From the YIVO Stacks: Of Comic Strips and Antisemitism

By Andrew Kotick, Leon Levy Fellow at the Center for Jewish History (2025-2026)

From the YIVO Stacks: Of Comic Strips and Antisemitism

A 1926 antisemitic pamphlet documents the antisemitic moral controversy surrounding the Jewish publishers that helped pioneer early French comic strips.

In the collections of YIVO Library at the Center for Jewish History rests an unassuming, yet unsettling French pamphlet from 1926 titled…

28 0

Behind the Cowl: Batman and Bob Kane

By Dr. Andrew Fogel, Visiting Scholar 2025-2026

Behind the Cowl: Batman and Bob Kane

In 1939, Batman debuted in Detective Comics issue twenty-seven with a May cover date. The comic book hit newsstands, according to copyright records, on March 30. Eighty-seven years later, copies of this rare piece of Americana sell for nearly two million dollars. Batman helped build the comic book industry and laid the…

667 0

A Major Breakthrough: When Passover Cakes Were Big News

By Rachel Gordan, National Endowment for the Humanities Scholar in Residence 2025

A Major Breakthrough: When Passover Cakes Were Big News

At the end of the summer of 1955, Jewish novelist Herman Wouk’s (1915-2019) fourth novel, Marjorie Morningstar was published. At this point in his career, Wouk was a celebrity-writer, having won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his war novel, The Caine Mutiny

1383 0

“What Shall We Tell the Children?”

By Miriam Udel, Rifkind Fellow 2024-2025 & Member of the CJH Academic Advisory Council

What Shall We Tell the Children?

As I demonstrate in my critical study Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children’s Literature, the Yiddish children’s literary canon that burgeoned on the secularist left during the first half of the twentieth century forms a rich archive for revisiting the anxieties and ideas…

1394 0

Electrical Engineering in Yiddish: The Vilna Technicum (and Beyond)

By Alona Bach, Dr. Sophie Bookhalter Short-Term Graduate Public History Fellow

Electrical Engineering in Yiddish: The Vilna Technicum (and Beyond)

“Up to this point, there has not been a single book about electricity in Yiddish, aside from a few small pamphlets,” declared the engineer Israel Okun in January 1922. It was a bold, frank introduction to his new Yiddish translation of…

2169 0