film and discussion
The Family Oppenheim: A Banned Anti-Nazi Film Rediscovered - In-person Program
Join us for the long-lost US premiere of The Family Oppenheim (Semya Oppengeym) (1938) – a powerful Soviet-made anti-Nazi film written by acclaimed German-Jewish novelist Lion Feuchtwanger (The Oppermanns) in collaboration with visionary Soviet Jewish filmmakers Grigorii and Serafima Roshal.
Conceived in exile, censored in Britain, and banned in the United States, The Family Oppenheim, based on Feuchtwanger’s 1933 novel, stands as one of the earliest cinematic warnings against Hitler’s rise to power and fascism’s brutal reshaping of Germany. Premiering internationally in the spring of 1939 but soon banned and forgotten for nearly nine decades, the film now returns to US screens – newly restored, translated, and subtitled through a remarkable student-led research project at the University of Oregon led by Miriam Chorley-Schulz. Experience a rediscovered masterpiece once banned by American censors – a work of resistance, vision, and urgency that still echoes powerfully today.
Accompanying the screening, join Miriam Chorley-Schulz (University of Oregon) and Rossen Djagalov (NYU) for an illuminating conversation tracing the film’s extraordinary journey from its complex conception to its celebrated 1938 Moscow premiere to decades of suppression, and finally, to its revival today.
About the Speakers
Miriam Chorley-Schulz is Assistant Professor and Mokin Fellow of Holocaust Studies at the University of Oregon. Her work explores German Jewish and Yiddish diasporic histories, cultures, and thought; Jewish left-wing and internationalist traditions; Jewish resistance to fascism; and the intertwined histories and theories of racism, antisemitism, and genocide. She is particularly interested in the lives and legacies of self-identified Jewish antifascists from the 1920s through the Cold War – among them, a figure to whom she often returns: Lion Feuchtwanger.
Chorley-Schulz is the author of numerous publications, including her award-winning first monograph, Der Beginn des Untergangs: Die Zerstörung der jüdischen Gemeinden in Polen und das Vermächtnis des Wilnaer Komitees (Berlin: Metropol, 2016), recipient of both the Hosenfeld/Szpilman Memorial Award and a Special Mention of the Scientific Award of the Ambassador of the Republic of Poland in Germany. She is also co-founder of the EU-funded project We Refugees. Digital Archive on Refugeedom, Past and Present, which documents global histories of displacement and refugeedom – with Feuchtwanger serving as one of its key historical interlocutors.
Rossen Djagalov is Associate Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University. His work focuses on the intersections of culture and Marxism, Soviet and Eastern Bloc internationalism, and the global history of the left.
He is the author of From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema between the Second and the Third World (2020), which reconstructs the Soviet roots of postcolonial literature, film, and theory. His current projects include a study of multinational Soviet literature through the Friendship of the Peoples literary magazine and The People’s Republic of Letters: Towards a Media History of Socialist Internationalism, exploring how left-wing movements used media – from novels and theater to song and film – to connect publics worldwide. He is a member of the editorial collective of LeftEast and the provisional committee of the Black Sheep.
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
Presented by:
film and discussion
lecture
A Very Jewish Christmas: Jesus in Modern Jewish Literature - In-person Program and Live on Zoom
“Other, and indeed banned, and yet one of my brothers” was how the renowned Yiddish and Hebrew modernist, Uri Zvi Greenberg, expressed his ambivalence toward Jesus in one of his many poems about this towering figure. Greenberg’s contemporaries shared this sentiment. For them, Jesus was inextricably bound up with the history of violence towards Jews committed in his name. At the same time, he also embodied an “authentic national Jew,” whose suffering and resistance to the authorities of his time created a powerful image that played a significant role in rethinking Jewish identity.
In this talk, Neta Stahl will examine how Jewish writers portrayed Jesus during periods of significant transformations in Jewish life. She will demonstrate that Jesus serves a range of ideological, theological, aesthetic, political, social, and psychological functions that not only relate to the long history of Jewish-Christian relations in Europe but also reflect attempts to reframe Jewish national lives in the diaspora and Israel.
A kosher Chinese food dinner will follow the presentation.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Ticket Info:
In Person: $15; YIVO members & students: $10
Livestream: Free; registration is required
Presented by:
lecture
conversation
At Lunch with Brandon and Lance Kramer – Live on Zoom
Julie Salamon, New York Times best-selling author, sits down with documentary filmmakers Brandon and Lance Kramer to discuss their new film Holding Liat. The brothers are co-founders of Meridian Hill Pictures, a Washington D.C.-based production company. Their directing and producing credits include The First Step (Tribeca, AFI DOCS), City of Trees (Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, PBS, Netflix), and The Messy Truth (CNN). Their latest documentary, Holding Liat, won the Berlinale Documentary Award at the Berlin International Film Festival and was co-produced with Darren Aronofsky, Ari Handel, Justin A. Gonçalves, and Yoni Brook.
Ticket Info: Free; register online for a Zoom link
Presented by:
conversation
celebration
Salud i Beraha: The 9th Annual NY Ladino Day! - In-person Program
Curated by Jane Mushabac and Bryan Kirschen
Musical Performance featuring Brazilian Ladino singer Fortuna, accompanied by her quartet
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Joe Halio
Since 2013, Ladino Day programs have been held around the world to honor Ladino, also known as Judeo-Spanish. January 11th marks New York’s 9th Annual Ladino Day hosted by the American Sephardi Federation.
Ladino is a bridge to many cultures. A variety of Spanish, it has absorbed words from Hebrew, Turkish, Arabic, French, Greek, and Portuguese. The mother tongue of Jews in the Ottoman Empire for 500 years, Ladino became the home language of Sephardim worldwide. While the number of Ladino speakers has sharply declined, distinguished Ladino Day programs like ours celebrate and preserve a vibrant language and heritage. These programs are, as Aviya Kushner has written in the Forward, “Why Ladino Will Rise Again.”
Ticket Info:
$20 Early Bird General Admission
(Admission to Ladino Day)
$30 Friend of NY Ladino Day (Includes a copy of the book: The Historic Synagogues of Turkey, and admission to Ladino Day)
$50 VIP Friend of NY Ladino Day
(Includes VIP reception prior to the program, a copy of the book: The Historic Synagogues of Turkey, and VIP seating at Ladino Day)
* Early Bird prices end on December 1, 2025
Presented by:
celebration
lecture
The Fall of the Weimar Republic - Live on Zoom
The fall of the Weimar Republic in 1933 has long been regarded as the paradigm of democracy’s collapse in the face of a populist, dictatorial challenge from Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, who built the “Third Reich” on its ruins. Can we learn any lessons from it for the present day? Many factors have been blamed for the failure of Germany’s first democracy, including the electoral system, based on proportional representation, the impact of hyperinflation in 1922-23, the power of the President, the impact of the world Depression in 1932-33, the legacy of the punitive Paris Peace Settlement that followed Germany’s defeat in World War I, and the charismatic appeal of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
This lecture by Sir Richard J. Evans explores the strengths and weaknesses of these various explanations and comes to the conclusion that the shallow and weak roots of democratic political culture in Germany were the most important factor in the inability of the Republic and its institutions to withstand the economic challenge of the Depression and the political onslaught of Hitler and the Nazis.
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 Speaker
Sir Richard J. Evans is a renowned British historian specializing in 19th and 20th century European history, with a particular focus on Germany. Evans has authored numerous influential books, including the acclaimed three-volume "The Third Reich Trilogy." He served as Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge from 2008 to 2014 and was President of Wolfson College from 2010 to 2017. He is known for his work on German social history, his role as an expert witness in the David Irving libel trial, and his defense of historical methodology against postmodernist skepticism. Evans has been recognized for his contributions to scholarship, receiving a knighthood in 2012. He served as Provost of Gresham College in London from 2014 to 2020. Evans currently serves as Deputy Chair of the UK Spoliation Advisory Panel, advising the Government on claims for the restitution of Nazi-era looted art.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
Presented by:
lecture
conversation
At Lunch with Margalit Fox – Live on Zoom
Julie Salamon, New York Times best-selling author, sits down with author and journalist Margalit Fox. Considered one of the foremost explanatory writers and literary stylists in American journalism, Margalit (mar-gah-LEET) Fox retired in 2018 from a 24-year-career at the New York Times, where she was most recently a senior writer. As a member of the newspaper’s celebrated obituary news department, she has written the Page One sendoffs of some of the best-known cultural figures of our era, including the pioneering feminist Betty Friedan, the writers Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison, the poet Adrienne Rich, the children’s author Maurice Sendak and the advice columnists Dear Abby and Ann Landers. She has also written the obituaries of many of the unsung heroes who have managed, quietly, to touch history, among them the inventors of the crash-test dummy, the bar code and the pink plastic lawn flamingo. In 2016, the Poynter Institute named her one of the six best writers in the New York Times’s history. The recipient of the William Saroyan International Prize for Nonfiction, Margalit is the author of four previous narrative nonfiction books: Talking Hands, The Riddle of the Labyrinth, Conan Doyle for the Defense and The Confidence Men. Originally trained as a cellist, she holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in linguistics from Stony Brook University and a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She lives in Manhattan with her husband, the writer and critic George Robinson. margalitfox.com
Ticket Info: Free; register online for a Zoom link
Presented by:
conversation
book club
LBI Book Club: Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum - Live on Zoom
Dr. Joanna Sliwá will join the LBI Book Club in January to discuss the book It Will Yet Be Heard: A Polish Rabbi's Witness of the Shoah and Survival by Leon Thorne.
It Will Yet Be Heard: A Polish Rabbi's Witness of the Shoah and Survival
Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer once described Dr. Leon Thorne’s memoir as a work of “bitter truth” that he compared favorably to the works of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Proust. Out of print for over forty years, this lost classic of Holocaust literature now reappears in a revised, annotated edition, including both Thorne’s original 1961 memoir Out of the Ashes: The Story of a Survivor and his previously unpublished accounts of his arduous postwar experiences in Germany and Poland.
Rabbi Thorne composed his memoir under extraordinary conditions, confined to a small underground bunker below a Polish peasant’s pigsty. But, It Will Yet Be Heard is remarkable not only for the story of its composition, but also for its moral clarity and complexity. A deeply religious man, Rabbi Thorne bore witness to forced labor camps, human degradation, and the murders of entire communities. And once he emerged from hiding, he grappled not only with survivor’s guilt, but also with the lingering antisemitism and anti-Jewish violence in Poland even after the war ended. Harrowing, moving, and deeply insightful, Rabbi Thorne’s firsthand account offers a rediscovered perspective on the twentieth century’s greatest tragedy.
(Rutgers University Press)
Leon Thorne was a rabbi from Schodnica, near Drohobycz, in Austrian Galicia. He trained at the Breslau Seminary. Following the Holocaust, he served the post-war Jewish community of Frankfurt as a rabbi before immigrating to the United States, settling in Brooklyn, New York.
About Our Guest
Dr. Joanna Sliwá is a historian at the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) where she also administers academic programs. Joanna is a historian of the Holocaust and modern Polish Jewish history. She is the author of the award-winning book, Jewish Childhood in Kraków: A Microhistory of the Holocaust(Rutgers University Press, 2021) and, with Elizabeth (Barry) White, of The Counterfeit Countess: The Jewish Woman Who Rescued Thousands of Poles during the Holocaust (Simon and Schuster, 2024), which has been translated in several languages. A new volume that Joanna co-edited with Christine Schmidt and Elizabeth Anthony, Older Jews and the Holocaust:Persecution, Displacement, and Survival, will be published in 2026 (Wayne State University Press). She previously worked at the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, and at the Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. She has taught Holocaust and Jewish history at Kean University and at Rutgers University and has served as a historical consultant and researcher, including for the PBS film In the Name of Their Mothers: The Story of Irena Sendler
Ticket Info: Free; registration required
Presented by:
book club
conversation
At Lunch with Joshua Zecher-Ross – Live on Zoom
Julie Salamon, New York Times best-selling author, sits down with Broadway conductor and musical director Joshua Zecher-Ross. Currently, the music director and conductor of Operation Mincemeat, now playing at The Golden Theatre and the score supervisor for The Queen of Versailles at the St. James Theatre. Previous Broadway credits include Water for Elephants, Be More Chill, and Once Upon a One More Time. Joshua has worked as a music director, conductor, arranger, and electronic music designer for dozens of shows across the country. He has performed in New York City at 54 Below, Joe’s Pub, Green Room 42, The Laurie Beechman, Birdland, The Duplex, and Feinstein’s at Nikko. He also works as a music supervisor, instructor, and accompanist at NY Film Academy Musical Theatre Program & Actor Therapy. He is a graduate of NYU: Steinhardt.
Ticket Info: Free; register online for a Zoom link
Presented by:
conversation
lecture
Klezmer and Other Displaced Musics in America - Live on Zoom
In this lecture, scholar and performer Walter Zev Feldman explores the vibrant, yet largely concealed, background of the klezmer revitalization in New York, Philadelphia and other American cities in the 1960s, decades after the period when America served as a crucible for immigrants and their diverse musical expressions. Drawing from his new memoir, From the Bronx to the Bosphorus, (Fordham University Press) Feldman will reflect on how he was instrumental in creating the klezmer revitalization in the US after learning from Greek immigrant musicians and then from the eminent klezmer Dave Tarras (1897-1989).
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 Speaker
Walter Zev Feldman is a leading researcher in Ottoman Turkish and Jewish music, instrumental in the 1970s Klezmer Revival. His notable works include Klezmer: Music, History, and Memory (2016) and Music of the Ottoman Court: Makam, Composition and the Early Ottoman Instrumental Repertoire (1996; 2024, revised edition). Feldman has extensively studied the instrumental traditions of Moldova’s klezmer and lautar communities. He is the Academic Director of the Klezmer Institute.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
The Cantorial “Golden Age” in America - Live on Zoom
In this lecture demonstration, scholar-musician Jeremiah Lockwood discusses some of the major stars of the cantorial “golden age” and takes a deeper look at the emergence of khazones (the Yiddish word for cantorial music) as a form of popular culture in the US in the early 20th century. Taking over from Europe as the center point of cantorial culture after World War I, cantors in America were major stars of radio, concert, Yiddish theater, and even the emerging sound film industry. Alongside the popularity of cantors as artists and public representatives of Jewish culture there developed a discourse of critique of cantors and their populist art, sometimes referred to as hefker khazones (cantorial music of abandonment) by critics. This lecture will explore the phenomenon of cantorial music as popular culture and will include samples of historic recordings of American cantors of the Jewish immigrant era.
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 Speaker
Jeremiah Lockwood is a scholar and musician, working in the fields of Jewish studies, performance studies, and ethnomusicology. He is the founder of the band, The Sway Machinery, and is currently a Fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at UPenn. His work engages with issues arising from peering into the archive and imagining the power of “lost” forms of expression to articulate keenly felt needs in the present. His book Golden Ages: Hasidic Singers and Cantorial Revival in the Digital Era was published by University of California Press in 2024.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
Presented by:
lecture
lecture
Yiddish Theater, George Gershwin, and the Birth of an American Sound - Live on Zoom
As a teenager, George Gershwin attended Yiddish theater regularly. Khantshe in Amerike, by family friend Joseph Rumshinsky, featured a working-class woman asserting her rights and her desires. But not only did the show include a Suffragette Parade—it has also been described as the first Yiddish musical to incorporate American rhythm. This lecture by scholar Ronald Robboy will explore the idea that Gershwin’s internalization of Black Americans’ music was influenced by his early immersion in Yiddish theater.
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 Speaker
Ronald Robboy is a musician and independent scholar based in San Diego, where he was a professional cellist for many years and, beginning in the 1970s, an early West Coast experimentalist in the klezmer revival. He has written and lectured extensively on Yiddish theater music, and in 1998 was named Senior Researcher for Michael Tilson Thomas’s Thomashefsky Project. Robboy is leading YIVO Institute’s reconstruction of the score to composer Joseph Rumshinsky’s operetta Khantshe in Amerike (1912), to be performed in New York at the Center for Jewish History in May 2026.
Ticket Info: Free; registration is required.
Presented by:
lecture
