Blog

This col­lec­tion — the inti­mate let­ters and a diary of an ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry Zion­ist politi­cian— was saved from obliv­ion by chance, found in a pile of trash in Israel. Through var­i­ous inter­me­di­aries, the col­lec­tion then end­ed up at the POLIN Muse­um of the His­to­ry of Pol­ish Jews in Warsaw.

Apr 22, 2024

The new­ly-redis­cov­ered ​“The Beach” (1996) is a strik­ing ear­ly exam­ple of Yid­dish writer, trans­la­tor, edi­tor, and teacher Jes­si­ca Kirzane’s non-Yid­dish work.

Mar 23, 2024

A lit­tle piece of bureau­crat­ic uni­ver­si­ty paper­work reminds us of the inter­na­tion­al scope and depth of the work of great Jew­ish schol­ars like Max Weinreich. 

Jan 18, 2024

Winokur’s let­ters offer a col­or­ful snap­shot of stu­dent life in Vil­na between the world wars.

May 02, 2023

A let­ter from a devot­ed read­er to Moyshe Nadir, detail­ing the per­son­al strug­gles and ide­o­log­i­cal mis­giv­ings of a dis­il­lu­sioned Communist.

Feb 20, 2023

A reflec­tion on the ​“weighty lega­cy” of retell­ng the cat­a­stro­phes and upheavals that befell the Jews of Tulchyn.

Feb 12, 2023

A melo­dra­mat­ic stu­dio pho­to­graph illus­trates the widen­ing gap between the Amer­i­can and Sovi­et branch­es of the author’s family.

Jan 18, 2023

For our briv funem arkhiv series, Artur Rudz­it­sky dis­cuss­es let­ters between Vladimir Nau­movich Wais­blat and Sholem Ale­ichem con­cern­ing Yid­dish the­ater in Kiev.

Jan 05, 2023

Ezekiel Lif­schutz’s diary from his time as YIVO chief archivist in the 1960s offers strik­ing evi­dence of the institute’s impor­tance in the wider Jew­ish world. In these pas­sages, we see the per­son­al­i­ties of three giants of mod­ern Jew­ish lit­er­a­ture — Yid­dish poet Abra­ham Sutzkev­er, Eng­lish nov­el­ist Saul Bel­low, and Hebrew writer Shai Agnon — and their rela­tion­ships to the Yid­dish language.

Mar 09, 2022

The pre­served pages of the guest book of Lublin’s renowned yeshi­va tell us about the remark­able range of cyclists, Esper­an­tists, local rab­bini­cal stu­dents, Catholic sem­i­nary stu­dents, Hasidic rab­bis, and Revi­sion­ist Zion­ists who all came to vis­it in the 1930s.

Dec 17, 2021