Exhibits

Immerse yourself in a lebedike velt, a living world, of fascinating exhibitions about Yiddish culture.

A Bintel Brief: opens April 7

An exhibit of illustrated panels, excerpts from a graphic novel by artist Liana Finck. Each of the eleven stories in the book is based on a different letter written to the Bintel Brief, a beloved Yiddish advice column that was published in the Forward newspaper beginning in 1906.

Caught in the Act: Photographs of Yiddish New York in the 1960’s by Arnold Chekow

Arnold Chekow grew up in the Bronx, the son of Jewish immigrants in whose house he learned Yiddish and absorbed Yiddish culture. A lawyer by profession, Chekow is also a skilled photographer who found his muse during the 1960s, capturing images of the still-lively Yiddish cultural scene in his native city. This exhibit is at the Yiddish Book Center through March 2013. View a slide show from this exhibit.

The Lee & Alfred Hutt Discovery Gallery

The Lee & Alfred Hutt Discovery Gallery is an interactive exhibit that celebrates and furthers our understanding of Jewish cultural identity through personal stories, objects, photographs, and interviews.

Sholem Bayes

By whatever name -- der yiddisher haym, the Jewish Home Beautiful or, simply, Mom and Dad’s –the home dominates the American Jewish landscape as well as the modern Jewish imagination.  As much an emotional space as a physical one, it figures as a site of continuity as well as rupture, a place to escape to and a place to escape from. The stuff of celebrated novels and memoir, satire and sociology, let alone some of the most enduring moments on the tube and the silver screen, the American Jewish home has been variously sentimentalized and romanticized, anatomized and analysed....

Read the full article by the exhibit's curator, Jenna Weissman Joselit.

The Sholem-bayes exhibit is made possible by a gift from Mitzi and Warren Eisenberg.

A velt mit veltelekh: The Worlds of Yiddish Culture

A velt mit veltelekh: The Worlds of Yiddish Culture explores the many facets of modern Yiddish language, literature, and culture.

Drawing on the Center’s own collection of one million Yiddish books, the main display, Unquiet Pages, examines the fascinating contents of Yiddish novels, plays, poetry, memoirs, and reportage.  In another gallery, “Sholem-bayes: The American Jewish Home” takes a lively look at how the Jewish home has been depicted in literature and related mediums. The Kinder-vinkl introduces visitors to the origins, sounds, appearance and uses of the Yiddish language. A Yiddish print shop presents traditional printing equipment on which Yiddish newspapers and other common materials were produced.

Unquiet Pages was made possible through a generous grant by the David Berg Foundation.

A Living Connection: Photographs from the An-sky Expeditions, 1912-1914

This exhibition in the Book Center's main repository explores the groundbreaking work of S. An-sky, who, at the turn of the twentieth century, launched the Jewish Ethnographic Expeditions, traveling throughout what is now Ukraine to collect materials about Jewish cultural life.  Photographs are from the Museum of the History of Religion, St. Petersburg, Russia.

 

Unquiet Pages

Drawing on the Center’s own collection of one million Yiddish books, the main display, “Unquiet Pages,” examines the fascinating contents of Yiddish novels, plays, poetry, memoirs, and reportage.

 

This exhibition is made possible by a generous grant from the David Berg Foundation.