News & Features

This episode of YIVO’s program on WEVD was originally broadcast on May 3rd, 1964. Ossip Walinsky (1887-1973), an active trade unionist and Labor Zionist, was born in Grodno (now in Belarus, close to the borders of Lithuania and Poland) and lived in London before immigrating to America. He served on ...

by ROBERTA NEWMAN

Fifty years ago today, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. In December 1963, Yedies marked the tragedy with death notices in both Yiddish and English.

On Tuesday, November 26th, Tony Michels, George L. Mosse Associate Professor of American Jewish History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will discuss his upcoming book on Communism, anti-Communism, and American Jews at YIVO's Ruth Gay Seminar in Jewish Studies, with moderator Daniel Soyer, Professor of History at Fordham University.

The outbreak of the Second World War precipitated an ideological-political crisis among Marxists in the United States. For much of the 1930s, Marxian intellectuals—specifically, those hostile to the Communist Party—had struggled to understand the rise of Nazism and the consolidation of Stalinism, but did so within Marxism's parameters. However, Germany's invasion of Poland, the systematic killing of Jews that followed, and the Soviet invasion of Finland raised questions about Marxism itself. Against the backdrop of totalitarianism, war, and genocide, intellectuals undertook a thorough reconsideration of Marxism. This process of rethinking Marxism entailed a new engagement with things Jewish: religion, Yiddish literature, Zionism, and the meaning of Jewish identity. This paper explores the turn to Jewishness by intellectuals during the 1940s and 1950s through the examples of Will Herberg and Irving Howe. Herberg rejected Marxism in the early 1940s, but over the next dozen years attempted to recast socialism on a theological basis, before he moved to the political right. Howe, who remained a socialist his entire life, negotiated a partial "reconquest" of Jewishness as an interpreter of Yiddish literature and the Jewish immigrant experience. Both individuals reflected larger political and cultural trends among American Jews in the post-World War II period.

Tony Michels is the author of A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Harvard, 2005) and editor of Jewish Radicals: A Documentary History (NYU, 2012). He is interviewed here by Yedies Editor Roberta Newman.

Adam Kirsch is a senior editor at The New Republic and contributing editor for Tablet magazine. He is the author of Why Trilling Matters (Yale, 2011), The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry, a Nextbook biography of Benjamin Disraeli, and two collections of poems, The Thousand Wells and Invasions.

For YIVO’s Winter Program (January 6-23rd, 2014), Kirsch will teach a course entitled “New York Intellectuals Revisited.” From the 1930s through the 1980s, a small group of mainly Jewish writers and thinkers known as the New York intellectuals helped to set the agenda for political and literary thought in America. In magazines like Partisan Review and Commentary, they charted their generation's complex relationship with Communism and Modernism. Many started on the far left and ended up as champions of neoconservatism. The class will explore the work of this seminal group.

Leah Falk spoke with Kirsch about the ideas behind the course, and why we should consider revisiting these writers today.

פֿון איציק גאָטעסמאַן

Parisian Yiddish singer Noemi Waysfeld visited New York and discussed her multilingual musical project on the subject of exile.

נאָך דעם ווי זי און איר מוזיקאַלישע גרופּע „בליק" זענען אויפֿגעטראָטן בײַ אַן אויסשטעלונג פֿונעם קינסטלער באָריס אַראָנסאָן אין פּאַריז, האָט אַראָנסאָנס זון, מאַרק, זיך פֿאַרליבט אין זייער פֿאָרשטעלונג און זיי פֿאַרבעטן קיין אַמעריקע צו שפּילן אויף זײַן זונס בר־מיצווה. דאָס האָט אונדז געגעבן די מעגלעכקייט זיך צו באַקענען און אַרומצורעדן נעמי ווײַספֿעלדס איצטיקע פּראָיעקטן.

Excerpts from an interview with YIVO Executive Director Jonathan Brent in the Forward’s online video, Philip Roth: Angst of a Retiring Novelist, exploring how Roth’s work both reflected and influenced American Jewish identity and culture.

Every month, the YIVO Library receives complimentary copies of books whose content has been drawn in part from research done by the authors in the YIVO Archives and Library. Below is a partial list of books published in 2011-2013.

In September 1950, YIVO announced plans for a new, focused effort to collect artifacts, documents and other materials documenting American Jewish history, specifically the history of the mass immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries and the impact that the immigrants were continuing ...

YIVO, in cooperation with the National Library of Lithuania and the Lithuanian Central State Archives (LCSA), is developing a detailed plan for the digitization of its collections in Lithuania, including newly discovered materials at the LCSA.

As we have reported earlier here, on Monday, November 4, 2013, YIVO’s longtime music archivist and Jewish cultural treasure Chana Mlotek passed away. But YIVO also lost another dear friend, Dr. Alfred Moldovan, who died that same day. Many in the Jewish world knew Dr. Moldovan as a major Judaica collector ...