This Week at YIVO: “Rise Up! Revolution or Class Mobility”

YIVO2THURSDAY 13 JUNE 2013 | 6:30pm
Rise Up! Revolution or Class Mobility: Anglo-Yiddish Poems and Songs as Agents of Political Debate 1884-1914

Presented by Vivi Lachs (University of London)
Moderated by Itzik Gottesman (Associate Editor, Forward – Yiddish Edition)
RUTH GAY SEMINAR IN JEWISH STUDIES

Admission: Free
RSVP Required: fmohrer@yivo.cjh.org | 212.294.6143

From the 1880s, the wave of immigration that brought East European Jews to New York also brought substantial numbers to the East End of London. In London’s over-crowded housing and job market, immigrants struggled to make a living within the ‘sweated trades.’ Attempts to organize and unionize Jewish workers were led largely by socialists who rallied workers to strike, agitate and demonstrate for the improvement of their working conditions. Socialist activist and poet Morris Winchevsky came to London in 1879. As editor of much of the London Yiddish socialist press, he published poetry as an instrument of political debate. Popular among the Jewish immigrant workers, his poems were declaimed in meetings and sung at demonstrations. Read more…

SUNDAY 16 JUNE 2013 | 2:00pm
Sovietization in the Pale: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk, the Jerusalem of Belorussia

Elissa Bemporad (Queens College, CUNY)
BOOK TALK
Admission: Free
RSVP Required: www.yivo.org/reservations | 212.294.6127

When describing Minsk in 1928, the Yiddish writer and journalist I. J. Singer wrote, “Everyone agrees that Minsk is a happy, lively city. Still evident is the charm typical of Lithuanian Jewish cities near the border, where ideas and smuggling, religiosity and heresy, modesty and dissoluteness, antiquity and modernity are compressed together in the grubby alleys and houses, and fill the city with life, dynamism, and hope. Here, one is still a little provincial, a tad old-fashioned, and therefore more believing.” Read more…

More June Events

Just added | THURSDAY 20 JUNE 2013 | 7:00pm
Old Solomon Levy in Petticoat Lane: Yiddish Popular Songs of London’s East End 1880-1940
Vivi Lachs (University of London)
LECTURE & PERFORMANCE

SUNDAY 23 JUNE 2013 | 2:00pm
Celebration of the New Comprehensive Yiddish-English Dictionary

Co-sponsored by Indiana University Press and the Institute for Israel & Jewish Studies at Columbia University
BOOK TALK & RECEPTION
SUNDAY 30 JUNE 2013 | 1:00pm
Annual Mordkhe Schaechter Memorial Program

Co-sponsored by the League for Yiddish

MEMORIAL PROGRAM

YIVOAventGardeON VIEW NOW THROUGH JULY 30
Floating Worlds and Future Cities: The Genius of Lazar Khidekel, Suprematism, and the Russian Avant-Garde
EXHIBITION

“Floating Worlds and Future Cities” is the first comprehensive exhibition in the United States of the work of the great artist, architect, designer and theoretician, Lazar Khidekel (1904-1986). Lazar Khidekel worked closely with Marc Chagall, El Lissitzky and Kazimir Malevich in Vitebsk in the years 1918-1922, where he became an important proponent and theoretician of the avant-garde movement known as Suprematism and a founding member of the UNOVIS group (Affirmers of New Art), which included other notable Russian and Jewish artists such as Kazimir Malevich, El Lissitsky, Nina Kogan and Ilya Chashnik. The exhibition focuses on Lazar Khidekel’s role in the transition of Suprematism from painting to architecture, cosmic urbanization, and radical yet environmentally conscious city planning of the future. Read more…

This exhibition begins on the 3rd Floor and continues on the 2nd Floor Mezzanine.

Hours:
Mon and Wed: 9:30am-8:00pm
Tue and Thu: 9:30am-5:00pm
Fri: 9:30am-3:00pm
Sat: CLOSED
Sun: 11:00am-5:00pm