Jewish Identity in Lithuania Today

Panel Admission: Free Watch the video

Join YIVO for a conversation about the resurgence of interest in Jewish identity and history in Lithuania today. Jonathan Brent will moderate a conversation among Miglė Anušauskaitė, a Lithuanian cartoonist and archivist working on the Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Online Collections Project, Anna Avidan, Managing Director of LitvakWorld, Kęstas Pikūnas, publisher of Passport, and former Lithuanian Minister of Culture, Mindaugas Kvietkauskas. Together they will explore topics such as the historical and social realities of Jewish-Lithuanian relations, and the challenges of building a multi-cultural, democratic society in Lithuania today.

About the Participants

Miglė Anušauskaitė is a researcher in the Judaica Research Center of the National Library of Lithuania, where she mainly works with manuscripts in Yiddish from the Interwar period. Apart from her direct responsibilities and participation in YIVO project, Miglė has worked extensively with texts and translations, both from Yiddish and from English to Lithuanian. She has translated two non-fiction books from English and an autobiography from Yiddish to Lithuanian and English. She has recently made 3 small comic books about the culture of Ashkenazi Jews. She has also written and drawn many comics about literature, science and history, among them – a graphic novel on Greimassian semiotics, presently being adapted into an animation movie.

Anna Avidan is a psychologist and educator, as well as the founder of an HR consulting company. She was born in Vilnius, Lithuania, in a family of Holocaust survivors. For the past ten years, Anna has led the non-profit organization “Jerusalem of the North,” dedicated to celebrating Jewish history and cultural heritage in Lithuania.

Mindaugas Kvietkauskas is a literary scholar, writer, and translator. Kvietkauskas served as Lithuania’s Minister of Culture. Before becoming a minister, Kvietkauskas worked at the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore in Vilnius for many years and managed this institution in 2008-2018. Kvietkauskas acquired his Ph.D. at the Department of Lithuanian Literature, Vilnius University, and studied Yiddish Language and Literature at The Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies of the University of Oxford. His main areas of research are multinational literary modernism and urban culture in Lithuania and East-Central Europe. He is the author of two academic monographs, a collection of poetry, and a recent book of literary essays “Uosto Fuga” (“The Port Fugue”). Kvietkauskas has also translated several books from the Polish and Yiddish languages, including works by Czesław Miłosz and Abraham Sutzkever.

Kęstutis Pikūnas is a Vilnius-based publisher, author, award-winning book designer, and compiler. His latest work is the third volume of Passport Journal, a bilingual annual publication, which brings to the reader an immersive insight into the history of the Lithuanian Jews, also known as the Litvaks. Throughout all of his works Kęstutis Pikūnas constantly stresses the importance of history, storytelling and aesthetics. He has graduated from the Columbian Union College (Washington DC, USA) and Newbold College (England) in 2005, then worked in printing/publishing industry. Former chairman of the World Lithuanian Youth Association.

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.