“Holocaust”

Leivick Hodes writes, in Madeleine Cohen's translation, of the trajectory of the Bund and other political movements in 1947, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Bund and Zionism.

Jun 11, 2026

Sven-Erik Rose devotes tremendous care to the texts he studies, situating them in broader currents of modern European literature and zeroing in on the qualities that make them astonishing and worthy of a much wider readership than they have had. His book will undoubtedly be a boon to scholars and readers of all kinds, from experts in the field to those with little knowledge to teachers looking for ways of incorporating powerful, lesser-known Holocaust texts into their classes.

Apr 07, 2026

“Lviv Ghetto: Space and Everyday Life” is a digital project that marks the locations of everyday life in the ghetto.

Mar 31, 2026

The letters collected here document the women’s profound struggles with survivors’ guilt, immigration, and cultural during the postwar years.

Mar 15, 2026

Zenia Marcinkowska Larsson, who died in 2007, left behind a rich literary and artistic legacy which, now that it has been brought back into view, proves capable of inspiring future generations. 

Mar 15, 2026

Yonia Fain's story follows an avant-garde theater troupe—and their clown—as the director casts the role of dictator in their next production.

Feb 27, 2026

The stories gathered in In the Shadow of the Holocaust offer distinctive vantage points on how people continue to live after a catastrophe. We suggest some avenues for class discussion that offer a framework for approaching postwar Soviet Jewish writing as literature of persistence rather than of catastrophe alone.

Feb 23, 2026

In geveb and the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University are partnering again to fund meaningful scholarship and creative productions based on the unique Yiddish oral histories at the Fortunoff Archive.

Feb 15, 2026

The Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University is collaborating with In geveb to encourage and fund scholars to work with the collection.

Oct 27, 2025

Meaghan Guterman speaks with D. Zisl Slepovich about his powerful collection of albums based on songs from Holocaust survivor testimonies held at the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University.

Jun 04, 2025

The teaching guide is designed for university-level history courses as a resource for working with oral testimony.

May 28, 2025

Reflections on two works of fiction that provided an immersive rendering of Jewish persecution in 1930s Austria.

May 20, 2025

May 19, 2025

May 07, 2025

Introducing essays describing the projects that our fellows have undertaken to interpret materials from the archive artistically, musically, and for educative purposes.

Apr 22, 2025

A member of the 2023 In geveb/Fortunoff fellowship cohort reflects on the question "How can one ethically use recorded Holocaust testimony as the basis for musical composition?"

Apr 22, 2025

On the role of Yiddish in the Holocaust testimony of Julia Pirotte, a Polish Jewish photographer.

Apr 22, 2025

Veln Di Verter Oykh Nern (The Words Will Also Nourish) is a body of work, including an edition of artist books and twelve accompanying prints, that Etai Rogers-Fett created as an In geveb/Fortunoff fellow between Fall 2023 and Spring 2024. The work emerges from Paja L’s Yiddish testimony about her experiences as a young woman, teacher, and library worker in the Vilna Ghetto.

Apr 22, 2025

The Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe, a digital language archive sourced from Holocaust survivor testimonies from the USC Shoah Foundation, is a project funded by a five-year CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation that will serve as a resource for Yiddish linguistics, pedagogy, and language revitalization.

Mar 27, 2025

The traditional Purim atmosphere of release, excitement, and permissiveness was particularly suited to the emotional needs of the time.

Mar 08, 2025

There is a well-known Yiddish proverb that argues Verter zol men vegn un nit tseyln (Words should be weighed and not counted). But when one pays attention to the weight of words in the way Hannah Pollin-Galay does, every word counts.

Feb 18, 2025

Though this film squarely fits into the growing genre of films about the return of Jews to Poland, its engine is character, not history.

Jan 13, 2025

This is a watershed entry into the English canon of Holocaust testimony.

Jun 06, 2024

A future beyond anything Rosenfarb dared to imagine is now present, and it exists alongside the painful past. 

May 07, 2024

Whether or not The Zone of Interest is a good film does not hinge on the usage of a minute-long melody. But I do believe its employment tells us the film was impeccably researched by a Jewish director with a clear vision for who ought to say what, and when.

Apr 16, 2024

The creators of the 2023 album Silent Tears: The Last Yiddish Tango grapple with complex questions about long-term trauma and the burdens of memory for women who survived the Holocaust.

Feb 23, 2024

An excerpt from Kaczerginski's memoir on the origins of the Partisan Hymn.

Jan 26, 2024

Amy Simon deploys empathic reading to interpret the range of emotions contained in Yiddish diaries written in the ghettos of Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna.

Dec 04, 2023

Nov 08, 2023

In geveb and the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University are partnering to fund meaningful scholarship and creative productions based on the unique Yiddish oral histories at the Fortunoff Archive.

Oct 22, 2023

In this study of the Jewish press in Poland, Anne-Christin Klotz identifies Polish Jewry, and specifically local Yiddish writers and journalists, as central to understanding the Nazi threat in the 1930s.

Mar 21, 2023

Shpigl’s Yiddish-Yiddish autorevisions powerfully exemplify an author’s felt compulsion to rewrite wartime writings from a postwar perspective even when no change of language—no literal translation—was involved.

Mar 14, 2023

The Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University is collaborating with the In geveb to encourage and fund scholars to work with the collection. 

Mar 07, 2023

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

Feb 12, 2023

An interview with Polish poet and musician Grzegorz Kwiatkowski.

Nov 02, 2022

May 15, 2022

Magdalena Kozłowska interviews Piotr Nazaruk about Lublin's Grodzka Gate Center and the center's new online exhibit of memory maps from yizkor bikher and oral history interviews.

Jul 06, 2020

The author reflects on his own experiences encountering David Roskies in the 1960s and collaborating with him in Holocaust remembrance at a very different time than our present context for the memory and commemoration of the Holocaust.

Jun 30, 2020

Abraham Sutzkever's poetry is often read within the confines of "Holocaust literature". This essays reads a selection of Sutzkever’s poetry against the Holocaust, against the apocalypse, and against the horizons of meaning that the label of "Holocaust literature" might impose.

Jun 30, 2020

Is there a Jewish way of not saying things? In facing crises in language during the immediate post-Holocaust years, filmmakers in English and Yiddish made choices about how to balance repair and critique.

Jun 30, 2020

This article considers the phantom traces of Yiddish in Georges Perec's W ou le souvenir d’enfance (1975).

Jun 30, 2020

In this essay, David Fishman draws a comparison between yidishe visnshaft, or Jewish studies scholarship, and Judenforschung, the Nazi field of antisemitic Jewish studies used to justify the persecution and extermination of Jews in scientific terms.

Jun 30, 2020

How and when do our readers teach khurbn materials in their Yiddish language classes? We've assembled responses to this poll in our loyt di lerers series.

Feb 23, 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

Jo Sabath talks with Francisco Dean about Dean's Frilingdik Umbazigt: As the Spring Unconquered, an electronic music piece memorializing the Holocaust that he composed and directed with high school student musicians at the Chicago Laboratory School.

Oct 17, 2019

The latest in our series in which we poll Yiddish studies instructors about a topic related to their teaching. This time, we want to know whether and how you introduce the topic of the Holocaust in your Yiddish language instruction.

Oct 15, 2019

Jul 08, 2019

Mark I. West offers suggestions for teaching Jacob Glatstein's 1943 Anti-Fascist children's poem.

Jun 10, 2019

Jonah Boyarin explores the process of his translation of Mordkhe Wolfshaut-Dinkes’s holocaust memoir, Checkmate: The Miracle of My Life.

May 14, 2019

May 06, 2019

An extract from Mordkhe Wolfshaut-Dinkes's holocaust memoir.

Mar 04, 2019

New research and translation of Avrom Sutzkever's work leads to a multilingual, multinational convening of Yiddishists in Copenhagen, Denmark and in Lund, Sweden. 

Jun 28, 2018

A bulletin produced by the Vilna Komitet in 1939, included in Miriam Schulz's recent book, Der Beginn des Untergangs: Die Zerstörung der jüdischen Gemeinden in Polen und das Vermächtnis des Wilnaer Komitees ("Before the bow that was drawn": The Vilna Komitet and its documentation of the destruction of Polish Jewry), presented here in a new translation. 

May 14, 2018

A translation of the introduction of Miriam Schulz's recent book, Der Beginn des Untergangs: Die Zerstörung der jüdischen Gemeinden in Polen und das Vermächtnis des Wilnaer Komitees ("Before the bow that was drawn": The Vilna Komitet and its documentation of the destruction of Polish Jewry).

May 14, 2018

A new translation of Jacob Glatstein's powerful and playful 1943 children's poem.

Nov 09, 2017

A standalone poem by Jacob Glatstein

Nov 09, 2017

In November 2016, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum launched the beta version of Experiencing History: Jewish Perspectives on the Holocaust, a primary-source teaching tool that aims to bring Jewish sources from the Holocaust to the North American undergraduate classroom. Emil Kerenji describes the tool and how it can be used. 

Oct 10, 2017

This online bibliographical series devoted to research resources in Yiddish Studies focuses on the Holocaust.

Jun 20, 2017

Joshua Sobol speaks to Rachelle Grossman about resistance through art and the future possibilities of Yiddish theater. 

May 12, 2017

Instructors share their thoughts on teaching with Yiddish in Holocaust Studies contexts. 

Apr 03, 2017

Do you teach courses related to the Holocaust? What role does Yiddish have in those courses? Let us know in this survey.

Feb 21, 2017

Jill Soloway and Micah Fitzerman-Blue on writing Transparent in Yiddish, whether or not you noticed. 

Mar 01, 2016

Lin Jaldati was a secular Dutch Jew who brought Yiddish music to communist East Germany. Now, Jewlia Eisenberg and David Shneer are reviving her music and investigating her revolutionary life. 

Feb 28, 2016

It seems obvious that study of the Holocaust would need to highlight Yiddish. Unfortunately though, the study of the Holocaust has often been pursued without the slightest nod to Yiddish. What is lost when Yiddish is left out? 

Aug 25, 2015

At the international symposium “Global Yiddish Culture: 1938-1949,” singer-songwriter Psoy Korolenko and Professor Anna Shternshis brought to life lost Yiddish songs of the Holocaust in an all-new concert and lecture program. 

Aug 12, 2015