revolutionaries.

This lecture will explore the images of the ghost, the undead, and the zombie in the bilingual, Hebrew-Yiddish works of Hayim Nahman Bialik and Isaac Leib Peretz.

The new book Yiddish in Israel: A History challenges the commonly held view that Yiddish was suppressed or even banned by Israeli authorities for ideological reasons, offering instead a radical new interpretation of the interaction between Yiddish and Israeli Hebrew cultures.

In his new graphic novel, Ben Katchor illuminates the historical confluence of events and ideas that led to the development of a “milekhdike (dairy) personality” and the proliferation of dairy restaurants in America, and recollects his own experiences in many of these iconic restaurants just before they disappeared.

No supermarket? No problem. Authors of The Gefilte Manifesto, Liz Alpern and Jeffrey Yoskowitz, will teach you to prepare your own Ashkenazi pantry staples, and share some incredible and inspiring dishes you can make once your pantry is stocked.

Join us for a live-recording of Charlie Buckholtz’s Bad Rabbi Podcast in which Buckholtz will be joined by YIVO’s Eddy Portnoy for a discussion of Portnoy’s book, Bad Rabbi and Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press.

Author and historian David Slucki, in conversation with Eddy Portnoy, discusses his new book, which explores the Holocaust and its aftermath, absence and the scars that never heal, and fathers and sons and what it means to raise young men.

Join Joan Nathan and Smithsonian food historian Ashley Rose Young as they prepare dishes from Fania Lewando's cookbook and explore the history of Vilna, the devastating impacts of the Holocaust on the city's Jewish population, and one woman's efforts to sustain her community through food. This event takes place at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.

The Zisl Slepovitch Ensemble & Sasha Lurje perform Where is Our Homeland, an album of songs transcribed from Holocaust survivors’ testimonies in the Fortunoff Video Archive.

Harriet Murav and Justin Cammy will discuss the texture of time, futurity, and activating the unrealized potentialities of the discarded past in David Bergelson’s literary work, drawing on Murav’s recently published book, Strange New World: Untimeliness, Futurity.

Join us for a Facebook live stream celebrating Beethoven in the Yiddish imagination including a performance of Ode to Joy in Yiddish translation, a bilingual dramatic reading of a Yiddish retelling of an apocryphal story of the origins of the Moonlight Sonata, and performances of two of Beethoven's masterworks with Jewish connections.

In this online class, investigate the great historical transitions and transformations of the late 19th - early 20th centuries in Eastern Europe and Russia through the avant garde literature of those lands that may be called the literature of the “fantastic.”

Join YIVO in Vilnius, Lithuania to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the birth of the Vilna Gaon, the most significant religious leader of his generation.

YIVO and the Congress for Jewish Culture invite you to a special program remembering the Yiddish actress Mina Bern, featuring Eleanor Reissa, Shane Baker, Frank London, and Lori Wilner.

Researcher Chip Berlet and journalist Talia Lavin discuss the Far Right’s themes of demonization, scapegoating, conspiracism and apocalypticism and offer their perspectives on how to deal with this toxic social current.

In honor of International Womens Day, the AJHS and YIVO are delighted to host a panel discussion of Nancy Sinkoff's new book, From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History, the first comprehensive biography of a pioneer historian in the field of Holocaust Studies.

In his autobiography The Odyssey of An Apple Thief, Moishe Rozenbaumas takes us through his fascinating life, starting with his boyhood in pre-war Lithuania, with a focus on the most impoverished part of the Jewish population, rarely accounted for in the books written by survivors after the war.

Join the League for Yiddish in celebrating! After 15 years of inspired and groundbreaking work, Dr. Sheva Zucker is passing the baton to new editor-in-chief Dr. Miriam Trinh and new executive director Noah Barrera.

This course is a continuation of Beginner Yiddish, for students who are still new to the Yiddish language or would like a review. It covers elementary grammar, holidays, stories, and songs.

This course is for students who are new to the Yiddish language or would like a review. It covers the alphabet, elementary grammar, and conversational and reading basics.

This course is for students who are comfortable with the alef-beys and basic conversation, and will enhance skills in speaking, reading, writing, and listening.

Chava Rosenfarb was one of the most prominent Yiddish novelists of the second half of the twentieth century. This new book, compiled and edited by Goldie Morgentaler, comprises thirteen personal and literary essays by Rosenfarb, ranging from autobiographical accounts of her childhood and experiences before and during the Holocaust to literary criticism that discusses the work of other Jewish writers.

In this lecture, Dr. Vladimir Levin will consider the uneasy relationship between the architectural oeuvre of the Jewish community and the capital city of the Russian Empire.

The most extreme legacies of tsarist antisemitism were pogroms and blood libels. After the Soviets came to power, they claimed that they had eliminated both these phenomena. In her new revelatory book, Elissa Bemporad demonstrates that the Soviets’ claim was part propaganda, part reality.

Examine and discuss the cultural roots of Yiddish theatrical songs and the special allure of this music for more than three generations of immigrant-era audiences.

Scholar and musician Jeremiah Lockwood offers insights from the YIVO archival holdings that illuminate the impassioned debates among cantors and their critics in the early 20th century. Cantor Yoel Kohn, one of the leading young voices reviving Golden Age cantorial music, will sing representative works from classic records.

Join YIVO for an evening critically engaging with Avrom Sutzkever’s poetic legacy including recitations of his poetry, and discussion with literary scholar Ruth Wisse, translator Barbara Harshav, and poet Irena Klepfisz.

Historian and photographer Elżbieta Janicka, in conversation with YIVO Executive Director Jonathan Brent, investigates Polish participation in the murder of Jews set up by the German Nazi state, as well as Polish counter-narratives about the Holocaust and Jewish history. This event takes place at Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust.

Yevgenia M. Albats, a former member of the Presidium of the Russian Jewish Congress and current member of its Public Council, discusses Jewish life in today’s Russia and explores why Jews have been leaving Russia en masse over the last several years.

Ilan Stavans leads a detailed, in-depth exploration of the central themes, motives, context, and authors of modern Jewish Latin American literature.

Elżbieta Janicka examines how the narrative of Poland as a country with a “multicultural past” that was unexpectedly destroyed by “two totalitarianisms” may be a form of exclusion and violence. She reconsiders the Holocaust through the lens of persistent cultural patterns and explores how and where antisemitism remains a community building force and a powerful political tool.

Anita Norich challenges the notion that women have written no novels or only wrote “domestic” novels in Yiddish by delving into the forgotten Yiddish literature written by women.

Ronald Robboy will dive into Goldfaden’s career and the significance of the music and story of Shulamis and some of his other musical numbers.

Spencer Sunshine will explore how conspiracy theories are structured; what their relationship to antisemitism is; and how they function on the Far Right today.

Irena Klepfisz leads a writing workshop focused  on Jewish themes and experiences (contemporary and historical) and will address questions of what is Jewish writing.

Jonathan Brent explores whether Isaac Babel was a martyr to art and truth, a victim of Stalin’s antisemitism, the jealousy of a vindictive husband in a position of power, or another random casualty in the brutal chaos and cacophony of Stalin’s Great Terror.

An intensive winter course of Yiddish for those new to the Yiddish language, or who would like a review. This course covers the alphabet, elementary grammar, and conversational and reading basics.

An intensive winter course of Yiddish for those seeking exposure and instruction beyond the basics.

Eddy Portnoy presents an overview of the underbelly of Jewish society during the late 19th and early 20th century, including some of its most colorful characters.