Taking Yiddish Science Global: YIVO’s Foreign Branches, 1925-1994
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Max Weinreich Fellowship Lecture
Dina Abramowicz Emerging Scholar Postdoctoral Fellowship Admission: Free |
“Hoops are rolling, one after the other,
From the East, from the North, from the South,
They all come together in YIVO
In the treasury of books and sforim [holy books].”
— Daniel Charney, “Hoops are Rolling” (Also known as the “YIVO March”).
From almost its very inception, YIVO was a global organization. Yiddish speaking communities, inspired by the diaspora nationalism and Yiddishism of YIVO, created local branches across the world, which came to be known as YIVO’s foreign sections. The “YIVO March,” cited above, rang out in Havana, Cuba, in 1953, for example; YIVO branches flourished across North and South America, in South Africa and even in Australia and China. These foreign sections used the techniques that YIVO had pioneered: surveys, autobiography competitions, material collection, and Yiddish historical writing and exhibition curation, to write new histories of immigration and demonstrate the ongoing viability of Yiddish as a language of scholarship. During and after the Holocaust, these branches, swelled by recent refugees from Nazism, turned their expertise towards some of the first exhibitions that commemorated the victims of the Holocaust — and set a program for the reconstruction of Yiddish culture. This lecture by William Pimlott tells the story of how YIVO became a global institution and the new and different stories that YIVO's Friend Societies tell about 20th century Jewish history.
About the Speaker
William Pimlott is the inaugural Postdoctoral Research Associate at the NYU Center for the Study of Antisemitism. He recently completed his PhD on the Yiddish press in Britain, 1896-1910, at UCL and has subsequently held two research fellowships at the University of London: at the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism and the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, respectively. Dr. Pimlott has published articles on Yiddish history-making in Britain, on the South African Yiddish press and Yiddish art history in Jewish Social Studies, Jewish Historical Studies, and Shofar. This year, he is the Dina Abramowicz Emerging Scholar Postdoctoral Fellow at the YIVO Institute in New York (2024-2025).