Blog

We are interested in pieces that place the recent events at YIVO in the context of discipline-wide trends, historical, economic, scholarly and otherwise, and that help us think through the broader forces that produced this moment and its possible ramifications.

Feb 09, 2020

Every two years, the town of Kutno, Poland hosts the Sholem Asch Festival, which organizers describe as an “event connecting the past with the present of Kutno, once a Polish-Jewish town in which Jews constituted over 70% of the population in the 19th century.”

Feb 04, 2020

In 1935, New York’s Buczacz-American Benevolent Sick and Aid Society received this appeal—in Yiddish and Polish— from the Jewish Relief Committee in Buczacz, Poland. One of the signatories was my grandfather, Moses Wolfthal.

Jan 31, 2020

Matthew Johnson and Corbin Allardice talk with Goldie Morgentaler, Chava Rosenfarb’s daughter and editor and translator of a recently published collection of Rosenfarb’s essays.

Jan 27, 2020

Posters like this one for special events, graduations, sales of Hasidic garments, computers, new books, videos and more are still popular in the Hasidic neighborhoods of Brooklyn. However, in recent years the internet has changed the business.

Jan 24, 2020

Saulė Valiūnaitė offers a glimpse into the storied Velfke’s restaurant, a gathering place for Yiddish writers, actors, and artists in interwar Vilne.

Jan 21, 2020

Rabbi Abraham Bick united a serious commitment to traditional Judaism with political radicalism in his short-lived New York City yeshiva, the Institut far Yidisher Bildung.

Jan 12, 2020

This 1939 article and photograph in a Warsaw Yiddish weekly — depicting “a typical female cocaine addict [kokainistke] with a crazed expression in the eyes,” according to the caption — point to the spread of recreational drug use within the Jewish community and its emergence as a subject of interest in the Yiddish press.

Jan 10, 2020

In geveb is among the cosponsors of an intensive workshop for reading handwritten Yiddish to be held September 6-7, 2020 at the University of Chicago

Jan 09, 2020

What kind of life will there be after the Resurrection of the Dead?

I may not believe in an afterlife or in resurrections, but I do believe that cultures can be reawakened and revived in new generations.

Jan 07, 2020