Building a Future in America: YIVO’s 90th Anniversary Celebration

YIVO turns 90!

Join us for a day-long celebration of YIVO’s 90th anniversary with film screenings, panels and more, as we explore the history of YIVO’s pioneering work in the U.S. over the last 75 years, and its future. The day ends properly, as all anniversaries should: with a birthday party.

Schedule

10:30am-11:00am
Registration

11:00am
Welcoming Remarks, Jonathan Brent (YIVO Executive Director)

11:15am
YIVO in Vilna

Archival film footage of YIVO in Vilna as featured in the Letters to Afar exhibition. Letters to Afar was created by Péter Forgács, and scored by The Klezmatics.

11:30am
The Move to America
Keynote Address, Kalman Weiser (York University)

Saving Yiddish, Saving American Jewry: Max Weinreich and the Mission of YIVO in Post-Holocaust America

In early 1940, Max Weinreich, co-founder and guiding spirit of YIVO, arrived as a refugee in the United States and immediately set about transforming YIVO's modest American Division into what he thought would be its temporary world headquarters. As he came to understand the utter devastation visited upon Eastern European Jewry, he was obliged to reconsider the future of Yiddish and Jewish peoplehood. Though heartbroken, Weinreich devoted himself with characteristic vision and vigor to building Yiddish scholarship on new shores, and to empowering American Jewry—now poised to assume intellectual and cultural leadership of the Jewish Diaspora—to understand itself.

12:15pm-1:15pm
YIVO and the Holocaust: Research, Education and Memorialization
Panel discussion with David Engel (NYU), Michael Grunberger (Director of Collections, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum), Sam Kassow (Trinity College), David Fishman, moderator (Jewish Theological Seminary)

YIVO was one of the first and leading centers of Holocaust research, scholarship and commemoration. This panel examines YIVO's role in developing the field of Holocaust research during the first postwar decade and its unsurpassed archival collection documenting the Shoah.

1:15pm-2:15pm
Lunch (Lunch will not be provided, please make personal arrangements)

2:15pm-3:15pm
"University for All": YIVO, Scholarship and Jewish Education
Panel discussion with Hasia Diner (NYU), Rakhmiel Peltz (Drexel University), Daniel Soyer (Fordham University), Jonathan Brent, moderator (YIVO)

With an extraordinary archive and library, the Max Weinreich Center, publications, fellowships and educational programs, YIVO is the preeminent research institution on East European Jewish history and culture. This panel explores YIVO's little-known impact on the development of Jewish Studies in America, its leading role in Yiddish language research and education, and why its mission to bridge the academic and public education of Jewish history is so significant.

3:15pm-3:45pm
The Future of YIVO
Special Address, Jonathan Brent (YIVO)

4:00pm-6:00pm
Birthday Party and Reception

About the Participants

Jonathan Brent is the Executive Director of The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City. From 1991 to 2009 he was Editorial Director and Associate Director of Yale Press. He is the founder of the world acclaimed Annals of Communism series, which he established at Yale Press in 1991. Brent is the co-author of Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953 (Harper-Collins, 2003) and Inside the Stalin Archives (Atlas Books, 2008). He is now working on a biography of the Soviet-Jewish writer Isaac Babel. Brent teaches history and literature at Bard College.

Hasia Diner is the Paul and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History at New York University, with joint appointment in the department of history and the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies. She is also director of the Goldstein Goren Center for American Jewish History. She has built her scholarly career around the study of American Jewish history, American immigration and ethnic history, and the history of American women. She has written about the ways in which American Jews in the early twentieth century reacted to the issue of race and the suffering of African Americans, and the process by which American Jews came to invest deep meaning in New York’s Lower East Side. Her most recent book, We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence After the Holocaust (New York University Press) won the National Jewish Book Award in the category of American Jewish Studies. She has also written about other immigrant groups and the contours of their migration and settlement, including a study of Irish immigrant women and of Irish, Italian, and east European Jewish foodways.

David Engel is Greenberg Professor of Holocaust Studies, Professor and Chair of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, and Professor of History at New York University and Senior Fellow of the Goldstein-Goren Diaspora Research Center at Tel Aviv University. A member of the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Prof. Engel is the author of seven books on aspects of modern east European Jewish history and the Holocaust, including, most recently, Historians of the Jews and the Holocaust and The Assassination of Symon Petliura and the Trial of Scholem Schwarzbard.

David E. Fishman is professor of Jewish History at The Jewish Theological Seminary, and serves as director of Project Judaica, a Jewish-studies program based in Moscow that is sponsored jointly by JTS and Russian State University for the Humanities. Fishman is the author of numerous books and articles on the history and culture of East European Jewry, including Russia's First Modern Jews (New York University Press) and The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture (University of Pittsburgh Press). He has taught at universities in Israel, Russia, Ukraine and Lithuania, and serves on the editorial boards of Jewish Social Studies and POLIN. Dr. Fishman is YIVO's second Jacob Kronhill Visiting Scholar in East European Jewish History, and will be in residence at YIVO for the Spring 2015 semester.

Michael W. Grunberger joined the staff of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2006, after more than twenty years at Library of Congress. In his role as Director of Collections, he leads the Museum’s “Rescue the Evidence” initiative, which includes acquiring, making available, and preserving the historical record of the Holocaust. Dr. Grunberger currently serves on the Advisory Board of the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure—a consortium of twenty research organizations from thirteen countries whose purpose is to encourage collaborative research on the Holocaust.

Samuel Kassow is Charles H. Northam Professor of History at Trinity College, and is recognized as one of the world's leading scholars on the Holocaust, and on the Jews of Poland. Kassow was born in 1946 in a DP-camp in Stuttgart, Germany and grew up speaking Yiddish. Kassow attended the London School of Economics and Princeton University where he earned a PhD in 1976 with a study about students and professors in Tsarist Russia. He is widely known for his 2007 book, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Indiana University Press) was elected a Fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research, has won numerous awards, and has lectured widely.

Rakhmiel Peltz, a specialist in the social history of Yiddish language and culture, is the Founding Director of the Judaic Studies Program and Professor of Sociolinguistics at Drexel University. His numerous articles and publications include “From Immigrant to Ethnic Culture: American Yiddish Culture in South Philadelphia” (Stanford University Press, 1997). Dr. Peltz has been a fellow at the Center for Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania, the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Patt and Choseed Fellowships at YIVO. He is currently working on a book on Uriel Weinreich’s research oeuvre, as well as a book on the future of the Yiddish language. Dr. Peltz is YIVO's inaugural Atran Visiting Professor of Yiddish Language and Linguistics.

Daniel Soyer is professor of history at Fordham University in New York. With Annie Polland he is author of The Emerging Metropolis: New York Jews in the Age of Immigration, 1840-1920 (NYU Press, 2012), volume 2 of City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York, winner of the National Jewish Book Award. His previous book, Jewish Immigrant Associations and American Identity in New York, 1880-1939 (Harvard University Press, 1997) won the Saul Viener Prize of the American Jewish Historical Society.

Kalman Weiser is the Silber Family Professor of Modern Jewish Studies at York University. A native of NYC, he is the author of several studies about Jewish nationalism and Yiddish linguistics and culture. His most recent book Jewish People, Yiddish Nation. Noah Prylucki and the Folkists in Poland won the 2012 Canadian Jewish Book Award for scholarship. His current research examines the pre and post-WWII war relationship between ethnic German scholars of Yiddish who served the Nazi regime and Max Weinreich, Solomon Birnbaum and other Jewish colleagues.