YIVO 80th Anniversary Heritage Mission to Budapest, Prague, Bratislava, St. Petersburg, and Lithuania
YIVO's 80th Anniversary Heritage Mission will leave for a two-week trip to Europe on May 3, 2005. To learn more about this tour of Jewish heritage, religious life, art, and learning, click here for a flyer or call Ella Levine at (212) 294-6128.
Reservations must be submitted, with a $500 deposit per person, no later than 3/20/2005.
NYU New Home of Intensive Program in Yiddish
Language, Literature, and Culture
(To download a full press release on this news item in Adobe Acrobat [pdf] format, please click here.)
New York University will house the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research's Uriel Weinreich Program in Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture beginning in 2005. The six-week, intensive summer program offers instruction in Yiddish language and an in-depth exploration of the literature and culture of East European/American Jewry.
Established in 1968, the program has drawn students from all over the world, including Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Israel, Australia, South Africa, Chile, Argentina, China, Korea, Japan, and western Europe, as well as the United States and Canada.
"All of us at NYU are delighted by this programmatic collaboration between two good neighbors, which will greatly benefit students interested in the Yiddish language and the study of Jewish culture," said Matthew Santirocco, dean of NYU's College of Arts and Science.
"Our collaboration with YIVO will be important for the advanced study of a historic language and culture and for the training of graduate students who represent the next generation of scholars, researchers, and teachers," added Catharine Stimpson, dean of NYU's Graduate School of Arts and Science.
The program is situated in YIVO's Max Weinreich Center of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and will be run out of NYU's Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies.
"We are very pleased to be entering into cooperation with the world-class faculty of the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies and look forward to many years of success together," said Paul Glasser, associate dean of the Max Weinreich Center.
"The Weinreich program will complement the offerings of NYU's Rauch visiting professorship in Yiddish literature and culture, inaugurated in 2003, to make the university a leading center for undergraduate and graduate studies related to Yiddish," said David Engel, director of graduate studies in the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies. "Since the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies already offers the largest and most comprehensive array of courses in Jewish studies outside of Israel, the initiation of a full program in Yiddish language and literature builds naturally upon one of NYU's great strengths. Both YIVO and NYU will now be able to take full advantage of the two institutions' physical proximity, sharing their considerable tangible and intellectual resources."
The program's centerpiece is an intensive language course designed to develop proficiency in speaking, reading and writing, as well as cultural literacy, in a concentrated period of time.
This summer's program will take place from Monday, June 27 to Friday, August 5, 2005. The YIVO Institute has been located just off Union Square, about a mile from the NYU campus, since 1999. The program was previously held at Columbia University, where founder Max Weinreich's son, Uriel, taught linguistics from 1951 to 1967. Uriel Weinreich was noted for his contributions to Yiddish Studies, sociolinguistics, dialectology, and for the increased acceptance of semantics as a branch of linguistics.
Since its inception, the program has graduated more than 1,300 students, including many of the leading scholars in Yiddish Studies/Jewish Studies in the world. These include Steven Zipperstein, Chair and Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and Jewish History at Stanford University; Dovid Katz, Professor of Yiddish Literature and founder of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, Vilnius University, Lithuania; Ruth Messinger, former Manhattan Borough president; and Tim Whewell, correspondent for BBC Radio World Programmes.
January Programs
Monday, January 10 & Tuesday, January 11
Film & Lectures
Join us for an exciting week of public events:
- Monday, January 10, 7:00 pm: Enemies, A Love Story. (FILM)
- Monday, January 10, 7:00 pm: The Annual Maria Salit-Gitelson Tell Memorial Lecture. Eliyahu Stern on the Gaon of Vilna.
- Tuesday, January 11, 7:30 pm: Rescued from the Reich: How One of Hitler's Soldiers Saved the Lubavitcher Rebbe. (LECTURE)
For more information on these programs, please visit the YIVO Public Programs calendar.
What's New 2005