“Briv funem arkhiv”

I not only found “Fun Hitler-land” interesting from a historical perspective—I also found it compelling as a student of Yiddish. The text tested my linguistic abilities to understand and translate Yiddish jokes (which necessarily rely on Yiddish language conventions and 1930s cultural contexts) into contemporary English.

Jan 14, 2026

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

Idishe bilder writer Moyshele Vulfart describes the visit of two Arab men from Palestine to a kibbutz hakhshara, a preparation kibbutz, in Liepaja, Latvia, in 1938. While it was not uncommon for such reports to be conveyed by Jewish comrades on return visits from Palestine, in this instance the message-bearers were Palestinian men presumably on the other side of the conflict.

Nov 22, 2021

From the collections of the University of Capetown, recently damaged by fire, an important document of Bundist history and a reminder of the global breadth - and precarity - of Yiddish archives.

Apr 29, 2021

While we usually conceive of the archive as a place to learn about the past, today we’re looking at a repository that can tell us about the place of Yiddish in today’s world full of rapid digital communication… and spam.

Feb 17, 2021

In time for Valentine's Day 2021, James Nadel introduces us to Uriel Weinreich's 1948 bilingual, multi-page, anti-Valentine's-Day valentine to his future wife, Bina Silverman.

Feb 12, 2021

A briv for khanike: a handmade menorah — complete with a row of tiny chairs — and handmade pedestal, a family heirloom donated to YIVO for safekeeping.

Dec 14, 2020

Sep 23, 2020

Moyshe Klaynman's remarkable 1943 manuscript relates his ten-month imprisonment at the Treblinka II extermination camp, his escape during the August 2, 1943 prisoner revolt, and much more. There is only one other known survivor source written so early, and there are no other known Treblinka survivor memoirs available only in the original Yiddish.

May 22, 2020

Yiddish poet and translator Yehoash lived at the famous Hotel Klibitsky in Rehovot for almost four months in 1914; the hotel featured frequently in his published travelogue. This note in the hotel's guestbook, now in the city archive, marks his stay.

May 15, 2020

Rachelle Grossman digs up a revealing clerical mix-up in the distribution of Shmuel Rollansky's 100-volume Musterverk series — a moment both funny and tragic at the end of the series' long run.

Apr 17, 2020

Michael Shapiro takes us to the Worker's Circle section of Boston's Baker Street Jewish Cemeteries, where he encountered a moving Yiddish poem.

Mar 06, 2020

On this 1933 flyer for a Kultur-lige pariz event, a walking, talking Eiffel Tower exclaims, “All of Paris is going to the Kultur-lige’s excursion to Garches, and you want me to stay here?

Feb 21, 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

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

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

Is there a more extraordinary and self-lacerating letter in all of Yiddish literature than this airmail from its most beloved poet to its most celebrated novelist?

Dec 18, 2019

Josie Naron gives us a glimpse into the pressures felt by the children of Jewish leftists targeted by McCarthyism and the role of Yiddish summer camps at the height of the Red Scare.

Dec 06, 2019

Saulė Valiūnaitė finds Chaim Grade's mother Vella listed as a fruit and vegetable seller in interwar Vilna, just as Grade movingly depicts her in his memoir.

Nov 22, 2019

Sam Shonkoff shares a receipt issued to Martin Buber for his purchase of thirty-three Hasidic volumes to be shipped from Przemyśl, Galicia, to his current home in Berlin, in October 1915 — in the midst of World War I and a turbulent year for Przemyśl's Jews.

Nov 14, 2019

For our first briv funem arkhiv, Alyssa Quint shares a Halloween-themed find: a pamphlet for a 1925 masquerade ball in Warsaw.

Oct 31, 2019