News & Features

Mikhl Herzog, 1927-2013 The Board of Directors and Staff of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research mourn the passing of Professor Mikhl Herzog, founding dean of the Max Weinreich Center of Advanced Jewish Studies and a member of the YIVO Board of the Directors. Mikhl Herzog was Atran Professor Emeritus of ...

(NEW YORK, July 2013) – The YIVO Institute is pleased to announce that it has received two generous grants for work on the Sutzkever-Kaczerginski Collection, which contains some of the rarest documents held in the YIVO archives. The Collection is named in honor of the two distinguished poets who headed ...

by TOVA MESSER This year's Uriel Weinreich Summer Program in Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture was kicked off on Tuesday, June 18, 2013 by a retro-chic evening of drinks, refreshments and entertainment celebrating avant-garde Yiddish-Russian culture. A lively cocktail hour in the Great Hall was followed by performances by Artists in ResidenceShane ...

PRESS NEWS: For immediate release

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The Award Committee of the Jan Karski and Pola Nirenska Award has the pleasure to announce that Prof. Barbara Engelking of Warsaw, Poland was named the receipient of this year’s prize. Endowed by Prof. Jan Karski at YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in 1992, the $5,000 prize goes to authors of published works documenting Polish-Jewish relations and Jewish contributions to Polish culture.

The winner was chosen by the Award Committee whose members are Prof. Jerzy Tomaszewski, Prof. Feliks Tych, Prof. Paweł Śpiewak (director, Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw), Dr. Jonathan Brent (Executive Director, YIVO Institute For Jewish Research). The award ceremony will be held in September at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw.

by ROBERTA NEWMAN The first News from YIVO appeared as a short article in the Yiddish literary journal, Literarishe bleter (Literary Pages) on October 9, 1925, shortly after YIVO was formally founded in Vilna (then Wilno, Poland; now Vilnius, Lithuania). The article reports on the meeting of the Bibliographical Commission, a group ...

Yedies fun YIVO (News from YIVO) has a long history in print. With few interruptions, it has been published continually since 1925, from the very first days of the existence of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, as YIVO was then known. It began life as an article in Literarishe bleter (Literary ...

The Award Committee of the Jan Karski and Pola Nirenska Award has the pleasure to announce that Prof. Barbara Engelking of Warsaw, Poland was named the receipient of this year’s prize. Endowed by Prof. Jan Karski at YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in 1992, the $5,000 prize goes to authors ...

By JONATHAN BRENT
Executive Director, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research

Much ink has been spilled over the knaidel/kneydl quasi-controversy since it erupted in the wake of the Scripps National Spelling Bee on May 30, veering from the ponderous and scholarly to the frivolous and silly. While no YIVO scholar was consulted, expert opinion has been cited from the YIVO Institute, as has the hoary authority of Merriam-Webster.  Culinary and orthographic precedents have been invoked from generations past. The history of Jewish nationalism in Eastern Europe on the one hand, and the kitsch of the Borscht Belt have chimed in. “My Little Matzoh Ball,” sung by Little Rita Carol Age 12, a popular song from the 1950s, has begun to circulate on the internet thanks to the sound archivists at the YIVO Institute. The Carnegie Deli has enjoyed the spotlight again for what many might consider a dubious, commercial product. Fox News, TIME, The New York Times, Urdu language blogs in Pakistan and India, The Jewishpress.com, and esoteric Yiddishist blogs around the world have all joined in this celebration of—what? A word? A mystery of spelling?  Other such mysteries of spelling and transliteration abound: gray/grey; theater/theatre; travelling/traveling; Czar/Tsar; Tchekhov/Chekov/Chekhov.  Chances are that if the final question posed to young Arvind Mahankali were “theater,” it would have been prefaced with the injunction to provide the American spelling; or if of the word “Czar,” to provide the primary American spelling. No such caution occurred with “knaidel.” Why?

Joseph Berger’s article in The New York Times, “Some Say Spelling of a Winning Word Wasn’t Kosher” (May 31, 2013), notes that YIVO is by recognized by many as the authority on Yiddish. The winning word in the Scripps National Spelling Bee was knaidel (matzoh ball), or, as the spelling rules ...

Letters to Afar Museum of the History of Polish Jews May 18 – September 30, 2013 Video installation by Péter Forgács with music by The Klezmatics, commissioned by the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York The audiovisual installation Letters to Afar ...