discussion
Do you have a Morris Katz story? We'd love to hear it!
Morris Katz made a name for himself as a painter who not only worked with incredible speed – whipping up paintings within just minutes – but who did so while engaging his audiences with Borscht Belt-style shtick and then auctioning the paintings off to all comers. Katz regularly brought his routine to Borscht Belt hotels and delighted audiences with his extraordinary speed. He holds the Guinness World Record for world's fastest painter, which he accomplished using only a palette knife and toilet paper. Famous for his "instant art," Katz is remembered as a prolific artist, selling more original paintings than any other artist in the world.
Join YIVO to celebrate the legacy of Morris Katz by sharing your Morris Katz story. This program will be held as a Zoom meeting, and attendees will be encouraged to share their favorite memories of Morris Katz. YIVO Senior Academic Advisor & Director of Exhibitions, Eddy Portnoy will provide opening remarks.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
Presented by:
discussion
film screening
Join The Leo Baeck Institute and Center for Jewish History for a screening of the documentary A Tree of Life: The Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting. Directed by Trish Adlesic, the film examines the deadly antisemitic attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. The screening will be followed by remarks from Scott Miller, former Director of Curatorial Affairs at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and current member of the Tree of Life Memorial Project. The event will be followed by a reception.
About the Film
On Saturday, October 27th, 2018, a white supremacist, further radicalized by the political climate at the time, walked into the Tree of Life Synagogue with four semi-automatic assault weapons, shouting “all Jews must die.” He murdered eleven congregants, ranging in age from 54 to 97, as they prayed. A Tree of Life: The Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting creates a deeply personal, trauma-informed portrait of the survivors, victims, and victims' family members of the Pittsburgh Synagogue attack, and brings into sharp focus the hate-based crisis that threatens our collective safety and the very social fabric of our society. As the first film to document the survivors’ stories and the only documentary with this level of personal access to the survivors and families of the victims, viewers will experience first-hand how the lives of those directly affected have profoundly changed and how the Pittsburgh community and the congregations set out on a path towards healing. (From GoodDocs)
About the Speaker
Scott Miller was a founding staff member at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where he worked for thirty years on the museum’s initiative to rescue the evidence of the Holocaust. He served as Director of the Benjamin and Vladka Meed Registry of Holocaust Survivors – the museum’s names-information and tracing center, as well as Director of Curatorial Affairs, overseeing the museum’s archival, artifact, photo, film, music and oral history collections.
Currently Scott serves on the academic advisory committee for the Tree of Life Memorial Project in Pittsburgh, and as guest curator for the core exhibition at the Hilton Family Center for Holocaust Education in Phoenix. He was also guest curator of the “Human Rights After the Holocaust” exhibit at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education in Portland, and was a member of the curatorial team for the new core exhibition at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City.
Scott co-authored with Sarah A. Ogilvie Refuge Denied – The St. Louis Passengers and the Holocaust, which tells the story of their trek to trace the fate of all the St. Louis passengers. He also co-edited with Randolph Braham The Nazis’ Last Victims: The Holocaust in Hungary.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
Presented by:
film screening
lecture
Elissa Bemporad | Delivered in Yiddish.
This talk will explore the different forms of Jewish resistance to the wave of unprecedented violence that devastated the Jewish communities of Ukraine in 1918-1921. The responses to the pogroms took on multifaceted expressions ranging from the establishment of self-defense units to the systematic collection of witness accounts and reports by writers, medical workers, and communal leaders; from the erection of memorials to the creation of archives. The impetus for these responses to the khurbn, or destruction, in the Ukrainian towns and cities was as many-sided as the expressions of resistance themselves, and varied from the desire to preserve the memory of violence for generations to come to the attempt to ensure the perpetrators’ accountability. It will be argued that the words and deeds of the Jewish men and women who experienced the violence of this period built both on the memory of previous waves of pogroms, as well as on new strategies that grew out of the specific geopolitical reality engendered by World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution.
About the Speaker
Elissa Bemporad is Professor of History and Ungar Chair in East European Jewish History and the Holocaust at Queens College and CUNY Graduate Center. She is a two-time winner of the National Jewish Book Award. She is the author of Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (Indiana University Press, 2013), Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets (Oxford University Press, 2019), and Revolution, Civil War, and New Ways of Life (NYU Press, 2025). She is the co-editor of three volumes, including Women and Genocide: Survivors, Victims, Perpetrators (Indiana University Press, 2018) and Pogroms: A Documentary History (Oxford University Press, 2021). She is currently working on a biography of the socialist-turned-communist Ester Frumkin. She is editor of Jewish Social Studies and Series Editor of Yiddish Voices for Bloomsbury Academic.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
Presented by:
lecture
film screening and discussion
Film screening followed by Q&A with Rabbi Eli Abadie and Genie Milgrom and a reception.
Between the Stone and the Flower follows the journey of Genie Milgrom, a direct descendant of the Pre-Inquisition Jews in her quest to uncover her hidden Jewish lineage.
Raised Roman Catholic in Havana, Cuba she made a return to Judaism that shook her family and friends to the core. Her search led her to Medieval Archives in several countries to untangle the web of secrecy that her ancestors created as protection during very dark times in Europe.
This documentary was screened to sold out theatres around the world since its world premiere in Miami Jewish Film Festival earlier this year.
Roberto Otero, Director of Alternative Audiovisual is a veteran in film production. He directs his successful cooking show in Miami, “Con Sabor a Miami.” He has filmed numerous productions in the Bahamas and Peru, including documentaries for Cable and the Ministry of Education. He is a graduate of the Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográfica (ICAIC), Cuba as well as the Escuela Nacional de Cine Radio y Televisión.
Ticket Info: $10
Presented by:
film screening and discussion
lecture
Dina Porat | Delivered in English.
Determined neither to allow the Holocaust to erase East European Jewish culture nor to permit Zionism and the kibbutz to beget a lifestyle devoid of ceremony and Jewish content, the WWII partisan, poet and intellectual Abba Kovner tried to create a new kind of community at Kibbutz Ein HaHoresh. Beginning in the early 1950s, within a society that in theory was supposed to distance itself from Jewish tradition and create a new lifestyle, Kovner forged his own synthesis between old and new. According to his good friend "Yitz" (Rabbi Irving) Greenberg of New York, part of Kovner's greatness was his understanding that Judaism's internal significance was not limited to time or place, and that there was a need to bridge the gap between what had been and what should be. "After the Holocaust, he was ready to scrap the old ways and start anew. He created a combination of Jewish values and secular realism, of continuity and innovation." Kovner considered Judaism as "a consensus within a difference of opinion" and difference of opinion as "the cornerstone of Jewish culture," and he was prepared to continue building from within the disagreement. Kovner rejected the approach of the movement's leaders, who themselves had come from religious or traditional homes but had adopted the movement’s motto that "the old world had to be razed to its foundations," and who loathed the idea of returning to the customs of the Diaspora. From the day of Kovner's arrival in Eretz Israel, they were suspicious that he would try to put a skullcap on the movement's head. However, year after year, holiday and festival after ceremony and anniversary, instead of confronting them, Kovner would suggest yet another idea, attempting to change habits from within until the kibbutz was a complete creation, a Jewish-kibbutz-collective whose existence would draw its inspiration from the Jewish foundation, which would in turn be renewed through the existence of the kibbutz. Replacing kibbutz ideology with Judaism would mean admitting that the kibbutz movement had failed to create a society of value and significance, unthinkable for the movement's leaders in the 1950s; only a combination would be acceptable, if that. Kovner wanted to integrate the two to perpetuate not only the Jewish community that had been destroyed but also the lost youth movement, his European HaShomer HaTza’ir.
About the Speaker
Prof. Dina Porat is the founding head of the Kantor Center for the study of Contemporary European Jewry and served as head of the Department of Jewish History, of the Rosenberg School for Jewish Studies, and as incumbent of the Alfred P. Slaner Chair in Antisemitism and Racism – all at Tel Aviv University. She served as the Chief Historian at Yad Vashem (2010-2021) and is now its academic advisor.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
Presented by:
lecture
book talk
Desires (White Goat Press, 2024), the only novel by Celia (Tsilye) Dropkin (1887–1956), was originally serialized between March 31 and June 6, 1934, in the Jewish Daily Forward, or Forverts. Anita Norich’s new translation brings this novel to English readers.
Dropkin was born in Babruysk, a city in what is now Belarus, and immigrated to New York in 1912, where she adopted Yiddish as her primary literary language. In the 1930s, she turned to prose, publishing this novel and ten short stories that appeared in the journal Tsukunft (Future). In Desires, as in much of her work, Dropkin reflects on the internal and external conflicts of love, domesticity, and the erotic life. Through characters carefully drawn from her own immigrant milieu, Dropkin addresses the yearnings of both the body and mind, the tension between excitement and security, and the conflicting impulses that are part of the human condition.
Join YIVO for a discussion about this new translation with Norich in conversation with Director of Publishing and Public Programs at the Yiddish Book Center, Lisa Newman.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
Presented by:
book talk
lecture
Moshe Taube | Delivered in Yiddish.
Since the 15th century, many testimonies in "Loshn Ashkenaz" (which may refer both to Yiddish and to German) have been preserved in responsa(rabbinic pronouncements on matters of Jewish law written in response to questions asked of halakhic authorities). The testimonies appear in the rabbinical court records, otherwise written in Hebrew, and are quoted inside the halakhic question. Although the testimonies themselves begin and end with Hebrew abbreviations that frame the quotations (functioning like the English terms quote, unquote), they contain many words of Loshn-koydesh (Hebrew/Aramaic) origin such as kale, milkhome, khasene, efsher from everyday Yiddish usage ("Merged Hebrew"), but much material from "Whole Hebrew" as well.
On the phonetic level, not much is to be learned about the pronunciation of the words in the testimonies since their spelling is not consistent and, furthermore, because Hebrew script is underspecified in many regards, often not reflecting the distinction between many sounds, especially vowels and diphthongs. The domains where we may learn the most from these testimonies about the development of spoken and written Yiddish are syntax, morphology, and the lexicon. Many phenomena thought to belong to Early Modern Yiddish (18th century onward) are attested in 17th century testimonies and thus appear to be at least one century older.
About the Speaker
Moshe Taube is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Slavic Studies at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research focuses on two main domains: syntax of modern Yiddish and philology of medieval translations from Hebrew. He taught in the two departments numerous courses on both topics, as well as courses on general linguistics. He served as head of the Department of Linguistics and as Head of the Institute of General Humanities. He is the author of The Logika of the Judaizers: A Fifteenth-Century Ruthenian Translation from Hebrew (2016) and The Cultural Legacy of the Pre-Ashkenazic Jews in Eastern Europe (2023). He published numerous articles in both domains, which can be viewed at his Academia page: huji.academia.edu/MosheTaube.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
Marion Aptroot | Delivered in Yiddish.
Isaac Wetzlar, a Jewish merchant in Germany, writes a Yiddish letter of brotherly love to his brothers and sisters in the mid-18th century. He criticizes the fabric of Jewish society in the German lands and lays out plans for a reform of Jewish education in Ashkenaz in which both Hebrew and Yiddish play a part – for both sexes. Wetzlar calls for a return to basics within Jewish tradition, but he is also inspired by the contemporary Pietist Christian revival movement.
Further reading:
- The Libes Briv of Isaac Wetzlar. Edited and translated by Morris M. Faierstein. Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1996.
- Aptroot, Marion, and Rebekka Voß, eds. Libes Briv (1748/49) Isaak Wetzlars pietistisches Erneuerungsprogramm des Judentums: Textedition, Übersetzung, Kommentar und historische Beiträge. Hamburg: Buske, 2021.
About the Speaker
Marion Aptroot received an MA in Romance Languages from Leiden University and a DPhil in Yiddish Studies from the University of Oxford. After teaching as Preceptor in Yiddish at Harvard from 1993–1996, she was appointed professor of Yiddish Culture, Language and Literature at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. Her research focuses on older Yiddish literature and the history of the Yiddish language in their broader contexts. She has written, co-edited or co-authored several books, including Araynfir in der yidisher shprakh un kultur (2002, 2016), Storm in the Community: Yiddish Polemical Pamphlets of Amsterdam Jewry, 1797–1798 (2002), Isaak Euchel, Reb Henoch, oder: woß tut me damit? Eine jüdische Komödie der Aufklärungszeit (2004), Jiddisch: Geschichte und Kultur einer Weltsprache (2010, 2023), Leket: Yiddish Studies Today (2012), Yiddish Language Structures (2014), Yiddish Knights (2020).
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
Presented by:
lecture
theater
Adapted on stage by David Serero
Inspired by actual events, this powerful drama takes audiences on a haunting journey through one of the most infamous trials in history, examining the depths of human evil and the quest for justice.
Don’t miss this compelling and thought-provoking theatrical experience as the world premiere of “The Trial of Adolf Eichmann” opens in July 2024 at the Center for Jewish History, inviting audiences to reflect on the lessons of history and the enduring struggle for justice and reconciliation.
July 21 at 7:00PM EST
July 22 at 8:00PM EST (Premiere)
July 23 at 3:00PM EST
July 25 at 8:00PM EST
Ticket Info: $26-$36
For questions and more details please call 855.688.7277 (ext.1)
Presented by:
theater
theater
Adapted on stage by David Serero
Inspired by actual events, this powerful drama takes audiences on a haunting journey through one of the most infamous trials in history, examining the depths of human evil and the quest for justice.
Don’t miss this compelling and thought-provoking theatrical experience as the world premiere of “The Trial of Adolf Eichmann” opens in July 2024 at the Center for Jewish History, inviting audiences to reflect on the lessons of history and the enduring struggle for justice and reconciliation.
July 21 at 7:00PM EST
July 22 at 8:00PM EST (Premiere)
July 23 at 3:00PM EST
July 25 at 8:00PM EST
Ticket Info: $26-$36
For questions and more details please call 855.688.7277 (ext.1)
Presented by:
theater
lecture
Michael Lukin | Delivered in English.
Most of the Yiddish songs we know today were created in the first half of the 20th century and distributed through commercial channels such as sheet music, concerts, radio broadcasts, records and CDs, theater stages, and more recently through songbooks produced in educational settings around the world. Our discussion focuses on lesser-known songs – Eastern Yiddish musical folklore, which emerged over a period of approximately four hundred years preceding the formation of the “popular” repertoire. Although we lack transcriptions of melodies or lyrics from before the end of the 19th century, a comparative study of documentation collected from then until the middle of the 20th century reveals that older layers of this musical-poetic creativity had been preserved over long periods of time. I refer to this older repertoire as the "musical pripetshik." Similar to the traditional combined home-heat-generating cooking oven known as the pripetshik, this old song repertoire was an integral part of Jewish culture, evolving in meaning and function over time. While for many, the image of the pripetshik corresponds to the nostalgic song by Mark Varshavski of 1901, this lecture will explore the earlier history of this and other poetic and musical images to offer an appreciation of their significance.
About the Speaker
Dr. Michael Lukin of the Jewish Music Research Centre (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) researches the traditional culture of Yiddish speakers from various perspectives: the ethnomusicological, the folkloristic, and the historical. His recent publications in Polin, Shofar, Oxford Handbook of Slavic and East European Folklore, and Music Traditions illuminate the music and poetics of Yiddish folksongs and the history of their scholarship. Over the past four years, as a Polonsky Fellow in Oxford and a Mandel-Scholion Postdoctoral Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he has engaged in extensive exploration of additional aspects of Jewish Eastern European music and folklore, including semiotics of various genres, their historical development, as well as their encounters with non-Jewish traditions. Lukin teaches courses on music and folklore in the Yiddish-speaking cultural realm, Hasidic musical thought, and music by Jews – at the Hebrew University and Bar-Ilan University. This year he has been a fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, working on his new project about Hasidic nigunim.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
Presented by:
lecture
theater
Adapted on stage by David Serero
Inspired by actual events, this powerful drama takes audiences on a haunting journey through one of the most infamous trials in history, examining the depths of human evil and the quest for justice.
Don’t miss this compelling and thought-provoking theatrical experience as the world premiere of “The Trial of Adolf Eichmann” opens in July 2024 at the Center for Jewish History, inviting audiences to reflect on the lessons of history and the enduring struggle for justice and reconciliation.
July 21 at 7:00PM EST
July 22 at 8:00PM EST (Premiere)
July 23 at 3:00PM EST
July 25 at 8:00PM EST
Ticket Info: $26-$36
For questions and more details please call 855.688.7277 (ext.1)
Presented by:
theater
lecture
Karolina Szymaniak | Delivered in Yiddish.
Chaim Chajes, secretary of YIVO's Ethnographic Commission and a figure central to establishing its early research program, is barely mentioned in publications devoted to Jewish ethnography. Daniel Fajnsztejn, the first Doctor of Ethnology at Stefan Batory University in Vilna, appears in the pages of Jewish history only as a member of the "Paper Brigade" in the Vilna Ghetto. Their near complete invisibility in Polish and Jewish intellectual history is, in part, a result of their simultaneous membership in two different cultural spheres and intellectual worlds – as figures of the Polish-Jewish "cultural borderland." This lecture will present fuller profiles of both researchers and their role in shaping modern ethnography and what could have become a new field of study, the development of which was interrupted by the outbreak of World War II and the Holocaust.
This work is based on research conducted together with Prof. Anna Engelking.
About the Speaker
Karolina Szymaniak is Assistant Professor in the Jewish Studies Department of the University of Wroclaw and Research Fellow at the Jewish Historical Institute (Warsaw). Her research interests range across modern Yiddish literature, Polish-Jewish cultural relations, and translation studies. In addition to having taught Yiddish language and culture throughout Poland and Europe, she has also served as a consultant for the POLIN Museum and as a curator for the Museum of Modern Art in Lodz. Her recent publications include Montages: Debora Vogel and the New Legend of the City and My wild goat: Anthology of Women Yiddish Poets (in Polish). She is also the editor of Rachel Auerbach's Ghetto Writings (in Polish), which received the 2016 Polityka History Award, as well as the memoirs of Malke Lee and Hinde Bergner.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
Presented by:
lecture
theater
Adapted on stage by David Serero
Inspired by actual events, this powerful drama takes audiences on a haunting journey through one of the most infamous trials in history, examining the depths of human evil and the quest for justice.
Don’t miss this compelling and thought-provoking theatrical experience as the world premiere of “The Trial of Adolf Eichmann” opens in July 2024 at the Center for Jewish History, inviting audiences to reflect on the lessons of history and the enduring struggle for justice and reconciliation.
July 21 at 7:00PM EST
July 22 at 8:00PM EST (Premiere)
July 23 at 3:00PM EST
July 25 at 8:00PM EST
Ticket Info: $26-$36
For questions and more details please call 855.688.7277 (ext.1)
Presented by:
theater
film screening and discussion
Join YIVO and Poetry in America for a panel discussion and screening of a short film examining the life of Joseph Brodsky, the celebrated Russian-Jewish American writer and Nobel Laureate.
Through analyses of two of Brodsky's evocative poems, “Epitaph for a Centaur” and “Six Years Later,” this 25-minute film encapsulates Brodsky's exploration of identity, belonging, and the passage of time. The film examines the paradoxical relationship between the U.S. and Russia during the Cold War, intricately portrayed through the symbolic figure of the centaur—a representation of Brodsky’s own multi-faceted existence as Russian, American, and Jewish. By delving into the intricate language of Brodsky’s poetry, this short film explores Brodsky’s Jewish identity, his legacy, and the political undertones of his writing.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
film screening and discussion