Past Events

This paper, largely based on radio broadcasts accessed through the YIVO Sound Collection, examines eyewitness accounts of Nazi persecution as they aired on radio programs in early postwar America.

Since the nineteenth century, Jews have played prominent roles in a variety of leftist political movements. YIVO, in association with AJHS, brought together historians, political scientists, philosophers, and journalists from Europe, Israel, and America to discuss some of the important topics pertaining to the relationship between Jews and the Left.

This concert series is devoted to rarely heard masterworks from the Sidney Krum Jewish Music and Yiddish Theater Memorial Collections at YIVO, performed by gifted young artists from the Juilliard School, the Manhattan School of Music and other premier conservatories in the metropolitan New York area.

Sholem Aleichem’s 1888 novel Stempenyu tells the story of an itinerant klezmer violinist in the Eastern European shtetl.

The inaugural program in the “From the YIVO Archives” series focused on the post-war memoir of Tuvia Bielski, leader of the Bielski partisans during World War II. The memoir was discovered in the YIVO Archives in 2009.

This talk considers the role of international travel, correspondence, touring, and artistic exchange in the Vilna Troupe's extraordinary rise to success.

The Devil in history and politics is a characteristically Eastern and Central European theme, from Mikhail Bulgakov to Leszek Kolakowski who had long intended to undertake a major work on the Devil in history and politics.

During the Second Polish Republic the history of East European Jews became a well-defined professional field, with its own scholarly literature, journals, research questions and methodological and ideological debates.

Jonathan Brent, Arnold Richards, and Nathan Szajnberg discussed the cohort of psychoanalysts in the United States who belonged to the Communist Party in the 1930s and 1940s, and their impact on both clinical practice and theory. 

This talk explores the evolution of Zhitlovski's program for secular Yiddish culture before and after Czernowitz, his radical plan for American Jewry, and his approach towards translation in theory and practice.

Born Lev Davidovich Bronstein in southern Ukraine, Trotsky was both a world-class intellectual and a man capable of the most narrow-minded ideological dogmatism.

Yiddish stories describing the intellectual limitations of the Khelemer naronim, the fools, or, in the more common ironic formulation, the wise men of Chelm, made their debut in Eastern Europe in the 19th century.

Although overshadowed in historical memory by the Holocaust, the anti-Jewish pogroms of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were at the time unrivaled episodes of ethnic violence.

Between 1914 and 1917, the ethnographer, playwright and relief worker S. An-sky spent months at a time on a remarkable mission to assist and document the experiences of Jews throughout Galicia and the Russian Pale of Settlement.

Leading Holocaust historian Debórah Dwork (Clark University) and Cathy A. Frierson (University of New Hampshire) presented their research on the devastating impact of the Holocaust and Soviet Terror on children.

In the late 1940s, the International Workers Order (IWO), a leftwing, multi-ethnic fraternal order established by Jews active in the American Communist movement, reached a membership peak of close to several hundred thousand members.

The two major works that Moyshe Kulbak completed while living in Berlin in the early 1920s count as significant achievements in Yiddish modernism, each poised between nostalgia and apocalypse.

During World War II, Stalin’s ideologists decided to form a new organization called the Jewish Antifascist Committee (JAC), which became a structural unit of the Soviet Information Bureau, or Sovinformburo.

This lecture explored the Broder singers’ history, repertoire, and style, and their relationship to Yiddish theater.

Follow Di Shekhter-tekhter, accompanied by their Musical Director and father, Binyumen Schaechter, in this film premiere of their one-of-a-kind musical revue, which has enthralled audiences around the world.