Read this article in Yiddish. Like stores, museums and theaters, archives and specialized libraries have struggled to adapt in the face of social distancing due to the Covid-19 pandemic. With staff and scholars unable to access their holdings and the public unable to attend in-person programming, many institutions have found themselves in a state of…
A member of the board of directors of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research has resigned, and another has been removed from the organization’s website, amid controversy over the organization’s decision to lay off its library staff. YIVO, the world’s preeminent center for the study of Yiddish and its history and culture, laid off all…
The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is the world’s preeminent center for the study of Yiddish language and culture. Founded in Vilna in 1925, YIVO is now based in New York and includes an academic center, an archive with 23 million item, and a library with 400,000 books. On Monday, that YIVO’s board, facing a…
Read this article in Yiddish here Nearly 700 scholars, students and former employees and volunteers of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research have signed an open letter condemning the organization’s decision to lay off all of its librarians. The letter, which is written in English and Yiddish, called for the immediate reinstatement of the four…
Updated 4:30 p.m. Read this article in Yiddish here. The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the world’s preeminent center for the study of the Yiddish language, culture and history, has laid off all of its librarians. Four people were let go in the move, which was announced internally last week and confirmed by executive director…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Whenever I see an announcement for the latest exhibit at the Neue Galerie, a New York museum of German and Austrian Art, I’m reminded of the nearly four decades (1955-1994) when the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research had its home in that same Upper East Side townhouse….
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Although he is better known in the Yiddish cultural world for his landmark textbook “College Yiddish” and his “Modern English-Yiddish/Yiddish-English Dictionary”, Uriel Weinreich was also a pioneer in the field of sociolinguistics. Even today, 50 years after his tragic death from cancer at the age of 40,…
‘You had these performers who were making fun of Jews, but the interesting twist was that Jewish performers – really the first generation of Jewish immigrants born here – saw this material, and as they got involved in entertainment, they started to do it as well.” Eddy Portnoy, curator of the new exhibit “Jewface: Yiddish…
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