Yiddish Scholarship Comes to America: The Yivo Institute at 100 - Paperback

by Kalman Weiser (Author)

A century-long effort to preserve eastern European culture.

This comprehensive history of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research--a groundbreaking American Jewish cultural organization, library, and research center--details its longstanding efforts to preserve eastern European Jewish culture during a century of genocide and mass emigration. Founded in 1925, YIVO was a global organization with headquarters in Vilna until World War II. It represented the symbolic pinnacle of building a modern, secular Yiddish culture.

Yet post-war, YIVO struggled to establish itself on a new continent, to reclaim what had survived of its Vilna collections, to document a lost world, and to impart the value of eastern European Jewish history and culture to new generations. Through the institute's steady commitment to establishing itself in New York and beyond, Yiddish language learning and scholarship became a crucial part of post-Holocaust Jewish life in a time when Hebrew was increasingly promoted in Jewish communities. Drawing on extensive archival research and oral histories, Weiser focuses on the transitional period of the YIVO Institute from 1940 to 1970 and showcases how the institute carved its own path toward scholarship and public engagement that remained true to its founding ethos--"from the folk, for the folk, and with the folk"--while acclimating to American society and mainstream Jewish culture.

Back Jacket

This comprehensive history of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research--a groundbreaking American Jewish cultural organization, library, and research center--details its longstanding efforts to preserve eastern European Jewish culture during a century of genocide and mass emigration. Through YIVO's steady commitment to establishing itself in New York and the broader United States, Yiddish language learning and the study of eastern European Jewish history and culture became a crucial part of post-Holocaust Jewish life. Focusing on the institution's transitional period from 1940 to 1970, the book explores how YIVO charted a course for scholarship and public engagement that remained true to its founding ethos--"from the folk, for the folk, and with the folk"--while acclimating to American society and mainstream Jewish culture.

Author Biography

Kalman Weiser is the Silber Family Professor of Modern Jewish Studies and director of the Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York University. He is the author of Jewish People, Yiddish Nation: Noah Prylucki and the Folkists in Poland, which won a Canadian Jewish Book Award. Weiser is also the coeditor of several works, including Czernowitz at 100: The First Yiddish Language Conference in Historical Perspective and Key Concepts in the Study of Antisemitism.