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 that…
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 a German textbook about…
By Cassia Kisshauer Senior Reference Services Librarian, Special Collections Selling Chanukah in America As Chanukah transformed in 20th century America from a smaller, home-based festival to a popular public holiday, businesses saw an opportunity to manufacture and market decorations and gifts to Jewish consumers. In the mid-19th century, new waves of German Jewish immigrants focused on Christmas as a winter holiday, in order to feel…
The Center and its partners are proud to send the above letter to our elected representatives, urging them to oppose the elimination of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Support from the NEH helps the Center to achieve its primary mission: to preserve and protect the history of the Jewish people.
Wikipedia Edit-a-thon at the Center By Leanora Lange A Wikipedia edit-a-thon was held on July 22, 2015, open to staff members from the Center and its partners as well as students from the YIVO summer program. Twenty people attended a training session on Wikipedia and basic editing, and several stayed for an open editing session that followed. Although the session was initially focused on…
