book talk
The Interracial Left and the International Workers Order, 1930–1954 - Live on Zoom
From Popular Front to Cold War tells the story of the International Workers Order (IWO), an organization founded in 1930 to provide life, burial, and health insurance to its members. The IWO broadened its mission to promote interracial solidarity, support labor unions, combat racism and antisemitism, and champion progressive social programs from the Great Depression into the postwar era.
At its height, the IWO had almost two hundred thousand members drawn from a broad ethnic and racial spectrum of the working class. It operated summer camps, published foreign-language newspapers, and supported a wide range of cultural activities. An early advocate for the United States' entry into World War II, the IWO was also ahead of its time in championing the nascent civil rights movement. After the war, it was declared a subversive organization due to its ties to the Communist Party and disbanded in 1954, though its legacy as a model for working-class cooperation across racial and ethnic differences endures to this day.
Join editor Elissa Sampson and contributors Jennifer Young and Felicia Bevel about this book, in a discussion led by Kate Rosenblatt.
About the Speakers
Elissa Sampson is a Research Associate in Cornell University's Jewish Studies Program. She is an urban geographer who studies how the past is actively used to create new spaces of migration, memory, heritage, and activism. Her life-long interest in migration, diaspora, re-diasporization, and culture has been pursued in the Lower East Side, Brooklyn, Jerusalem, Paris, and elsewhere and points to the dynamic interactions among diasporas in shared spaces/places.
Jennifer Young is the Education Program Manager at the Yiddish Book Center. Jennifer served as the Director of Education at the YIVO Institute, where she also worked as Digital Learning Curator to produce YIVO's first online class, Discovering Ashkenaz. She has also worked at the Tenement Museum, the Lower East Side Jewish Conservancy, and the New York Historical Society. Jennifer received a B.A. in Anthropology and Jewish Studies from McGill University and an M.A. in Anthropology from the University of Illinois. After completing doctoral studies in Jewish history at NYU, she received an M.Ed in Museum Curriculum and Pedagogy from the University of British Columbia. She also serves as part of a scholars' working group dedicated to research and scholarship of the Yiddish Left, sponsored by Cornell University.
Felicia Bevel is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Florida. Her research and teaching interests include African American history, twentieth century U.S. history, cultural history, and childhood studies. Her current research examines early twentieth century American cultural productions that romanticized the Old South and circulated outside the U.S. within the larger Pacific world, specifically in Canada and Australia. Her work has been supported over the years by the Ford Foundation, ACLS, and Florida Education fund. At UNF, she teaches courses such as the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Pacific, and Blackness in Archives and has served on the advisory boards of the Digital Humanities Institute and Africana Studies. She is also a faculty member on the Red Hill Cemetery Project, a collaboration between UNF and the Okefenokee Heritage Center and Black Hertiage Committtee to document the history of an African American cemetery in Waycross, GA.
Kate Rosenblatt is the Jay and Leslie Cohen Assistant Professor of Religion and Jewish Studies at Emory University. She is a historian of American religion with a focus on the history and experience of American Jews. She earned a BA in American history from Columbia University (2006), a BA in Bible and Ancient Semitic Languages from the Jewish Theological Seminary (2006), and both an MA in Jewish Studies (2009) and a PhD in American history (2016) from the University of Michigan. Her first book, Cooperative Battlegrounds: Farmers, Workers, and the Search for Economic Alternatives (under contract, History of American Capitalism series, Columbia University) details the efforts of a coalition of Americans – workers, farmers, religious clergy and their laities, labor activists, reforms, state and federal bureaucrats, and others – to put forward an alternative expression of American capitalism by way of producer and consumer cooperatives across the twentieth century. She is also at work on a second book project, a reappraisal of the post-World War II American Jewish left.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
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book talk
book talk
Eastern European Jewish Immigrant Bankers and the Shaping of American Finance, 1873–1930 - Live on Zoom
What are immigrants to do when business opportunities abound in their new home, but banks refuse essential financial support? How could they make the journey in the first place without helping hands? In this lively history, Rebecca Kobrin chronicles the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Jewish immigrants who stepped up by doing the lending themselves. Arriving from the Russian Empire and settling primarily in New York, they made livelihoods by assisting fellow Jews, so they could purchase passage to the United States and, after arriving, obtain credit that other lenders would not dare provide. Drawing on previously unexamined archival materials in Russian, Yiddish, German, and English, Credit to the Nation traces the novel practices of bankers who not only enabled the flourishing of American Jewry, but also revolutionized the US financial industry.
Join us for a discussion with Kobrin about this book, led by Annie Polland.
About the Speakers
Rebecca Kobrin is the Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History at Columbia University. She works in the fields of immigration history, urban studies, business history, Eastern European history and American Jewish History, specializing in modern Jewish migration. She received her B.A. (1994) from Yale University and her Ph.D. (2002) from the University of Pennsylvania. She served as the Blaustein Post-Doctoral Fellow at Yale University (2002-2004) and the American Academy of Jewish Research Post-Doctoral Fellow at New York University (2004-6). Her book Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora (Indiana University Press, 2010) was awarded the Jordan Schnitzer prize (2012). She is the editor of Chosen Capital: The Jewish Encounter with American Capitalism (Rutgers University Press, 2012), Salo Baron: Using the Past to Shape the Future of Jewish Studies in America (Columbia University Press, 2022), and is co-editor with Adam Teller of Purchasing Power: The Economics of Jewish History (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).
Annie Polland is a public historian, author, and President of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, where she served as Vice President for Programs and Education from 2009 to 2017. Prior to her return to the Tenement Museum, she served as Executive Director of the American Jewish Historical Society. She is the co-author, with Daniel Soyer, of Emerging Metropolis: New York Jews in the Age of Immigration (New York University Press, 2013). She served as Vice President of Education at the Museum at Eldridge Street, where she wrote Landmark of the Spirit: The Eldridge Street Synagogue (Yale University Press, 2008).
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
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book talk
lecture
Never Again, When?: German Memory Culture, the Holocaust, and Free Expression - In-person Program
This event is part of LBI's Forum on Free Speech and Democracy.
In a recent article for New German Critique, sociologist Irit Dekel (Indiana University, Bloomington) described the phrase “Never Again” as a floating signifier, “flexible enough to carry different meanings for different audiences while remaining specific enough to galvanize various political actions, depending on the context and speakers.” In a comprehensive analysis of the use of the phrase in German discourse since October 7, 2023, she showed how “Never Again” has been deployed to argue for the singularity of the Holocaust and the need to protect Jews from a feared repetition of the catastrophe. When the same language is invoked to draw universal lessons from the Holocaust, however, it can draw both social and legal censure.
With philosopher Omri Boehm (The New School), Dekel will discuss the origins of the phrase “Never Again” in German history and the ways that Holocaust memory politics impacts free expression in Germany today.
About the Series
Leo Baeck Institute Forum on Free Speech and Democracy
Made possible in part by support from the Erna & Heinz Mayer Fund at the LBI
As the United States observes its semiquincentennial anniversary, one of its most cherished political values is also one of its most hotly debated. Is free speech still protected in America? If not, what poses the greater threat: state repression, a censorious culture, or a corporate media environment where free expression belongs to the highest bidder? In a world where hatred quickly metastasizes online – are the people even safe from free speech?
The ideas that found expression in the First Amendment and the constitutions of other liberal democracies were shaped and reshaped by Jewish thinkers from Spinoza to Arendt, enabled processes of Jewish emancipation and religious reform, and are still seen as undergirding religious freedom in pluralistic societies.
In this series, scholars, activists, and public intellectuals will explore these questions through the lens of German-Jewish history, starting with documents in the LBI collections and mining them for insight into the present.
About the Speakers
Irit Dekel is an Assistant Professor in Germanic Studies and Jewish Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. Her work focuses on the relations between collective memory, media and the public sphere, particularly on Holocaust memorialization and the representation of ethnic and religious difference in contemporary Germany. Dekel’s first book, Mediation at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin (Palgrave, 2013), analyzed how various groups mediate their experience in the Holocaust Memorial. Her second book, ‘Witnessing Positions: Jews, Memories and Minorities in Contemporary Germany’ is forthcoming with Indiana University Press in January 2027. Dekel co-edited the Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism (2023).
Omri Boehm is Associate Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. He teaches and writes on early modern philosophy and philosophy of religion, with a specific focus on Descartes, Spinoza and Kant. His books include The Binding of Isaac: A Religious Model of Disobedience (Continuum, 2007), Kant’s Critique of Spinoza (Oxford University Press, 2014), Haifa Republic: A Democratic Future for Israel (Penguin Random House, 2021), and Radikaler Universalismus: Jenseits von Identität (Propyläen Verlag, 2023). In addition to his academic publications, he has also written for outlets including the LA Review of Books and the New York Times.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
Presented by:
lecture
book talk
Polish-Jewish Masculinities and the Challenge of Modernity - Live on Zoom
At the turn of the twentieth century, Jewish men in Eastern Europe lived in a social reality in which both Jewish and non-Jewish men and women tested, debated, and redesigned masculinities. Men of Valor and Anxiety by Mariusz Kalczewiak explores how religion, class divisions, antisemitism, new domesticity, and militarization changed masculine ideas and practices in Eastern Europe between the 1890s and 1930s. Kalczewiak’s study ventures into the military barracks, yeshivot study halls, fraternity parties, and Jewish homes to demonstrate how complex Jewish masculinities were between orthodoxy, acculturation, Polish and Jewish nationalisms, and changing notions of domesticity and profession. Men of Valor and Anxiety is the first book to demonstrate how the links between ethnicity and gender were constructed within both global and local contexts.
Join YIVO for a discussion with Kalczewiak about this book, led by Miriam Mora.
About the Speakers
Mariusz Kalczewiak is a Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland. He is a social and cultural historian of modern Jewish history, with a focus on Latin America and Eastern Europe. His award-winning book Polacos in Argentina: Polish Jews, Interwar Migration, and the Emergence of Transatlantic Jewish Culture was published in 2020 with the University of Alabama Press. His second book Men of Valor and Anxiety: Polish-Jewish Masculinities and the Challenge of Modernity came out in 2025 with Indiana University Press.
Miriam Mora is a historian of American immigration and ethnic history, with a focus on Jewish American gender identity. Her areas of research interest and specialization include modern Jewish history, gender and antisemitism, genocide studies, Holocaust memory and representation in pop culture, masculinity, history of Irish conflict, and American Jewish acculturation. Her first book, Carrying a Big Schtick: Jewish Acculturation and Masculinity in the Twentieth Century was released from Wayne State University Press in 2024. She previously served as Academic Director at the Center for Jewish History in New York City.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
Presented by:
book talk
celebration
Shmooze & Booze
Celebrate the start of summer at Shmooze & Booze Shabbat, an elevated Shabbat dinner experience for young Jewish adults at the Center for Jewish History. Join NYC’s vibrant Jewish community for a stylish evening of connection and culture featuring curated cocktails, a buffet dinner, and exclusive after-hours access to CJH’s galleries.
As the foremost repository of Jewish history in the United States, the Center for Jewish History offers a truly distinctive setting to celebrate Jewish heritage while forging new connections with fellow young Jewish New Yorkers.
Blending the warmth of Shabbat with the energy of summer in the city, this special evening is the perfect opportunity to raise a glass and enjoy community connection in one of New York’s most extraordinary cultural spaces.
Optional Shabbat service at 6:30 pm.
Ticket Info:
In celebration of CJH’s 25th anniversary, we are offering $25 early bird tickets through May 25th.
Standard: $36
Tickets are non-transferable and non-refundable.
By registering, you may be contacted by the event sponsors.
Presented by:
celebration
lecture
Bearing Witness Across Generations: The Austrian Heritage Collection at 30 - In-person Program
The Austrian Heritage Collection (AHC) is celebrating its 30th anniversary. Established through the collaboration of the National Fund of the Republic of Austria for Victims of National Socialism, the Austrian Cultural Forum New York (ACFNY), the GEDENKDIENST association, and the Leo Baeck Institute New York, Austrian volunteers have been traveling to New York every year since 1996. Since then, the AHC has pursued the goal of documenting the history of Austrian-Jewish emigrants who fled to North America during the years of Nazi rule over Europe.
Thirty years after its founding, 57 different Gedenkdienst volunteers have conducted more than 1,000 oral history interviews. More than 4,000 questionnaires have been returned, and numerous contemporary documents have been collected. The voices of many people who for a long time—particularly in their country of origin, Austria—found little or no public recognition have reached a wider audience through this project. Their stories are also carried forward by the volunteers serving in the Gedenkdienst program.
With the passing of the last emigrants and survivors—what is often referred to as the “end of the era of eyewitnesses”—the AHC is facing a new challenge. Since 2025, it has already become the reality for Gedenkdienst volunteers to interview primarily the children, nephews, and nieces of survivors and emigrants—the so-called second generation. While this will significantly and sustainably change the project in the future, these individuals also bring new perspectives. For this reason, the 30th anniversary of the Austrian Heritage Collection is not only a moment for celebration, but also a time for reflection.
Nina Glueckselig, Leonie Eidinger, and Beatrice Segal: their parents had fled from Austria and found a new home in the United States and Canada. These three members of the second generation tell the stories of their parents and relatives. They speak about their own histories, reflect on the significance of bearing witness, discuss the role of the second generation, and consider the future of the Austrian Heritage Collection.
The event is taking place in cooperation with the Austrian Cultural Forum New York (ACFNY).
About the Speakers
Nina Glueckselig - born in 1956 in Washington Heights, New York, is a retired nurse, social worker, and jewelry designer who researched the experiences of children of Holocaust survivors for her thesis.
Her parents, Leo and Ita Glueckselig, met while studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. After a failed escape attempt, Leo witnessed Kristallnacht before emigrating to the United States with his brother and later served in the U.S. Army in the Philippines. Ida fled under an assumed name to Hungary and eventually returned to Poland; after the war, Leo located her through the American Red Cross. Leo went on to work as a graphic designer and illustrator in New York and was part of the Oskar-Maria-Graf Stammtisch, with his artwork exhibited in the US and Austria since 1999.
Listen to the interview with Leo Glueckselig conducted by Martin Horváth in 1997.
Listen to the interview with Nina Glueckselig conducted by Noel Kogler and Pia Maurer in 2025
Leonie Eidinger - daughter of Sidi Shernofsky and Manny Brecher, born in 1954 in Montreal, Canada, is a clinic coordinator for an ophthalmic in-home service for seniors.
Following the November pogrom of 1938, Sidi’s father was interned in Dachau and Buchenwald and released after the family secured visas to Shanghai. In 1939, Sidi and her parents traveled via Genoa to Shanghai, where her mother died shortly after their arrival. Sidi and her father were later forced to move to the Shanghai Ghetto in the Hongkou District, while she attended school outside the ghetto and her father worked as a jeweler. In 1947, they emigrated to Montreal via San Francisco and New York.
Listen to the interview with Sidi Shernofsky conducted by Emma Schrott in 2018.
Beatrice Segal - a clinical social worker and therapist, was born in New York City in 1962 to book editor David Segal and author Lore Segal.
Lore Segal was born in Vienna in 1928 and was sent to England on a Kindertransport after the Anschluss, where she lived with several families before reuniting with her parents. She later studied English literature in London, lived briefly in the Dominican Republic, and immigrated to the United States in 1951. She went on to teach creative writing at various American universities and became a well known author.
Lore Segal was interviewed for the Austrian Heritage Collection twice.
Listen to the interview with Lore Segal conducted by Klaus Fiala in 2008.
Listen to the interview with Lore Segal conducted by Miriam Bonaparte and Kevin Gheorghe in 2023.
Listen to the interview with Beatrice Segal conducted by Pia Mauerer and Noel Kogler in 2025.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
Heresy, Witch Hunts, and Political Persecution: The Problem of Speech from Enlightenment to the Present - In-person Program
This event is part of LBI's Forum on Free Speech and Democracy.
Made possible in part by support from the Erna & Heinz Mayer Fund at the LBI
In 1783 the German philosopher Moses Mendelsohn published his monumental work Jerusalem – Or on Religious Power and Judaism where he laid out his blueprint for Jewish political and religious life. At the very center of Jerusalem was the idea that all human beings should be granted the ability to think and speak without religious coercion or censorship. To prove his point, Mendelsohn recuperated the legacy of the most infamous and detested heretic on the Continent, Barukh Spinoza, the so-called “atheist” and political “libertine.”
In this conversation, the philosopher Jason Stanley (Toronto) and the historian Eliyahu Stern (Yale) will discuss the relevance of Mendelssohn’s and Spinoza’s views on heresy and the freedom of speech to the threats facing American political life and Jewish communities and institutions today.
About the Series
Leo Baeck Institute Forum on Free Speech and Democracy
Made possible in part by support from the Erna & Heinz Mayer Fund at the LBI
As the United States observes its semiquincentennial anniversary, one of its most cherished political values is also one of its most hotly debated. Is free speech still protected in America? If not, what poses the greater threat: state repression, a censorious culture, or a corporate media environment where free expression belongs to the highest bidder? In a world where hatred quickly metastasizes online – are the people even safe from free speech?
The ideas that found expression in the First Amendment and the constitutions of other liberal democracies were shaped and reshaped by Jewish thinkers from Spinoza to Arendt, enabled processes of Jewish emancipation and religious reform, and are still seen as undergirding religious freedom in pluralistic societies.
In this series, scholars, activists, and public intellectuals will explore these questions through the lens of German-Jewish history, starting with documents in the LBI collections and mining them for insight into the present.
About the Speakers
Jason Stanley is a philosopher and the Bissell-Heyd-Associates Chair in American Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto. He is the author of seven books, including How Propaganda Works (2015), the New York Times-bestselling How Fascism Works (2018), and Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future (2024). His books have been translated into more than 25 languages.
Before moving to the Munk School in 2025, Stanley was the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University (2013–2025). He has also taught at Rutgers University (2004–2013), the University of Michigan (2000-2004), and Cornell University (1995-2000).
Eliyahu Stern is Professor of Modern Jewish Intellectual and Cultural History in the Departments of Religious Studies and History at Yale University. Previously, he was Junior William Golding Fellow in the Humanities at Brasenose College and the Oriental Institute, University of Oxford. He is the author of the award-winning, The Genius: Elijah of Vilna and the Making of Modern Judaism (2012). His second monograph Jewish Materialism: The Intellectual Revolution of the 1870s (2018) details the ideological background to Jews’ involvement in Zionism, Capitalism, and Communism. He has served as a term member on the Council on Foreign Relations and a consultant to the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, Poland. Currently, he is a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Center of Jewish History.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
From Pamphleteers to Podcasts: How Evolving Media Environments Can Fuel Antisemitism and Authoritarianism, and What to Do About It - In-person Program
This event is part of LBI's Forum on Free Speech and Democracy.
Each advance in media technology can serve both constructive and destructive purposes. When the printing press was invented in the fifteenth century, it helped disseminate the anti-Jewish blood libel and sear the image of a "dangerous" Jew in European Christian imagination. Later, modern newsprint and radio were quickly adopted by antisemites and white supremacists. Today, in the midst of another media revolution, extremism spreads rapidly online through social media and podcasts. This event will ask what role antisemitism and conspiracy theories have historically played in challenging democracies and undergirding authoritarianism. How does the structure of online platforms amplify extremists and create financial incentives for hate? And what should we do about it?
David Brody is the Executive Director and founder of the Alliance of Jewish Americans, a nonprofit, nonpartisan Jewish civil rights organization that confronts extremism and drives legal accountability in the U.S. He is a leading national expert on the intersections of white nationalism, surveillance technologies, and civil rights. Previously he was the director and founder of the Digital Justice Initiative at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, where he advocated for policies to protect privacy and civil rights online and litigated against white supremacists and voter suppression efforts.
Magda Teter is Professor of History and the Shvidler Chair in Judaic Studies at Fordham University. She is the author of several award-winning books, most recently, Blood Libel: On the Trail of An Antisemitic Myth (2020), Christian Supremacy: Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism (2023), Blood Libels, Hostile Archives: Reclaiming Interrupted Jewish Lives (2025). Her essays have also appeared in the New York Review of Books, Public Seminar, the JTA, and others. Teter's research has been supported by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, HF Guggenheim Foundation, the Cullman Center at the NYPL, the NEH, and the Center for Jewish History, among others. She is currently the President of the American Academy of Jewish Research.
About the Series Leo Baeck Institute Forum on Free Speech and Democracy
Made possible in part by support from the Erna & Heinz Mayer Fund at the LBI
As the United States observes its semiquincentennial anniversary, one of its most cherished political values is also one of its most hotly debated. Is free speech still protected in America? If not, what poses the greater threat: state repression, a censorious culture, or a corporate media environment where free expression belongs to the highest bidder? In a world where hatred quickly metastasizes online – are the people even safe from free speech?
The ideas that found expression in the First Amendment and the constitutions of other liberal democracies were shaped and reshaped by Jewish thinkers from Spinoza to Arendt, enabled processes of Jewish emancipation and religious reform, and are still seen as undergirding religious freedom in pluralistic societies.
In this series, scholars, activists, and public intellectuals will explore these questions through the lens of German-Jewish history, starting with documents in the LBI collections and mining them for insight into the present.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
Presented by:
lecture
exhibit opening
Comics and Cocktails with the Curators – In-person Program
Please note: This event is SOLD OUT.
Join the American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS) and the Center for Jewish History (CJH) for Comics and Cocktails with the Curators, a special opening event for The Jack Kirby Way: How a Boy from the Lower East Side Became the King of Comics.
Before he became the “King of Comics,” Jack Kirby was Jacob Kurtzberg, the son of Jewish immigrants growing up on New York’s Lower East Side during the Great Depression. He would go on to help create the Marvel Universe and forever transform popular culture. Featuring more than 70 pieces of original art, rare comics, and historic artifacts, this first-of-its-kind exhibition explores how Kirby’s Jewish identity, New York roots, and boundless imagination inspired generations of superheroes and stories that changed the world.
Curated by author, pop culture historian, and AJHS Trustee Roy Schwartz, along with Founding Trustee and Director of the Jack Kirby Museum & Research Center, Randolph Hoppe, this exhibition is presented by the American Jewish Historical Society in partnership with the Jack Kirby Museum & Research Center. Karen L. Green, Curator for Comics and Cartoons at Columbia University, will moderate this discussion.
Light refreshments will be served, and space is limited.
Ticket Info: This event is sold out.
Presented by:
exhibit opening
lecture
The Drama of Russian Jewry in the Long Twentieth Century – Live on Zoom
Zvi Gitelman | Delivered in English.
In 1900, there were five million Jews in the Russian Empire, more than in any other country in the world. Today, there are only about 300,000 Jews in the Former Soviet Union. For hundreds of years, Yiddish was the dominant language among the Ashkenazi Jews of Russia, but in 1989, only 11 percent claimed Yiddish was their “mother tongue.” The past 150 years have seen turbulent, sometimes tragic, changes among “Russian Jews.” At one time, they enjoyed dramatic educational, professional, and social upward mobility. But they also experienced two revolutions, two world wars, a civil war, drastic changes in their culture, including Yiddish, and the near-disappearance of Judaism. Their massive emigration, mostly to Israel, North America, and Western Europe, had a profound influence on the countries and cultures of their new homes. This lecture by Zvi Gitelman will explore the transformation of Russian Jewry during the twentieth century.
About the Speaker
Zvi Gitelman is the Preston R. Tisch Professor Emeritus of Judaic Studies and Professor Emeritus of Political Science at University of Michigan. He studies ethnicity and politics, especially in former Communist countries, as well as Israeli politics, East European politics, and Jewish political thought and behavior. His most recent edited book is The New Jewish Diaspora: Russian-speaking Immigrants in the United States, Israel and Germany (Rutgers University Press, 2016). In 2012, Cambridge University Press published his Jewish Identities in Postcommunist Russia and Ukraine: An Uncertain Ethnicity which drew on two large surveys that he conducted with two colleagues in Russia. Gitelman is co-editor of a forthcoming volume on Jewish thought, politics and literatures in the interwar (1918-1939) period (Yale University Press). He is writing a book on ethnic relations in the Soviet armed forces and the partisans during the war, and Soviet policy regarding the Holocaust.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required.
Presented by:
lecture
conversation
At Lunch with Michelle Friedman – Live on Zoom
Julie Salamon, New York Times best-selling author and journalist, sits down with author and psychiatrist Michelle Friedman to discuss her career and recent book Divine Corners. Michelle Friedman is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and teacher whose life and work explore the art of listening and the resilience of the human spirit. Raised on a chicken farm in the Catskills by Holocaust survivor parents, she became a healer devoted to helping others find meaning and repair. In her recent memoir, Divine Corners, Michelle weaves together hair-raising stories of her parents’ wartime survival with vivid memories of life on the farm. Her unflinching yet loving inquiry explores Jewish identity, resilience, and what makes one person break while another survives.
A graduate of Barnard College, NYU School of Medicine, and the Columbia University Psychoanalytic Center, she holds the Sharon and Steven Lieberman Chair in Pastoral Counseling at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah and is also an Associate Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital. She maintains a private practice in Manhattan, where she lives with her husband.
Ticket Info: Free; register online for a Zoom link
Presented by:
conversation
lecture
The Red Jews: Intertextuality in a Yiddish Myth – Live on Zoom
Rebekka Voß | Delivered in English.
Envisioned as a tribe of ruddy-faced, redheaded, and red-bearded Jewish warriors clad in red attire, the legendary Ten Lost Tribes of Israel are referred to as “Red Jews” (royte yidlekh) in Yiddish. This unique figure is a creation of late medieval vernacular culture in Germany and became a shared motif among both Jews and Christians, circulating in both Yiddish and German. These two linguistic communities interpreted the Red Jews in different ways, each contesting their significance and viewing them through varying shades of red.
This lecture by Rebekka Voß will trace the journey of the Red Jews through both Jewish and Christian imaginations, from their medieval origins to their presence in Old Yiddish and modern Yiddish literature. Focusing on select stories of the Red Jews, the lecture will explore their intertextuality, illustrating how this popular literary motif engaged with canonical texts, including the Bible, works of Hebrew and Yiddish literature (such as Toledot Yeshu, the polemical counter-story of the life of Jesus, and the romance Viduvilt), as well as medieval German literature.
About the Speaker
Rebekka Voß is an associate professor at Goethe University in Frankfurt. Her research focuses on Jewish cultural history in early modern Europe, with special attention to cultural transfer between Jews and Christians.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required.
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
Welcome to Otwock: A Virtual Visit to the Warsaw Suburb Before the War – Live on Zoom
Benny Mer (Majersdorf) | Delivered in Yiddish.
“Every Jewish street in Warsaw was a city unto itself,” wrote Isaac Bashevis Singer, and all the more so each suburb of Warsaw. Otwock was quite different from its neighbors. The crown suburb of the “Otwock Line” was, on its western side, a typical Polish-Jewish shtetl, with synagogues, craftsmen, charitable women, and Hasidim – the latter including the Lubavitcher Rebbe and the musical Modzhitser Rebbe whose homes were there. On its eastern side, Otwock was a Warsaw resort town, with refined villas, gardens, forests, and boarding houses. All that attracted distinguished guests, painters, and writers such as Alter Kacyzne, Kadya Molodowsky, Zusman Segalovitsh, Julian Tuwim, Janusz Korczak, and many others. This virtual visit will acquaint the public with the various facets of old Otwock through poems, short stories, and images. This lecture tour by Benny Mer (Majersdorf) is based on the speaker’s newly published Guide to Yiddish Warsaw, 1938.
About the Speaker
Benny Mer (Majersdorf) was born in Tel Aviv in 1971. He is the author of Smocza: A Biography of a Jewish Street in Warsaw (2018), as well as A Guide to Jewish Warsaw, 1938 (2025), and several other works. He has translated into Hebrew from Yiddish the works of Sholem Aleichem, Avrom Sutzkever, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Alexander Spiegelblat, Rivke Basman Ben-Hayim, among others, and has published an anthology of Yiddish poetry in Hebrew translation. Mer served as editor of the literary supplement of Haaretz and of the journal Dafke: Yiddishland and Its Culture. In 2015 he was awarded the Mendele Prize.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required.
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
On Early Yiddish Literature in Italy – Live on Zoom
Claudia Rosenzweig | Delivered in Yiddish.
In 1982 the celebrated Yiddish scholar Khone Shmeruk published a descriptive catalogue of Yiddish prints from Italy (from 1545 to 1663), listing thirty-five books (including desiderata). Two decades later, in 2003, Chava Turniansky and Erika Timm published a catalogue of old Yiddish manuscripts and printed books that numbered ninety-nine items. Since then, additional manuscripts and printed books have come to light. Claudia Rosenzweig will present some of these newly discovered items, along with the suggestion that, given evidence from written sources, the history of Yiddish in Italy is far more extensive than previously thought and has yet to be evaluated in terms of its richness and variety, as well as its connections with both Hebrew and non-Jewish prints of the time. Most of the works composed, copied, and printed in Italy during this period had a wide reception throughout “Yiddishland.” This suggests that, although the flourishing of Yiddish literature in 16th century Italy isn’t detachable from its local cultural context, the works that were created there became an intrinsic part of general Yiddish culture tout court.
About the Speaker
Claudia Rosenzweig graduated in Classical Studies from the University of Milan and later specialized in Old Yiddish Literature, with an emphasis on Yiddish Literature in Italy. Her PhD thesis, supervised by Prof. Chava Turniansky (Hebrew University, Jerusalem) and Prof. Erika Timm (University of Trier, Germany), focused on the chivalric poem Bovo d’Antona, a Yiddish rewriting of an Italian work composed in ottava rima. Rosenzweig worked with Prof. Erika Timm and Prof. Chava Turniansky on the volume Yiddish in Italia (Milan 2003), a broadly comprehensive presentation of Yiddish Literature in Italy covering more than one hundred texts. In October-November 2011 and February-March 2012 she took part in the European Seminar on Advanced Jewish Studies titled Old Yiddish: Old Texts, New Contexts at the Oxford Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies.
Rosenzweig is the author of a critical edition of the Yiddish work Bovo d’Antona (Leiden – Boston 2015) and she is preparing a critical edition of the Mayse-bukh (Basel 1602) together with prof. Avidov Lipsker. She has taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Università degli Studi di Milano, the Università degli Studi di Venezia, the Università degli Studi di Verona, the Charles University in Prague and Tel Aviv University. Rosenzweig is Associate Professor in the Department of Literature of the Jewish People at Bar-Ilan University (Ramat-Gan).
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On the Threshold of a New Yiddish Language – Live on Zoom
Daria Vakhrushova | Delivered in Yiddish.
“We may be standing at the threshold of a new Yiddish language – Yiddish-Russian,” proclaimed Ayzik Zaretski in 1930. This claim sparked heated debates among Soviet Yiddish linguists. Indeed, Soviet Yiddish is still best known today for its major influence from Russian, but was Russification the only driving force behind the linguistic developments in the Soviet Union? In that country, Yiddish received state support for the first time in its history and officially became a “national language,” even though the term carried rather different implications than it did at the Czernowitz language conference (1908). How does a former zhargon, as it was widely and derisively referred to, become a national language? How does one develop a kulturshprakh (‘language of culture’, i.e., one with widely recognized standards that is accepted as an adequate medium for all levels of communication – from “high culture” downward)? What is to be retained? What should be changed? What should be borrowed from neighbors? Apart from addressing concepts such as folkshprakh, kulturshprakh, and literarishe shprakh, Daria Vakhrushova will also examine the practical means in the Soviet setting to employ language policy (via language learning, linguistic conferences, research projects); in so doing, several samples of characteristic features of Soviet Yiddish will be presented.
About the Speaker
Daria Vakhrushova is a Yiddish lecturer at Ludwig Maximilian University Munich. She studied Translation and Translation Theory at Nizhny Novgorod State Linguistics University and received her PhD in Yiddish Culture, Language, and Literature in Düsseldorf in 2022. Her research focuses on Soviet Yiddish culture, literature, and translation. One of her particular interests is Yiddish grammar, in both its practical and theoretical dimensions. Her recently published book, Red Jews: Soviet Yiddish Culture, 1917–1934, examines Yiddish literary manifestos, literature, and translation projects in the Soviet Union.
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More than Dates: Yiddish Calendars as Cultural Agents, 1870-1914 – Live on Zoom
Nathan Cohen | Delivered in Yiddish.
Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and until the outbreak of WWI, some Yiddish calendars / almanacs began to change their traditional character and broaden their scope. Political, social, economic, and cultural changes in both non-Jewish and Jewish societies, motivated publishers, editors, and writers to make use of the familiar and accessible format of the calendar in order to disseminate Maskilic and utilitarian ideas, as well as to bring Yiddish readers new literary works, both original and translated (at a higher or more popular level), alongside instructive insights in various fields of knowledge. All of this transformed the almanac into a kind of condensed encyclopedia and presented Yiddish as a “normal” language of culture rather than a "mere jargon.” In this presentation Nathan Cohen will provide an overview of several aspects of this highly interesting phenomenon.
About the Speaker
Nathan Cohen is a full Professor at the Rena Costa Center for Yiddish Studies at the Department of Literature of the Jewish People at Bar-Ilan University. Since 1998, he has been Associate Editor of the bi-annual journal Yad Vashem Studies. His main fields of research and teaching include the cultural history of the Jews of Eastern Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the history of the book and reading in Yiddish, modern Yiddish literature, the Jews of Poland between the two world wars, and Yiddish literature and culture during the Holocaust period. He is the author of Books, Writers and Newspapers: The Jewish Cultural Center in Warsaw, 1918-1942 (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2003, Hebrew; translated into Polish and published by the Jewish Historical Institute in 2021) and Yiddish – The Linguistic Leap from a Common Dialect to a Cultural and Literary Language (Jerusalem: The Zalman Shazar Center, 2020, Hebrew; translated into English under the title Yiddish Transformed: Reading Habits in the Russian Empire, 1860-1914, New York and Oxford: Berhahn, 2023), as well as tens of articles in peer-reviewed periodicals.
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