Author Henry H. Sapoznik’s The Tourist’s Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City offers a fresh perspective on more than a century of New York’s Yiddish popular culture. Henry, a Peabody Award–winning coproducer of NPR’s Yiddish Radio Project, will guide us through his exploration of theater, music, architecture, crime, Blacks-Jews relations, restaurants, real estate, and journalism. Drawing from […]

Childhood friends in Poland, Chava Rosenfarb and Zenia Larsson lived through the Lodz Ghetto and the death camps together, parting soon after their liberation from Bergen-Belsen. For the next fifty years, Rosenfarb and Larsson continued their friendship through letters as both went on to become distinguished novelists in their respective languages, Yiddish and Swedish. Letters from […]

In her book Displays of Belonging: Polish Jewish Collecting and Museums, 1891–1941 author Sarah Ellen Zarrow illuminates the lives and work of Polish Jewish collectors and museologists who sought to preserve the treasures of the Jewish past while demonstrating Jewish belonging on Polish soil. Her talk will offer a nuanced understanding of the multiplicity of ways in which […]

Celebrate the launch of a new translation of Jonas Kreppel’s Adventures of Max Spitzkopf, the complete series of 15 mysteries starring the Viennese “king of detectives,” Max Spitzkopf. Translator Mikhl Yashinsky will share insights into the origins of these stories, how they captivated readers and achieved pulp fiction status, and why they were beloved by figures such as […]

Join us on Zoom for a visual exploration with members of the Firschein family on the history of their family’s legendary Yiddish printing press and how it came to reside at the Yiddish Book Center. For decades, the Firschein Press—a small, family-run printing business—provided the residents of Brooklyn neighborhoods with all their stationery and advertising […]

Translators Ellen Cassedy and Anita Norich join Lisa Newman to discuss their recently released translation of Rashel Veprinski’s Hand in Hand. This headily bittersweet novel takes readers into the “Jewish tumult” of New York’s early 20th-century Yiddish literary community, where recent immigrants from Eastern Europe toiled as shoemakers and tailors by day while cultivating a vibrant intelligentsia by […]