YIVO Centennial Celebration
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Panel Discussion
This event will take place in Yiddish. Co-sponsored by The Workers Circle, League for Yiddish, Congress for Jewish Culture, and Sholem Aleichem Cultural Center In Person:Admission: Free Zoom Livestream:Admission: Free |
Join us for a Yiddish evening celebrating YIVO’s 100th anniversary! Panelists Zalmen Mlotek, David Roskies, Samuel Kassow, and David Fishman will reminisce about YIVO’s past and reflect on the organization’s enduring legacy, in a panel led by Cecile Kuznitz. The discussion will analyze the work of various important figures in YIVO history, including Emanuel Ringelblum, Zelig Kalmanovich, Max Weinreich, Chana Mlotek, and more. This event will take place in Yiddish. A celebratory reception will follow the panel discussion.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
About the Speakers
Zalmen Mlotek is an internationally recognized authority on Yiddish folk and theater music as well as creator of new musicals such as The Golden Land which toured Italy under the sponsorship of Leonard Bernstein and Those Were The Days, nominated for two Tony Awards. As the artistic director of the NYTF for the past twenty years, Mlotek helped revive Yiddish classics, instituted simultaneous English and Russian supertitles at performances and brought leading creative artists of television, theatre and film, such as Itzhak Perlman, Mandy Patinkin, Sheldon Harnick, Ron Rifkin and Joel Grey to the Yiddish stage. His vision has propelled classics, including NYTF productions of the world premiere of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Yentl in Yiddish (1998), Di Yam Gazlonim (The Yiddish Pirates of Penzance, 2006) the 1923 Rumshinky operetta The Golden Bride (2016), and the critically acclaimed Fidler Afn Dakh (Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish, 2018). During his tenure at the NYTF, the theatre company has been nominated or received over ten Drama Desk Awards and four Lucille Lortel Awards.
David G. Roskies is the Sol and Evelyn Henkind Chair emeritus in Yiddish Literature and Culture and a professor emeritus of Jewish literature at The Jewish Theological Seminary. He also served as the Naomi Prawer Kadar Visiting Professor of Yiddish Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Dr. Roskies was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012. Dr. Roskies is a cultural historian of Eastern European Jewry. A prolific author, editor, and scholar, he has published nine books and received numerous awards. In 1981, Dr. Roskies cofounded with Dr. Alan Mintz Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History, and served for seventeen years as editor in chief of the New Yiddish Library series, published by Yale University Press. A native of Montreal, Canada, and a product of its Yiddish secular schools, Dr. Roskies was educated at Brandeis University, where he received his doctorate in 1975.
Samuel Kassow, Charles H. Northam Professor of History at Trinity College, holds a PhD from Princeton University and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Jewish Research. From 2006 until 2013, he was the lead historian for two galleries of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, which opened in 2014. Professor Kassow is the author of Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum and the Secret Ghetto Archive (Indiana University Press, 2007), which received the Orbis Prize of the AAASS; was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award; and has been translated into eight languages. A child of Holocaust survivors, Professor Kassow was born in a displaced-persons camp in Germany.
David Fishman is a professor of Jewish History at The Jewish Theological Seminary. He also serves as director of Project Judaica, JTS’s program in the Former Soviet Union, which is based at Russian State University for the Humanities (Moscow) and Kyiv-Mohyla Academy University (Kiev). Dr. Fishman is the author of The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis (ForEdge, 2017). Previous books include Russia’s First Modern Jews, The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture, and an edited volume of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s Yiddish writings, Droshes un ksovim.
Cecile E. Kuznitz is Associate Professor and Patricia Ross Weis ‘52 Chair in Jewish History and Culture at Bard College. She is the author of YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture: Scholarship for the Yiddish Nation (Cambridge University Press, 2014; Lithuanian translation, 2025) as well as articles on the Jewish community of Vilna, the field of Yiddish Studies, and Jewish urban history. She has held fellowships at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies.